Jerome 07
Dean Gay Hall
Seabury-Western
October 2, 2007
When I was a student at EDS, I often went to the Thursday noontime organ concerts given at the Busch-Reisinger Museum on the other side of Harvard Square from the seminary. It’s arranged differently now, but in the 1970s you couldn’t get very far into the Busch-Reisinger without being almost accosted by the dramatic 16th century portrait, St. Jerome in His Study, painted by the Dutch artist Joos van Cleve. This is one of those allegorical paintings loaded with all kinds of symbolic detail–a candle, a bird, a washbasin, and a red cardinal’s hat, to name a few. But what most arrests you about St. Jerome in His Study is the figure of Jerome himself. He is seated at a desk, his left hand pointing downward at the skull he seems to be using for a paperweight. In front of him lies an open Bible. And he is using his right hand to hold onto the side of his head. On his face is an absolutely excruciated expression. Either he’s been thinking too much, or he’s in the grip of what they used to call “Excedrin Headache Number Three.”
Now there are probably many explanations why I spent so many hours standing staring at that picture in those days, but one of them probably has to do with the way Jerome figured for me the tortuous experience of trying to open up the Bible. There I was, studying Hebrew and Greek, learning new fancy words like kerygma, eschatology, and Heilsgeschichte, and there were days on which I thought my own head would explode. When I looked up at van Cleve’s painting of the prototypical Bible scholar in his study, I saw a figure who looked like he felt pretty much as I did: alternately exhilarated and perplexed by an unfolding lexical mystery.
I wish that I could stand here confidently and tell you that, thirty-five years later, I feel as if it all makes some kind of perfect elegant sense to me now that I’ve lived with it for awhile. But when I went to the Harvard Art Museum website and looked at this painting again online, I found myself just as drawn to this painting as I had been in the past. A working life lived out trying to talk intelligently about scripture has not made the task of unraveling it all that much easier. If anything, I find certain things about the Bible more perplexing today than I did in 1973.
Like many people of my generation, I was socialized to read the Bible under the rubrics of what 19th century scholars called “the higher criticism” of the Bible. This meant that, before doing anything like personally engaging a piece of text, I relentlessly subjected it to a series of heuristic questions. Was it J,E,D, or P? M, L, M, or Q? What was its situation in life, or Sitz im Leben? What kind of transmission and redaction problems were apparent? I actually never got very close to asking any questions like, “what is this text saying now and to me?” because I was so busy trying to ask what it meant then and to them. So, as full as my head was of the Biblical analytical tools I was learning, their presence insulated me in a way from the experience of actually having to take in the hard or odd things that the pericope might be saying to me and to us in that moment. In that system I learned how to tell you a lot about what Mark was probably up to, but very little about the impact it should have been having on you and me.
Now I’m not about to stand up here and tell you that the higher criticism of the Bible doesn’t matter, because it does. As one of my Bible teachers put it, “you can’t presume to talk about what it means until you understand what it meant.” But thirty-five years of wrestling with texts have made me a lot less certain than I used to be that each passage, carefully examined, will yield the secret and unique meaning which the author intended. In other words: the Bible, looked at both exegetically and contemplatively, will yield not one but a myriad of meanings. It means a lot of different things today because it meant a lot of different things then. Interpretation, as Flannery O’Connor once said, is not a method of “solving for x.” These are not algebra problems, reducible to one gold star right answer. There are as many readings as there are readers, as many orthodoxies as there are interpretive communities. What is sacred about the Bible has less to do with the theologically correct answer we clever readers or even German Higher Critics can find embedded in the text than it does with the way you and I, like readers before us, experience God by means of our engagement with it.
What has changed for me over time, therefore, is my understanding about how the Bible means for us at all. I used to think that reading the Bible was like reading Shakespeare or Milton or Joyce, that what I was after was the ingenious reading of a passage which would amaze my friends and confound my adversaries. But living with the Bible over time–in small group Bible studies, in academic conversations, in lectio divina processes, and even in fiercely polemical church debates has helped me see it otherwise. Because the Bible is the church’s book, it yields the depth of its many meanings as it is engaged in community. And because it was produced by many communities with many voices in many settings over a long period of time, it can only fully be what it is when it is engaged in a polyvocal community. There is no one ingenious and privileged reading. No one interpretation trumps all the rest.
Which brings me, I guess, back to that painting of Jerome. Maybe he looks so perplexed in that picture because he’s looking for precisely the right Latin word to represent the Greek. Or maybe he looks that way because the more he reads it the more voices he hears. It’s not the mental effort, it’s the polyphony that Jerome seems to sink under. At the dawn of Imperial Christianity, Jerome had the unenviable task of stepping into that Biblical polyphony and producing for Christendom a unitary sacred text. Whenever we represent Imperial culture we think we have to give the definitive answer. But the Bible is not the Empire’s book. It is the instruction manual about how to cut the Empire down to size. No wonder Jerome looks so stressed out in that picture.
People to the right of us want to worship the book Jerome so lovingly translated as, what that same Bible professor jokingly called the Fourth Member of the Trinity. People to the left of us want to see the Bible as one text in a series of culturally specific human responses to God. In his essay, “Revelation and Its Mode”, William Temple defined revelation as the interaction of event and interpretation by minds created by God. In other words, for us the Bible only exists in relationship, as read in community. Perhaps that’s still the best Anglican place to stand.
Today’s Gospel is excerpted from Jesus’s final risen appearance in the Gospel of Luke, the one he makes right after his appearance on the road to Emmaus. “Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures” [Luke 24.45] As I’ve learned to live with the Bible over these years, what emerges for me is the truth of that little verse from Luke. As important as study and critical acumen are–and I really believe they are–they are only partial and approximate aids in reading the Bible. The only way we will ever understand the scriptures is when Jesus opens our minds and helps us do so. Right before this passage, Jesus was made known to his disciples in the breaking of bread. And, right after that, they saw him eat a simple piece of broiled fish. The words which we hear only make their final sense in the context of the meal to which Jesus invites us. And it is to that meal that, together, that Jesus calls all of us to gather around God’s table and give thanks. Amen.