“You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.” Jesus says that in the midst of his rebuke of the Jewish religious authorities who challenged his saying that he is the son of God. It reminds me of a tendency among some Christians to be more focused on adherence to the Bible’s words than the source of what those words mean.
I call them “Biblians,” a term my spouse, a former pastor, gave to people who are much like the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ time, fixated on judging others and themselves based on written codes and ordinances. It’s not that following laws and codes are not important; Jesus himself said that we should give due deference to the laws that help us live together in community and maintain order.
But when it comes to Scripture, it is not the words that give us life; what those words do for us is point us toward the source of life, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is “the Word made flesh”; he is not only what the Word looks like as a walking, breathing human being, but he also embodies what words cannot capture: what it means to be fully connected to God and to all of humanity through love.
Jesus challenged the religious leaders of his day to look up from their sacred texts and look at him, the fulfillment of what those texts imperfectly sought to capture. We all are challenged to do the same. Just as the Pharisees did in Jesus’ time, some Christians today use the words of the Bible as weapons to attack people who are different from them. Often, those words are stripped from the cultural context in which they were written, and almost always stripped from the central message of the Gospels, that we should love the “other” in a way that is inextricably linked to our love of God.
I can find joy in calling myself a Christian precisely because it means I am a follower of Jesus, and I can follow his example of following what love of God and love of others would call us to do, and to challenge and even disobey authority when their laws stand in the way of what Godly love commands.