Postscript: Heart To Heart
Creation Story One: 1:1-2:4a
And Jesus said to them, “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
They said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” Lk 24:25-7, 32
What this story about the-mother-of-all-Bible-classes tells us is that the Good Book is the absolute daddy of interconnectedness. As alluded to at the start and exemplified in the above passage, for a Christian, this immense interdependence of biblical stories revolves around and coheres in the person of Jesus. He is the story system’s sun. The Storyteller.
This is more than simple cross-referencing or footnoting. Allusions, numbers, images, types, religious experiences and characters’ vocations share curious connections across a vast sweep of human history. Of course, there’s a lot of editing involved in this; theological polishing pens always add colour to strict history. But, rather than make-believe, it’s all in service of revealing hard-to-grasp mysteries. Spiritual realities are a little like cut diamonds. They won’t fire unless turned under a focused light. Then each glint yields a beautiful new insight; small facets of the whole hallowed stone.
Well, they say a picture paints a thousand words and this captures it perfectly:
There’s also an interactive version here: www.chrisharrison.net
Here’s how Mr Harrison describes it:
The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible, starting with Genesis 1 on the left. Books alternate in color between light and dark gray, with the first book of the Old and New Testaments in white. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in that chapter (for instance, the longest bar is the longest chapter in the Bible, Psalm 119). Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible are depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.
[another grateful nod to Dr Peterson’s brilliant Genesis lecture series]
These textual synergies in sacred scripture reflect the prophetic element bubbling away in the people of God. It’s there, generation after generation, in all the small stories that come to form the greater one. Like a cool photo mosaic. So, the book itself isn’t the focus, so much as the perrenial weave of words slowly revealing the wider Word.
Tradition is fundamental here. The handing down of stories through a people with a sense of shared history creates the context for consistent and authentic interpretation. This tradition is properly named Judeo-Christian. I’m both proud and astonished to call Abraham my father. His story is as ancient and relevant as ever. As it should be to one of his own children, and anyone else with an open mind.
There’s something further, though.
God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New. (DV #16)
That is, divine inspiration. The Bible is the story of God and his people and whilst the people change and their understanding of God deepens and clarifies, God remains God through the whole unfolding story. Yet, He doesn’t impose or dictate the words but rather inspires his beloved followers to find the right ones, over and again. Interestingly, originality in this sense doesn’t entail the heavy burden of constantly crafting the totally new, but rather (as the word implies) returning to the origin to be inspired to fresh geneses.
This guarantees the story won’t go astray, or lack overall coherence and resonance. Each word has something to tell us and is worthy of reflection. Even curiosities like a talking donkey. Maybe especially the curiosities. Still, the fullness of meaning resides in the totality, in the whole canon of scripture, not in isolated parts.
St Augustine used a turn of phase that was adapted by St John Henry Newman for his Cardinal’s motto: cor ad cor loquitur - heart speaks unto heart. This is the perfect way to picture the difference in encountering the Bible. We all know the name of that novel that reached inside us. The one where we heard the author first whispering the magic of story so close to our ears that we forgot ourselves for a while; when we reemerged into the light of day as from birthing waters, crying out in newness of being…
Me: The Power and the Glory. You?
Yet, reading scripture is two-way. Our stories are drawn into God’s own. And, He even writes His into ours. Heart unto heart. Dialogue. Interconnection. Not merely words on a page. That rapture, diamond-light hypnosis, burning hearts upon the perfect* sacred path, is what picking up the Bible ought to be like. There’s literally no other book like it in the whole of history, yet it’s all too easy to miss its mosaic uniqueness in our age of soundbite and slogan.
This is, then, my somewhat laboured yet unapologetic apologia for why reflections on Genesis invariably end up everywhere else. Like an enthralling conversation, they’re meant to: digression comes as standard. As we re-begin our journey by exploring Creation Story Two, not only will we need to appreciate the different theological perspectives of a clearly different narrative voice, we will also need to be mindful of the many connections with Creation Story One and indeed with the incredible span of God’s ever encompassing Word.
How burns your heart upon the road?
Header photo: Robert Zünd, The Road To Emmaus, 1877. Public Domain
*How far from Jerusalem?
I have often thought that scripture/salvation history is so perfectly designed it could not be an accident. It stands as a proof of God in itself, aside from, you know, the first hand accounts.