The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Such a discussion of hope as this may seem too abstract or even pious to the battered and defeated in a world dedicated to the fast track of success. Such hope is little more than an opiate, a Band-Aid, a palliative that makes inevitable suffering bearable and encourages a form of spineless quietism. Critics of the therapeutic uses of hope allege that the act of hope has been substituted for the content of hope, and that because of that, hope has lost its edge and become dubious, illusory, and little more than a diversion. The act of hoping becomes little more than that which is expressed by the impious and frequently ill-used phrase of modernism, “hopefully.” The grammarians have nearly given up reminding Americans of our regular misuse of this word hopefully as a synonym for “it is to be hoped,” as in “Hopefully, it won’t rain on our parade.” We know what is meant by this now nearly universal idiom: “It is to be hoped that it won’t rain on our parade.” The act of hoping in this sense has neither content nor object, and is thus merely wishful. Interestingly enough, hopefully in this sense is the secular version of the far more ancient expression of hope, once universal, which had both content and direction, the Latin phrase Deo volente, reduced among our literate ancestors to D.V., which of course meant “If God wills, it will not rain on our parade.” The age that is hopeless is reduced to the mere act of hoping, which is little more than wishing.

  The content of hope consists of the promises of God, promises that give those who hope in those promises the right to expect peace, justice, mercy, equity, joy, and equanimity. God has hallowed or made holy the future just as the past, and indeed, even the present, are hallowed by the presence of God, and thus hope becomes the operative opposite not of experience but of fear. It is customary to speak of the “triumph of hope over experience” as if hope were opposed to experience, but for the believer, hope is based on experience, the experience of what God has done. Hope then is the opposite of both fear and anxiety. It does not operate out of ignorance as is so commonly believed, but out of knowledge: “I know that my Redeemer lives,” says Job, and thus he cannot be seduced or overwhelmed even by his dire circumstances or miserable comforters, because he has the knowledge upon which the content of his hope is based.

  It was the content of hope and not the mere act of hoping that gave Dietrich Bonhoeffer a confidence in facing death by the Nazis that was more than bravado or romantic courage. Those who take the content of hope seriously see the future not simply as an escape from the difficulties of the present, but as the place in which that for which they are willing to live and to die is to be found. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was in the midst of his campaign to redeem the soul of America, he was sustained over and over again by a clear vision of the content of a future hope in which the promises of God were to be fulfilled. That is what his “dream” speech is about, and in that almost mystical final sermon on the night before he was to be killed, in alluding to Moses, King said, “I have been to the mountaintop.” What could he have possibly meant, other than that, like the earlier prophet, he too had “seen” the promises of God fulfilled? The more rational among us will assume that this was just one more preacherly hyperbole, an example of colorful black church-speak. If we understand, however, that King meant what he said, and that what enabled what he did was the content of his hope in a God of justice who provides for the future, we will have got the message. Thus, when in that same sermon he said, “Children, don’t be afraid,” he was not simply offering a pastoral word of encouragement; he was saying that the God who is and who sustains the future will bring us through this present time, that time that Saint Paul, in Romans, calls “this brief momentary affliction.”

  I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. (Romans 8:18–21)

  Despair is the absence of hope. The content of hope banishes despair and empowers in the present, and for the future as well, those who hope.

  This conviction is at the heart of one of the best-selling books of these last days of the present millennium. Its very title tells us what we need to hear: Crossing the Threshold of Hope, by Pope John Paul II.3 Speaking of his high regard for the young, and of his hope in them and for them, the pope says in response to his interlocutor’s question, “Is there really hope in the young?”

  The very day of the inauguration of my papal ministry, on October 22, 1978, at the conclusion of the liturgy I said to the young people gathered in St. Peter’s Square, “You are the hope of the Church and of the world. You are my hope.” I have often repeated those words.

  The pope is convinced that young people are searching for God, for something worthy of placing their hopes in. They want to know what the rich young ruler wanted to know when he asked Jesus, in Luke 10:25, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The content of that hope for the pope, and for the rest of us as well, is Christ.

  …Christ who walks through the centuries alongside each generation, alongside every generation, alongside every person. He walks alongside each person as a friend. An important day in a young person’s life is the day on which he becomes convinced that this is the only Friend who will not disappoint him, on whom he can always count.

  As theologian Jürgen Moltmann has reminded us, the Middle Ages developed a theology of love, and the Reformation developed a theology of faith. Now, in these days as modernity’s confidence in itself becomes unglued, perhaps the time has come to cultivate a theology of hope and to prepare the people of this age to encounter the content of that “inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.” The consequence of such a hope is indeed the good life, and the only life worth living. The question then is not simply what is the good life, but where does the search for it begin, and where does it end? These are the questions with which the Bible is concerned.

