The beautiful thing about going into an Aldi or an Asda (will Germany or the USA be in charge of our supermarkets in days to come?) is choice. We can eye the shelves and make our selection with all the carefree abandon of a newcomer to ‘the shopping experience’.
We can also do this in a bookshop, a public library or a kindle. And, furthermore, once we have selected a book we can pick out those items in it that we particularly appreciate. The bigger the book, the easier it is to do this. What we have as an outcome is our personal selection of the book’s contents, a customised version.
And one book where this is supremely possible is the Bible. It is impossible not to like bits and pieces of it – bits and pieces, that is, that we have chosen. They are almost certain to include the story of the prodigal son and the story of the good Samaritan. With a bit of prompting Psalm 23 would be on most people’s list. Leviticus or Obadiah would not.
When we have made our choices we have what you might call a personal Bible. It is the Bible as we should like it to be. It has lost many of what if we are honest we regard as the tedious pages. We have created our own anthology from a much larger existing one.
This approach, condescending as it may seem, is one we follow because it is not easy to know what to do with the Bible as a whole. It is a book that comes to us as a diverse collection of documents in Greek and Hebrew that are marshalled to present an overall revelation. It is not organised as a recipe book with a sequence of equally valuable items that we can select as required. It is not a novel like the Galsworthy Saga with a story about a family or dynasty running from beginning to end. It is not a memoir like Joshua Slocum’s narrative of his single-handed voyage round the world. It is not like Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’.
At first sight it is not clear exactly what the Bible is. A minister of word and sacraments has the fearsome task of making its overall meaning plain – or as plain as can be. The Bible will always be an anthology but an anthology like no other.
‘You’ve taken my breath away!’ gasped Humpty. ‘I knew that the Bible was more like a smorgasbord than a haggis, the original meal in a bag – but it sounds as though it’s hard work in the kitchen serving it up to customers.’
‘Just you wait until we get started on Obadiah,’ I murmured. Humpty sighed.
What have I let myself in for?
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