reading of large chunks of Scripture.
I want to take Mary as an example of learning to read the Bible aright, which means a good place to start is at the low point of her life as recorded in Scripture, at Mark 3:21, 31–35:
Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” . . . Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”
Mary hears of the good and unconventional deeds of Jesus down on the Sea of Galilee at Capernaum. She, along with her sons and daughters (Mark 6:3), comes to the conclusion that Jesus “is out of his mind.” Dick France, after sorting out the evidence, renders the scene in these words: “Jesus’ people back home [i.e., his family] have heard reports on the rowdy scenes in Capernaum, and decide that it is time to take Jesus in hand for his own sake and for the family’s reputation, on that assumption that, to use a modern idiom, he has ‘flipped.’”7 We, together with the second evangelist, know Mary has got her facts wrong. Yes, she’s probably worried Jesus could lose his life; yes, from what she knows, her son, who is born to be Messiah, is losing favor fast with those in power; but, no, this isn’t contrary to God’s will. But Mary doesn’t know that.
Why? Because she believed every word the angel told her: that her son was destined to occupy the throne of David forever. Why? Because the song she sang, the Magnificat, sings of an imminent victory of God over the Romans and the disestablishment of injustice and the establishment of justice and peace. Why? Because her relative priest, Zechariah, said what amounts to the same thing. Why? Because whatever Simeon meant by a sword, Mary knew that her son was designed by God to bring the consolation of Israel. Why? Because not long ago she had seen, down the hill in Cana, a miracle beyond miracles. At the heart of each of these why questions was an answer that involved her son, Jesus: he would be king, he would bring justice, he would kick out the Romans, he would bring consolation, and God’s power was upon him unlike anything Israel had ever seen. That was her story, and she was sticking to it. That’s why Jesus was out of his mind; he evidently wasn’t living out the same story.
But God had another story, and she had to learn it if she was to learn Israel’s story so that it led to her Son in the way God designed it. She had to go back and listen again to what Simeon meant when he said a sword would pierce her own heart; she had to go back in time to Jerusalem when after traveling an entire day, perhaps all the way to Scythopolis, a Roman city over which stood the tel on which Saul was brutally exhibited, she and Joseph realized Jesus wasn’t with them. So they retraced their steps, and having climbed up to the temple, they found the young messianic boy teaching the leaders of Israel. At that time, he taught Mary that he had to be about his Father’s business, and Mary began to ponder what kind of boy he might be. But she knew because she had heard the angel and had sung the song and seen the miracles. She also had to go back and think of how he first responded to the request for more wine. Instead of saying “Sure, mom, check the clay pots,” Jesus said, “Not now.” At that moment Mary surrendered to Jesus’s plans. There were, in other words, hints, but nothing was as clear as this silliness of attracting hookers and toll collectors, of hanging with fishermen and family members, and of exorcising demons and troubling the Pharisees.
Mary had to learn a different story, and eventually she did, but it may not have been until her son was publicly and humiliatingly crucified in Jerusalem, no doubt stark naked, with a mocking title over his head that Mary gained the chutzpah to believe. When did she learn? We don’t know, but by the time Jesus was raised and exalted, she had come to terms with the story more completely because she was with the followers of Jesus in Acts 1 and she was there at Pentecost, and she no doubt played a role in the early fellowship in Jerusalem, and it was no doubt in part from her that Luke was able to tell the stories of Luke 1–2 and that one of her other sons, James, was able to lead the church in Jerusalem.
What was the story she had to learn? That God’s story is Jesus’s story. That making sense of Jesus’s story is the way to make sense of God’s story in this world. That her son, Jesus, was indeed the Messiah, but that he was a Messiah who would reign not by force or by coercion or by violence, but by suffering under the force, coercion, and violence of the political, military, and religious leadership of Jerusalem. But that God, her God, could raise her son back to life and exalt him above every other name, and that this story, the story of living faithfully, dying unjustly but redemptively, and being raised was the story that needed to be learned.
It’s told over and over in the pages of the Bible, beginning of course with Adam, and Abraham, and Joseph, and Moses, and David, and the prophets, who in their own ways anticipate the fulfillment of God’s story in the story of Jesus. But we can’t become gospelers until we learn this story the way Mary had to learn it. When we do, the gospel comes alive and we can expand beyond the reductive boundaries of the gospel that so many of us learned, and learn to embrace the kind of gospel Jesus and the apostles preached.
Indwell the Story
Learning the story is the first part. It is when we indwell the story that we, as the church, become the gospel by embodying it. I’d like to take Paul the apostle, and especially as seen in Galatians, to illustrate what I mean by “indwelling” the story.
We will assume the conversion story of Paul in Acts 9. What we find is that Paul’s encounter with Jesus, the resurrected, vindicated, and now speaking-to-Paul Jesus, was a one-of-a-kind explosive encounter and from that point on, Paul reframed Israel’s story as a story that was fulfilled in Jesus. Allow me, though, to retrace steps by saying that Paul’s conversion story is not the story of “how he got saved” so much as how he came to the conviction that Jesus was Messiah. Anyone who has studied the stories of Jews who convert to Jesus know that the conversion story is essentially one of exploring whether or not Jesus is Messiah.8 That, I am contending, is the archetypal gospel story and gospel response.
How then did Paul “indwell” this story? He not only had learned the story inside and out, as the many references to the Old Testament and his exegesis of the Old Testament reveal, but he had learned to indwell this story. I want to draw our attention to one text, Galatians 2:15–21, which can be read as the central theological text of the entire letter.
We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.
“But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the sinners, doesn’t that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! If I rebuild what I destroyed, then I really would be a lawbreaker.
“For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”
For our purposes the opening lines of verses 15–16 are nothing short of monumental. Here is Paul, a Jew, dragging Peter, also a Jew, into the same circle, and openly confesses that justification before God comes by faith and not by adherence to the Torah. However, one comprehends Judaism and Paul’s relationship to Judaism, and how one comprehends justification, whether it is exclusively a soteriological word or also an ecclesiological word, what matters here is that Paul indwells this