  Chapter 10

  The Bible and Suffering

  THE church was crowded with the young and the good, those filled with promise and the first flush of achievement. Many of them were in the “industry,” the almost oxymoronic euphemism that describes what people in Hollywood do to entertain and divert us, and to make enormous sums of money while doing so. Some observers of Harvard graduates have noted that the three cities to which our brightest and best gravitate are New York, Washington, D.C., and Hollywood. In New York they make money, in Washington they make policy, and in Hollywood they make not only films but fantasy for the whole world. Those who go there in some sense never grow up. They are Peter Pans, and they are in the business of catering to the Peter Pan and Wendy in all of us.

  This was such a crowd. I had last seen many of them on Commencement morning fewer than five years before when they were also in church, and among a large crowd; and on that morning the world was bright with promise and waiting for them, the sober black of academic dress neither concealing nor checking their exuberance and expectations. Few if any of them on that glad day had expected to return to Harvard or to The Memorial Church quite so soon, or for the sad and solemn purpose of burying one of their own who had been killed in a senseless, irrational car accident in the prime of life. Here they were, however, black-suited, still fair of face, and looking younger and indeed more vulnerable than when last we had all been together. Death had intruded, and with it a monstrous assault on the human claim to immortality. They wept, and they raged at the loss of their friend. Death was an abstraction about which movies were made, and death happened to grandparents, to the occasional victim of terrible crime, or to participants in war. Death in theory would come to them eventually, but so far down the road of reality that it was hardly real at all. How does one deal with unscripted death? How do the worldly-wise, the hip, the interpreters of life in the fast, or at lea
st in the interesting, lane deal with it? How do they deal with the irrational and immutable judgments of death unprepared, unexpected, unwelcome?

  The Victorians, we are told, loved death and feared sex, and hence their culture embraced a culture of death and mourning, and constructed strong taboos against sex. We, on the other hand, love sex and fear death, and our taboos are of a different sort. We delight in sexuality, we pander to the sensual, and we have made Calvin Klein a very wealthy man. Death is not something we want to understand or to know; death is somehow unfair, and in this country it is culturally unconstitutional, violating our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thus, when death intrudes, particularly among the young, we respond in terror, anger, and fear.

  As I listened to the heartrending eulogies of the young for their young, I heard anger and fear. I heard their love as well, and their pained, pathetic desire to make sense of it all. “What does it mean?” asked one tearful young woman. “We must make it mean something,” said another. “It doesn’t make sense,” said a third. “Will it get easier to understand this as we get older?” a bright young man asked me as the white wine flowed at the reception. “Will I wake up some day and understand why Willie had to die in this way, at this time?” It was not a question that required an answer, at least not then, for he was baying at the moon, not making a theological inquiry.

  I think I said most of the right things. One hopes, in my calling, that one does on occasions like this. Clichés become truths when they are applied to one’s own situation, I have discovered, and I reminded these young people that while funeral-going was perhaps a new experience for most of them, it was an all too familiar habit for the rest of us. I reminded them that the context of life is not living, but death, and that it is out of death that life comes. Death is the rule to which life is the exception. It is not how long you live, but how well you live with what you have, and I quoted that lovely and relatively unfamiliar passage from the Apocrypha, which says of early death: “He, being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time; for his soul pleased the Lord: therefore hasted he to take him away from among the wicked.” (Wisdom 4:8–14)

  I always end memorial services and funerals with the prayer long associated with Cardinal Newman, and I did so on this day. Many were familiar with it, and many more were not, but were interested in it:

  O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then, in thy great mercy, grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last.

  We scattered again, as we always do, back to the demands and diversions of this troublous life, pondering the meaning of suffering, the purpose of life, and trying to make sense of it all as in the making of a living we try to make a life as well. It is for moments such as these that religion was made, and when we confront the unconfrontable, or more to the point, when it confronts us, we are at a religious moment, and for a moment at least we are religious. Contrary to the popular misconception, religion is not an escape from reality but rather a genuine effort to make sense of what passes for reality and all that surrounds it. Religious people are not escape artists; they are not practitioners of evasion or of self-deception. Religion is not the answer to the unknowable or the unfaceable or the unendurable; religion is what we do and what we are in the face of the unknowable, the unfaceable, and the unendurable. It is a constant exercise in the making of sense first, and then of meaning.

