Encounter in the (over)familiar
God’s kingdom is not here to bore us by listening about it at church; it is here to bring revolution, and we are co-creative rebels of change.
Unexpected things happen to me at Catholic church.
Last Sunday being Palm Sunday, the service started with a Gospel reading of Jesus’s revolutionary rent-a-donkey ride into Jerusalem.
Fair enough.
It’s a great story.
I was happy to hear it.
Then the mass continued. We had our Old Testament reading, a Psalm, our New Testament reading, and then — lo and behold — another Gospel reading.
I was confused.
We had already started with our Gospel reading. What were they doing giving us another one? Don’t they know that’s not how it works?
But it was Holy Week, after all, and the Gospel is pretty awesome; two Gospel readings in one service isn’t the end of the world.
So we all stood up, mumbled the pre-Gospel liturgy, and the reading began in Mark 14:1.
It carried on beyond the end of that passage. And straight through the next one. And the one after that. It carried all the way on into the next chapter and it kept on going. And going. And going.
We did not stop until Jesus had been buried.
In Mark 15:47.
Half.
An.
Hour.
Later.
I know that I shouldn’t complain, because this is the Easter story and it’s amazing and it’s absolutely integral to our faith.
But we were standing still for half an hour and I had heard it all before and, to be completely honest with you, I was bored.
I’m sure you sometimes feel the same way.
We deal in God-stories week-in and week-out. We listen to sermons, read the bible, know the gospel formula. God’s redemptive rule is familiar to us.
And then it becomes over familiar to us.
We tire of hearing the same stories. We guess (correctly) the sermons’ three main points. We lose our fear of the Lord, and we grow numb to God’s grace.
I’m fairly confident this is a problem.
Our overfamiliarity with scripture desensitises us to the beauty of God’s story. We are no longer stunned by it nor are we shaken by its transformative power.
So what do we do?
Some people seek to roughen the story up. They look to see scripture in a new way, to find things they never noticed before.
This isn’t bad.
In fact, it definitely has its merits.
But it’s a bit like having Jesus standing before you, tousling his hair, and then being amazed because Jesus now looks a little different.
Why not just be amazed that Jesus stands before you in the first place?!
The best way to cure our bible-boredom is to remember that sure, we might have heard it all before — but scripture isn’t some stuffy old logbook: it is God’s story, and we are wrapped intimately up in its plot.
Hidden in plain sight in the bible is God’s invitation that we find our own place in His story.
This story is that Christ is King — and He asks if we will rule with Him.
God’s kingdom is not here to bore us by listening about it at church; it is here to bring revolution, and we are co-creative rebels of change.
We get bored by the bible when we treat it as a text that we can control.
When we put ourselves in charge, we drain scripture of life and it quickly becomes overfamiliar. This overfamiliarity breeds apathy.
But how can we tire of this text’s re-creation tales when we remember that God is in them and invites us to join Him?
When we become participants in scripture and not puppeteers over it, the bible becomes a place of living encounter — and our living God becomes increasingly familiar.
I like it when this happens.
At Easter, we repeat the “same old stories.” And we will probably do so here as we start to stumble through Mark 11–16. This is not an excuse to zone out but a reason to tune in, and meet God in the familiar.
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Originally published at https://www.stumblingthroughscripture.co.uk on April 2, 2021.
