Word for the Week: Whole Life, Whole Bible (2/50) – I’ll Tell You a Story

‘Word for the Week: Whole Life, Whole Bible’, from London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, is a series of fifty emails designed to look at the main milestones of the biblical story, seeking to show how whole-life discipleship is woven through Scripture as a whole, from beginning to end. Here is the second of the fifty emails, written this week by Margaret Killingray.

O my people, hear my teaching; listen to the words of my mouth. I will utter… things from of old – what we have heard and known, what our ancestors have told us. We will not hide them from our children; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power and the wonders he has done. (Psalm 78:1-4)

Human beings tell stories, stories that weave individuals and their families into wider communities of place and time. They sing the story of the ancestors who built their village; they learn of the Romans that came and named their towns; they ferret around in the archives to discover their Russian great-grandparents; they say, ‘I’m Scottish’, ‘My grandmother was a slave’, ‘My father was in the D-Day landings’. And so we tie ourselves into place and time.

And the Bible, the story of humankind’s relationship with God, tells stories. One story from beginning to end, with many contributing stories of individuals and nations, which reflect, repeat and enlarge the grand narrative, a narrative, as we saw last week, with Jesus Christ at the heart of it, alpha and omega, creator, redeemer and final judge.

Listen to the story; tell it to your children; how God brought you out of slavery under the sign of the lamb’s blood and led you on a journey to nationhood; a story told over and over again in the Old Testament. That story illuminates a new and greater story of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and in that process invests with new profundity other stories: Isaiah’s suffering servant, the lamb silent before her shearers.

And when the pivotal moment of the whole history of God’s dealings with humanity took place, and a new born baby was laid in a manger, Matthew tells us that this baby is part of this human story; his family line descends from the great heroes of God’s people, Abraham and David, but also from the smaller stories of faithfulness and redemption, Ruth the Moabite and Bathsheba the Hittite (Matthew 1:1-17).

We need to hear the story, to recognise ourselves in it. ‘The whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’, the Lord told the Israelites at Sinai, and, through Peter (1 Peter 2:9), he tells us, the scattered people of God, that we are now that holy nation and priestly kingdom, until the final curtain goes up and we reign with him in a renewed earth.

For further reflection and action:

1. Christians are not utopians who believe that civilisation is always getting better. Nor should they be pessimists who believe the world is all bad and we should withdraw and endure until he comes again. The people of God, both OT and NT, are called to be salt and light, bringers of justice, love and social responsibility. How does that work out for you, and for your church, this week?

2. Jesus told stories; read Luke 15: 1-7. Two groups are listening (15:1). Look at Ezekiel 34 and Isaiah 40:10-11. Will the ones who need rebuke for bad shepherding and the ones who need assurance of forgiveness and mercy, hear the right story?