Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

by Rachel Held Evans

The biblical scholars I love to read don’t go to the holy text looking for ammunition with which to win an argument or trite truisms with which to escape the day’s sorrows; they go looking for a blessing, a better way of engaging life and the world, and they don’t expect to escape that search unscathed.

With Scripture, we’ve not been invited to an academic fraternity; we’ve been invited to a wrestling match.

Rather than an exact enumeration of time, forty symbolizes a prolonged period of hardship, waiting, and wandering—a liminal space between the start of something and its fruition that often brings God’s people into the wilderness, into the wild unknown.

In an ancient world that often celebrated violent indulgence, the Law offered a sense of stability and moral purpose. For example, the famous lex talionis, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (from Leviticus 24:20), may strike modern readers as a barbaric endorsement of revenge, but within its cultural context, this “law of retaliation” represented a deliberate move away from the excessive punishment allowed in other tribes by limiting retaliatory action to judicious, in-kind responses. In other words, you can demand restitution for your loss, but no more; this is about justice, not revenge.

We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love, with Christ as our model, or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? Are we seeking to enslave or liberate, burden or set free?

If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm. With Scripture, we’ve been entrusted with some of the most powerful stories ever told. How we harness that power, whether for good or evil, oppression or liberation, changes everything.

If we train ourselves not to ask hard questions about the Bible, and to emotionally distance ourselves from any potential conflicts or doubts, then where will we find the courage to challenge interpretations that justify injustice? How will we know when we’ve got it wrong?

If you really want to understand what makes a community or a culture tick, ask the people in it what they believe is worth dying for, or perhaps more significantly, worth killing for. Ask the people for their war stories.

Boyd argued that God serves as a sort of “heavenly missionary” who temporarily accommodates the brutal practices and beliefs of various cultures without condoning them in order to gradually influence God’s people toward justice.

Insofar as any divine portrait reflects a character at odds with the cross, he said, it must be considered accommodation.

“The one who complains to God, pleads with God, rails at God, does not let God off the hook for a minute—she is at last admitted to a mystery. She passes through a door that only pain will open, and is thus qualified to speak of God in a way that others, whom we generally call more fortunate, cannot speak.”2

Wisdom, it seems, is situational. It isn’t just about knowing what to say; it’s about knowing when to say it. And it’s not just about knowing what is true; it’s about knowing when it’s true.

Arguably, these verses imply a pro tip too: When your friend is sitting in a heap of ashes, grieving the loss of his family and scratching his diseased skin with a shard of broken pottery, it’s time to be silent. It’s a time to listen and grieve.

“The Psalms don’t theologize or explain anger away,” wrote author and poet Kathleen Norris, who studied the Psalter as a Benedictine oblate. “One reason for this is that the Psalms are poetry, and poetry’s function is not to explain but to offer images and stories that resonate with our lives. . . . In expressing all the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the Psalms act as good psychologists. They defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first.”11

“The absence of lament in the liturgy of the American church results in a loss of memory. We forget the necessity of lamenting over suffering and pain. We forget the reality of suffering and pain.”14

In other words, the prophets are weirdos. More than anyone else in Scripture, they remind us that those odd ducks shouting from the margins of society may see things more clearly than the political and religious leaders with the inside track. We ignore them at our own peril.

The prophets, explained Brueggemann, “are moved the way every good poet is moved to have to describe the world differently according to the gifts of their insight. And, of course, in their own time and every time since, the people that control the power structure do not know what to make of them, so they characteristically try to silence them. What power people always discover is that you cannot finally silence poets.”6

Jeremiah’s particular skill at lament often lends him the moniker “prophet of doom,” though this articulation of the reality of suffering is a crucial part of both truth-telling and healthy grief.

Alongside these cries of anguish and anger, condemnation and critique, the prophets deliver what is perhaps the most subversive element of any resistance movement: hope. Employing language and imagery charged with theological meaning, the prophet asserted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the God of Israel—the God of slaves and exiles and despised religious minorities—remains present and powerful, enthroned over all creation and above every empire.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.

persuasions. For too long, the white American church has chosen the promise of power over prophetic voice. We have allied ourselves with the empire and, rather than singing songs of hopeful defiance with the exiles, created more of them. We have, consciously and unconsciously, done the bidding of the Beast—not in every case, of course, but in far too many.

than the one the Bible actually gives us. Jesus didn’t just “come to die.” Jesus came to live—to teach, to heal, to tell stories, to protest, to turn over tables, to touch people who weren’t supposed to be touched and eat with people who weren’t supposed to be eaten with, to break bread, to pour wine, to wash feet, to face temptation, to tick off the authorities, to fulfill Scripture, to forgive, to announce the start of a brand-new kingdom, to show us what that kingdom is like, to show us what God is like, to love his enemies to the point of death at their hands, and to beat death by rising from the grave. Jesus did not simply die to save us from our sins; Jesus lived to save us from our sins. His life and teachings show us the way to liberation.