The Painted Prayerbook

The Inner Library © Jan L. Richardson

This week the lectionary leads us to Matthew 4.12-23 for the Gospel reading. It’s a passage that provides a great example of one of the things I find intriguing about how Matthew tells the story of Jesus. Matthew frequently turns to the Hebrew scriptures to interpret and explain who Jesus is. Drawing from the prophets—especially Isaiah—as well as the Psalms, Matthew grounds the story of Jesus in the remarkable landscape of the Hebrew scriptures and offers a vivid portrayal of Christ as the longed-for savior, the enfleshed fulfillment of an ancient hope.

At the outset of this passage, Matthew tells us that Jesus, upon hearing of the arrest of John the Baptist, leaves Nazareth and makes his home “in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali.” Matthew turns, as he loves to do, to Isaiah, explaining Jesus’ move as a fulfillment of Isaiah 9.1-2. Drawing from the prophet’s words, Matthew writes,

Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea, across the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
light has dawned. (Mt. 4.15-16)

Isaiah’s testimony about the great light that comes to those in darkness—one of the particularly lovely and powerful passages from his book—is among the lectionary readings for Christmas Eve. In quoting from these words, Matthew works to make especially clear that in the birth and life of Jesus, our hopes for light have been fulfilled.

Matthew’s use of the Hebrew scriptures, here and elsewhere, reminds me of something shared by the Dominican nun who first taught me about lectio divina. In talking with our group about praying with the scriptures, Sr. Kathleen cautioned that it’s important to remember that the Hebrew scriptures can stand on their own. Though Christians typically refer to this part of the Bible as the Old Testament, for our Jewish sisters and brothers it is the sole testament, a living and present word that continues to speak to their lives. Oftentimes Christians have treated the Hebrew scriptures as an extraneous appendage, a hefty section that merely makes our Bibles heavier. We have frequently read the Old Testament primarily as a prelude, a prooftext, viewing it solely through the lens of the New Testament and mining it for little else but news of Jesus and some lovely poetry.

I think it’s important to read the Hebrew scriptures with the kind of caveat that Sr. Kathleen offered us. At the same time, she affirmed that in the context of lectio divina, we who read the Hebrew text with Christian eyes may indeed find the presence of Christ there, and if we grow closer to him as a result, then that is a blessing and a gift.

For Christians, it’s possible to read the Hebrew texts both with an understanding of Christ as the embodiment of the ancient hope of which they speak, and also with a respect for the fact that they can also stand on their own as a testimony that is not merely “old” but eternal. Beyond what they reveal about the Messiah, the Hebrew scriptures provide an amazing and crucial context for our history as the people of God who have been on a journey that in some ways hasn’t changed all that much in millennia. The stories, longings, and lamentations that we find in the Old Testament—the kind of material that Matthew continually returns to in his Gospel—are some of the same kinds of stories, longings, and lamentations that we continue to live with. In this living, it’s crucial to engage this text not merely as prelude but rather as a persistently relevant revelation that grounds us in the ancient story of our long wrestling with God.

I find it intriguing, the way that Matthew preserves this ancient and living text. Had the Hebrew scriptures disappeared—God forbid—we still would have had essential fragments of it preserved in his gospel. It’s like having little books within his book, an essential and precious library tucked away within his tale.

The practice of lectio divina invites us to think of our lives as sacred texts that can be read and prayed with in much the same way that we approach a sacred written text such as the Bible. With that understanding, my pondering of this week’s gospel lection has prompted me to wonder about what I’ve preserved in my own interior library. Following Matthew’s lead, what are the texts that help me understand who I am? What words are tucked into the larger story of my life, and how do they influence how I read and live that story? In talking about texts in this context, I’m thinking both of written texts that have impacted me as well as the unwritten texts—the stories, experiences, and understandings through which I interpret my life.

What texts, sacred or otherwise, are preserved in the library of your life? What are the words through which you interpret your story and respond to the world around you? As you move through this world, what experiences and stories do you default to? What are the texts within and beneath the texts, the old and sometimes forgotten stories that influence how you read your present life?

Some of those texts that we carry in our interior library may readily strike us as sacred and life-giving; others may feel burdensome, painful, unlovely to us, and we keep them on the most remote and abandoned shelves. Yet God, that consummate recycler, has a remarkable habit of redemption. Every word of every text we carry, every scrap of every story: God has a place for it, a use for it, a need of it in the ongoing crafting of our tale.

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This entry was posted on January 23, 2008 at 8:37 PM and is filed under art, books, lectio divina, lectionary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.