Life is wonderful. Life is also difficult. Understanding, acknowledging, and wrestling with that paradox is a key to our growth into mature human beings. When we face difficult questions or problematic sayings, especially in matters that cut to the core of what we believe, we cannot simply ignore them if we hope to expand our minds and our worldview. That is especially true when a belief or pronouncement is not only difficult but continues to cause harm.

For instance, as we celebrate Juneteenth, do people of faith today spend much time grappling with the implications of being a slave (as mentioned multiple times in the Bible) especially given our own history of owning enslaved individuals in the U.S.?

Acknowledging the difficulties is what the most recent book taken from my TBR pile is all about.

The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings (2021) by Amy-Jill Levine is full of challenging questions and problematic sayings. Perplexing is just the right word, for I often found myself asking, “Jesus said that?”

How difficult could they be? Well, right off the bat she has Jesus looking at the rich young ruler in Mark 10:21 and saying, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”

Not exactly the message of today’s prosperity gospel preachers.

How many professing Christians have emptied their bank account and joined ranks with Mother Theresa? None that I know. Or how many “hate father and mother” (Luke 14:26-27) or believe in slavery (Mark 10:44)?

What, exactly, are we to do with such sayings? Fortunately, there are questions we can ask that help. Questions such as: What’s the historical context in first century Palestine? What did the writers have in mind? Who made up their audience? How might the various ways of translating words have impacted meaning? What’s our historical context coming after centuries of bad interpretation and hateful sermons? And perhaps most importantly, what moral question is Jesus asking us to consider with these provocative sayings?

Levine is well suited to tackle these issues. She is the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. In 2021 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Levine describes herself as “an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who until 2021 taught New Testament in a Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.”

No difficult word or perplexing statement is going to push her away from this challenge.

I admire Levine’s ability to hold to her own faith tradition yet take other traditions seriously and with good intent. Because she admires the man and his teachings, the one thing she does consistently is take Jesus seriously. That’s more that can often be said for those who profess belief in the Christian gospel.

In each of the six chapters of this short but fascinating work, Levine dives into the historical context around Jesus’s audience at the time: first century Jews. That usually means she goes back deep into Jewish tradition, in which she is well versed. She also is a well-trained linguist who looks at how different words came to be used, especially as the Bible was translated through the centuries. What she doesn’t do is take the easy way out and suggest that not all these sayings came from the mouth of Jesus. She accepts the difficulty and wrestles with its deeper meaning.

In the Afterword, Levine notes that “if we look at the Bible as a book that helps us ask the right questions rather than an answer sheet, we honor both the Bible and the traditions that hold it sacred.” And so she works through each perplexing statement looking at the questions that we should be asking ourselves today. How much do we think about “economics, the sources of our resources, the way we use them, their hold on us”? Values and personal identity in relationship to family, others, and ourselves are additional topics that these difficult questions press us to consider. How do we address passages that seem to indicate that the all-knowing and all-loving God is just a bully?

As is true for many Americans, I have lived my entire life among cultures that see the Bible as an answer sheet. And it is not surprising to find the number of times those answers align with personal biases and have a tone that exudes righteousness. In this context I have worked to change my mind-set to asking the right questions, moving from certainty to mystery.

Levine is a delightful and playful writer who helps me in this journey. As she notes after stringing together a series of puns, sometimes a little levity can help us deal with the heaviness of the implications of what these sayings push us to consider. She can admit that she’s among the 78 percent of American Jews who do not believe in hell, although she confesses that especially in her less gracious moments “I do like the idea.” The belief in the existence of hell is something that has changed a great deal through the centuries, so when she ends the chapter on “Outer Darkness” with the sub-title, “To Hell with Hell” you know where she’s headed.

AJ (as she’s known to friends) notes here — as well as in her highly praised work on the short stories of Jesus — that parables are not “videotapes of life; they are stories designed to challenge us, to provoke us, to get us to think, and to motivate us to act morally.” In tackling these perplexing questions, Levine has challenged, provoked, and hopefully motivated the modern reader. It’s up to us as to whether — and how — we deal with them. But they are not going away.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Frantisek Krejci from Pixabay.