  “I’m not very religious, but I had to come to this service,” said one of my secular young mourners. He was more religious than he thought, not because he professed certain doctrines or behaved in a particular way or performed certain rites and rituals and believed in what they said and did. He was religious because he wanted to make sense of what he was experiencing, pain and all, and on his own and by himself he could not. Legal, medical, physiological, even psychological answers, themselves definitive and helpful, were not sufficient of themselves; somehow something else was wanted and needed.

  The Thin Places

  That something else wanted and needed is what religion is about. “Religion in its simplest terms,” says John Habgood,1 the recently retired Archbishop of York, “is about making sense of life, of this life first of all, and particularly of those aspects of it which challenge and disturb us. This is why suffering and ways of responding to it have always been such central religion.” Not only do we have a need to try to make sense of suffering, Dr. Habgood tells us, but we also want to make sense where we can of joy—“undeserved happiness,” he calls it—or “blessings,” as the devout and pious call it; and of mystery, those close encounters of the transcendent kind that suggest relationships beyond the power of our experience to reckon, but which we know in some fundamental way to be true. Suffering, joy, and mystery are those points where the human and the divine come into the most intimate and profound of proximities. They unite all human experience in all ages and beyond all particulars of place and of circumstance. All religions of the world are and always have been concerned with their substance. It is the common ambition of our common humanity to make sense and meaning of these encounters wherever we can. Religion is the attempt to give some formal record of what we may learn from these experiences, and, for Christians, the Bible is the authoritative record of the human encounter with God at these points.

  There is in Celtic mythology the notion of “thin places” in the universe, where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity. To seek such places is the vocation of the wise and the good, and those who find them find the clearest communication between the temporal and the eternal. Monastries and holy places were meant to be founded at such spots to increase the likelihood of a transcendental communication. These thin places were threshold places, from the Latin limen, which can mean a border or frontier place where two worlds meet and where one has the possibility of communicating with the other. In Celtic studies the phrase can refer to places that stand at the border between the spiritual and temporal realms, and between people gifted with supernatural gifts in the mundane world and those living on the border.

  Perhaps we can adapt the concept of such thin places to the experience that people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery, and seek in some fashion to make sense of that encounter. If we think of these encounters as the ultimate thin places of human experience, and of religion as a way of talking and thinking about the encounters, we might do very well to think of the Bible as our guide through the thin places, and as providing us with a record of how our ancestors coped with their encounters, and guidance beyond their particular situation which may be useful in ours. Contrary to the efforts and assumptions of many, the Bible is not a systematic book. It is not a doctrinal handbook or a systematic theology, nor is it a comprehensive history or a compendium of morals and ethics. To argue that it is any of these is to make the Bible conform to an extra-biblical set of convictions and assumptions, and to make it pass a test of theological orthodoxy of which it is not capable. Doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility are merely modern human efforts to impose order both on scripture and on those who read it. These are what John Huxtable2 once called “dogmatic vested interests,” designed to preserve as the word of God a particularly partisan way of looking at scripture. Such a way of reading the Bible is designed to support those interests, and they are “found” in the Bible because they are brought to the Bible.

  There are principles and ideas that develop over time through the pages of scripture that make it possible for us to detect truths that transcend the contexts in which they are found, principles that go beyond captivity to a given situation, and which stand out like the mountains on the moon. Indeed, it is such normative teaching and such developing ideas and ideals that enable us to judge scriptural situation by scriptural principle, and thus, in order to be biblical, we are able to read scripture freed of the expectation that we must reproduce its
every detail and circumstance. If we have learned anything in the last section, I hope it is that this is what being biblical means—not playing “Bibleland,” as my old colleague Krister Stendahl used to like to say, but determining what in the Bible transcends the limits of the world in which the Bible was developed. This was the question upon which rested all the debates concerning our so-called hard passages, and, as Roland Bainton argued in his case for total abstinence from alcohol, biblical principle takes precedence over biblical practice.

  If we are to think of scripture not so much as we would a book of history, theology, or philosophy, but as the human experience of the divine at the thin places of encounter, then perhaps we may enter into a book that is perhaps less elusive and more accessible than we might have at first been led to believe. If the Bible is understood to be the place where not only others long dead but we ourselves encounter those thin places of suffering, joy, and mystery, and the efforts to make sense and meaning of those encounters, then perhaps we have rescued it from the clutches of the experts and the specialists and placed it where it rightly belongs, namely in the hands of those who find themselves more religious than they thought.