One of the reasons I enjoy the preaching of Rob Bell is because he digs often deeply into the Jewishness of our faith. Such digging often adds colour and vibrancy to what we are reading in the text. It can inform us of the mindset of the writer, original readers and point us to where God is looking in the story.
What do I mean “where God is looking”? Sometimes when I’m reading the bible I get we just sort of gloss over the bits that don’t quite make sense or are a little jarring. We probably do this mostly in the Old Testament because it’s world is so far removed from ours.
I’m not talking about glossing over simple details and minutia, I’m talking about the gaps that are left behind in the text. For example, when Abraham took Isaac up a mountain, did Sarah know what was happening? If she did, how did she feel about this? The woman that laughed in God’s face when told she would have a child.
Jews have a method and history of appealing to these gaps, the backstory and the confusing parts of the bible called Midrash. Midrash is a way of interpreting biblical stories that goes beyond simple distillation of religious, legal or moral teachings. It fills in many gaps left in the biblical narrative regarding events and personalities that are only hinted at.
As Richard Beck says, and I quite enjoy:
One of the things I like about midrash is how it goes looking for these oddities in the text. Rather than avoiding the strangeness midrash turns the peculiarities of the text into locations of positive theological reflection. Walter Brueggemann says that “the work of midrash is to focus on the ill-fitting element” within a text, perhaps even an element that “might be an embarrassment to the main claim of the text.” By focusing on the “irregularity or misfit” midrash can create fresh readings by “exposing the oddity that destabilizes and questions the main flow of the text.”
So midrash, as a strategy, looks for the “surface irregularities” and “friction” within a text. Why? To keep the text, and the God it describes, from being reduced to a system, an intellectual artifact. A goal of the text is to “resist” and “irritate” the modern mind. The text doesn’t want to be tamed. It actively pushes back. The oddity of the text is like its immune system, its way of fighting off our diseased need turn the text into a syllogism and PowerPoint presentation.
Those ill fitting bits, those confusing bits, those gaps and missing backstory in the Bible help to stimulate our thinking, our theology and to stop us from boxing up our God. Wonderful stuff.
