Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Study Guide. Luke 11.
Let's keep it simple today. Six times Jesus says "woe to you." (Woe is kind of archaic, so the NLT translates that as "How terrible it will be ...." Your assignment? Identify the nature of the reason for Jesus saying it each time, and then summarize those reasons into as small a summary statement as possible. My answers in a comment late tonight.
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As I was preparing this post originally, for some reason I ended up exploring bumper stickers. I think the original connection in my mind was that bumper stickers tend to express something that seems profound, but isn't, or some aspect of culture that is all about surface things, or some basic materialistic tendency. Phrases like "the one who dies with the most toys, wins," or "have a nice day," came to mind. When I went to search for popular bumper stickers I found an amazing collection of mostly rude to crude sayings, which were inappropriate for this blog.
But I didn't let go of the idea altogether, and continued to think, not about specific bumper stickers, but more the idea of bumper stickers. Perhaps I should have been thinking more about what Jesus' actually said. But there is a connection. And it's this.
One of our goals in Bible reading and study should be to assimilate what we read, to chew on it, to really understand it, both in our heads, and in our actions. To do that we can employ many practices including memorization, note-taking, underlining, discussion, research, outlining, meditation, and paraphrasing. Whenever we write a paraphrase of a passage or a summary of it, we're putting our mind to work in a way that forces us to really think through what we've read and what it means.
Of course, we always have to be careful that what we've written, or what others have written, doesn't become the focus of our study or the final word on what God is revealing in a given passage. What God is revealing is in the text itself, which is the proper focus of our thought, meditation, and practice. So we need to continually return to the text, perhaps with our summary or paraphrase in hand, revising and adjusting as we dig deeper into the text, and as we grow in our understanding of God's revelation in Word and Spirit.
Back to the bumper stickers. During the day, I wondered how short a summary of the woes would still be faithful to what Jesus said. The beatitudes, the blessings, are just about bumper sticker length, and yet, contain profound truths. Maybe thinking about the woes in such a way would be both productive and fun. At the risk of trivializing Jesus' words, which I profoundly pray I haven't, here's an attempt to answer the study guide question posed in the original post in a bumper-sticker fashion -- short, pithy, to the point, thought-provoking -- and as accurate a summary as time permits. No replacement for the text itself, but my small summaries.
Each bumper sticker in its own comment, starting with comment of Jesus which was provoked by the Pharisees' fussiness over hand-washing, and followed by the six woes.
No amount of washing will make you pure.
Obeying the law is no substitute for practicing justice.
There's no award for "World's Greatest Humble Person."
A camouflaged skunk spreads the most stink.
True leadership is removing the burdens of others if you can, and sharing the burdens if you can't.
You share the guilt of your ancestors when you memorialize their evil acts.
A good teacher helps her students discover. A bad teacher prevents discovery. The worst teacher refuses to discover.
Summary:
A true guide is not one who only knows the rules, not the one who loves being called the guide, and not the one who fills everyone else's packs while emptying theirs. A true guide knows the right paths, and recognizes, honors, and follows the guide who knows more.
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