It ain't necessarily so: taking it literally

Jesus and the Rich Young Ruler - Heinrich Hofmann (from Wikipedia)

A few weeks ago, I was struck by something the priest said in his homily at Mass. In writing critically about it, I am not criticising this particular individual as he is a man I like and respect. I am also aware that it is easy to nit-pick when people speak publicly: as a retired lecturer who has preached in church a few times, I am very aware that it is difficult to avoid a few loose words here and there.

However, what was said on that Sunday casts light on an attitude that one finds across the Christian churches, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. It is very problematic when trying to clarify what the New Testament actually says, especially given that England is a country that is now less than 50% confessed Christian (and less than 10% regular churchgoing).

The gospel reading was from Luke 12, and included Jesus’ instruction to his disciples to ‘sell your possessions and give to those in need’. A similar instruction can also be found in Jesus’ conversation with a rich young man who wants to know what he must do to gain eternal life (in Matthew 19, Mark 10, and Luke 18). It was also the practice of the very earliest Church, according to Acts 2.45: ‘they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need’. Alongside these passages, throughout the Bible there are very many which speak of the importance of social justice and helping the poor.

In his homily on the reading, the priest told us that we needn’t take this literally. It is to be understood as signifying the inner life in which one gives everything up to God. Selling your possessions would be very difficult and impractical for the everyday Christian (and even more so during a cost of living crisis). The priest mentioned that one person who had taken it literally was St Francis of Assisi, who was a very special case – the exception which proves the rule, if you like – showing us that it is a rare and unusual thing for people to follow the instruction of Jesus in this respect.

Not long before hearing this homily, I had been taken to task by some Catholics for not taking the virgin birth literally. I had said that I regarded it as a metaphor, a beautiful story but not something that actually happened. There are three main reasons for not taking it literally: the discovery of DNA, which shows the virgin birth to be unnatural (where did the Y chromosome come from?); the lack of mention of it in the traditions of Paul, Mark, and John; the easy explanation of the metaphor in terms of ancient Mediterranean cultures and their ways of expressing theology in story form. Nevertheless, the people to whom I was speaking thought that understanding the virgin birth as a literal historical reality was necessary for their faith and they wanted me to realise that it could not be put aside so easily. One would find the same view amongst conservative Protestants for whom the narratives of the Bible are literally true.

Something else that the Catholic Church and many Protestants take literally is the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality. One can respond by pointing out that, although the Old Testament is forthright in its prohibition of male homosexuality, there are very many things in the Old Testament to which Christians do not adhere, including circumcision, following Paul, who argued that living in Christ meant freedom from the Law. Moving onto the New Testament, there is no reference to homosexuality at all in the gospels, and the condemnation of it in the Pauline epistles is not at all clear from a linguistic point of view. It could easily apply to the abuse of slaves, including children, which is not at all the same thing as voluntary adult homosexual relationships, and especially not if they include commitment, mutual respect, and genuine love. Nevertheless, some Christians regard the prohibition on homosexuality as central to their faith: they argue that we should accept the straightforward reading of these passages, as they see it, and take them literally.

To take another example of things in the Bible that are taken literally, the Catholic Church has always been very clear in its insistence on the irreversibility of marriage. Annulment can be obtained only through a legalistic and painstaking process which somehow shows the original marriage to have been invalid. Even people who have been abandoned by their first spouse and forced by loneliness to seek another have traditionally been refused communion (there have been moves by Pope Francis to soften this approach but with a great deal of resistance). I remember a priest saying to me that a woman who attended Mass very regularly but was not allowed communion was ‘the holiest person in the parish’. Her first husband had abandoned her and so she had entered into another long-term relationship. The priest was impressed by her loyalty despite the restriction on her receiving communion. I thought that, if she were the holiest person in the parish, then she should really be at the centre of its sharing of the body and blood of Christ, but there you are.

Once again, one can raise reasonable objections to the conservative view. Jesus’ instructions against divorce were a rejection of the easy way in which Jewish males interpreted the Law which allowed divorce in certain circumstances. The women thus abandoned were rarely remarried and often reduced to a state of poverty. Jesus refers to this practice as ‘hard-hearted’. His words seem to have been a response to a particular question about the Law rather than a commandment for the Church to take an equally hard-hearted view when faced with the inevitability of marriage breakdown in some cases. Nevertheless, many Christians continue to take this literally: for them, divorce and remarriage are definitely not acceptable even if allowed by the State and some Churches.

So, according to many Christians in various denominations, we have three things that are often taken literally in the face of arguments to the contrary: the virgin birth, prohibition on homosexual relationships, the irreversibility of marriage. And one thing that we do not need to take literally: the instruction by Jesus to sell your possessions and give the proceeds to those in need!

If you drew up a pie chart for the Bible showing how much of it refers to the virgin birth, homosexuality, and divorce, and how much of it to social justice and concern for the poor, the first three issues would take up merely a small sliver of the pie. Taking those as your benchmark for Christian life means that you would spiritually starve to death (extending the metaphor of the pie!).

I can’t pretend that I am any better than anybody else when it comes to selling my possessions and giving to the poor. One builds a home and – in my case, eventually! – a family and there is very little left over to give, particularly at the moment. But I do know what Jesus’ teaching is: SELL YOUR POSSESSIONS AND GIVE TO THOSE IN NEED. There is no ducking it, no consigning it to the parts of the faith that are not to be taken literally. Yet millions of Christians do this, and instead magnify that thin sliver of the pie that refers to issues like the virgin birth, homosexuality, and divorce. I think it is better to be honest about what Christian faith demands of us, and understand where we fail to live up to it. Then perhaps we will be ready when, one day, we are presented full in the face with the demand to live the gospel without any alternative. In a world with rising poverty, migration, and environmental collapse, that day might not be very far away.

My challenge to Christians is that they should say nothing at all about the literal status of the virgin birth and biblical passages on homosexuality and divorce until they have taken Jesus’ teaching on almsgiving equally literally and sold their possessions and given the proceeds away. Otherwise they will be like the ‘noisy gong’ or ‘clanging cymbal’ of 1 Corinthians 13. In that chapter, Paul writes that ‘If I give away everything to feed the poor and hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I achieve nothing’ (verse 3). True, but I suspect that without love you are very unlikely to give away everything to feed the poor in the first place.

.