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

by Rachel Held Evans

In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “Jesus himself, the entirety of his acting, teaching, living, raising and remaining with us is the ‘gospel.’”

deus ex machina,

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.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

The church is not a group of people who believe all the same things; the church is a group of people caught up in the same story, with Jesus at the center.

(The Cotton Patch Gospel,

Ours is a God who knows how to mend clothes and bake bread, a God familiar with the planting and harvest seasons, the traditions of bridesmaids, and the tickle of wool on the back of the neck.

“I am a Christian,” I concluded, “because the story of Jesus is still the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”

These numbers must be significant because in Mark’s gospel, Jesus quizzes the disciples about them on a boat ride to Bethsaida.

In Judaism, certain numbers carry special theological significance, and most scholars believe the numbers in these stories symbolically underscore the expansion of Jesus’ ministry from the Jewish community to the greater Gentile world.

Gerasene demoniac

When Jesus sees the leper, he responds emotionally. Some translations say he was “moved by compassion”; others report he was “indignant,” likely over the man’s unjust treatment. Regardless, Mark chose his next words carefully: Jesus “reached out his hand and touched the man,” and immediately the man was healed (v. 41).

The second story describes a woman who suffered from what appears to be a chronic uterine hemorrhage. “She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had,” Mark noted, “yet instead of getting better she grew worse” (5:26). (What a sad and stark description of life with chronic illness.) Awful as this condition already was, it was made worse by the fact that the law prevented physical contact with menstruating women and considered them ritually impure for the duration of their periods and seven days after. This woman’s continual bleeding rendered her perpetually untouchable, cut off from her husband, her community, and her temple. Perhaps she had heard about Jesus healing the man with leprosy, for in this account she garners the courage to join a large crowd following Jesus through the city streets, pressing in around him.

the third story,

Once again, Jesus touches someone who shouldn’t be touched, for according to the law, contact with a corpse was also considered nonkosher and demanded a period of quarantine and ritual washing.

In all three stories, the point isn’t just that Jesus healed these people; the point is that Jesus touched these people. He embraced them just as he embraced other disparaged members of society, often regarded as “sinners” by the religious and political elite—prostitutes, tax collectors, Samaritans, Gentiles, the sick, the blind, and the deaf.

As Jeffrey John explained in The Meaning in the Miracles, these and other healing stories “seem to have been deliberately selected by the evangelists to show Jesus healing at least every category of persons who, according to the purity laws of Jesus’ society, were specifically excluded and labeled unclean.”2 “Each of these healings,” he wrote, “is, of course, a demonstration of Jesus’ healing power and compassion for the individual, but that is not the main point. Uppermost in the evangelist’s mind—and far more relevant to us—is the miracle’s universal significance: the overturning of social and religious barriers; the abolition of taboo...

“Hope,” wrote N. T. Wright, “is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to change the world.”4

When Peter, a devout Jew, encountered the hospitality and faith of the Roman centurion Cornelius, he made the radical decision to not only meet with the Gentile, but to set aside nearly every kosher restriction in the Book and share a meal with him. “It is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile,” Peter confesses to his new friend. “But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean” (Acts 10:28).

The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget—that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.

A lot of religious folks think they can help by insisting over and over again how important it is to “just believe,” as if belief were something one could conjure by force of will. But in my experience, simply wanting to believe doesn’t work. The only thing that “works”—and probably only about half the time—is the long and storied spiritual discipline the sages of the faith refer to as “fake it till you make it.” Go to church. Take communion. Show up at the homeless shelter. March in the protest. Pray for healing. Rebuke the chaos.

“I like that one too,” I said to the mother, and then posited the theory that the number 153 in rabbinic numerology signifies “completion” and perhaps corresponds to a specific prophecy in Ezekiel that describes a great river full of all kinds of fish flowing out of a restored temple. It’s worth noting, I added, that John emphasized that the net was full but not torn, which means the net might symbolize the church, holding a great diversity of fish together in unity. Early Christian art depicts Peter and John holding a net on either side of a stream flowing from a temple, suggesting they made that connection too. “Oh, I wasn’t thinking about all that,” the woman said with a smile. “I just like the idea of God frying up fish for breakfast.”

ekklesia,

Pax Romana

“They say Pax Romana begins in the home,” she says. “Maybe revolution does too.”

tchotchkes

In places where women in leadership assisted in the spreading of the gospel, Paul encouraged it; where it might prove too disruptive or confusing, he discouraged it. (Notably, the most restrictive New Testament instructions regarding women in leadership appear in a letter to Timothy in Ephesus, home of the infamous Artemis riots.) In fact, in his first-century context, Paul would likely have been perceived as radically inclusive and egalitarian. For him, nothing mattered more than unleashing the gospel and moving out of the way any unnecessary cultural or religious obstructions that might impede its proliferation.

“It is my judgment,” the apostle James concluded, “. . . that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God” (Acts 15:19).

Was Paul a man of his time? Of course. But that’s exactly the point. God meets us where we are, as we are. The Spirit shows up in the thick of it.

“The composers of biblical prose,” wrote author and scholar Gregory Mobley, “appended the simplest conjunction, ‘and,’ to a line, gave it a little extra vocalization . . . doubled the initial consonant of the word to which the ‘and’ was attached, and voila: the Biblical Hebrew ‘and then.’ ‘There was light and then God saw that the light was good and then there was evening and then there was morning, and then and then and then,’ before you know it, you are standing with Moses on Mount Nebo at the end of Deuteronomy, light-years from when God first peered over the abyss.”1