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

by Rachel Held Evans

Esther secures permission for the Jews to take revenge on their enemies, on the very day those enemies had planned to eliminate them. The story ends in a Tarantino-style bloodbath.

Many people notice that the book of Esther is the only one in Scripture that fails to mention God, and indeed its religious themes are covert.

Sometimes the best

way to fell the Beast is to look it in the face and laugh.

Its author, a seer named John, had been exiled to the island of Patmos, where he wrote to challenge and encourage Christians suffering intense persecution under the Roman Empire, probably during the reign of Domitian.

As we move to the stories from the Gospels, it’s important to remember that these stories don’t begin with “Once upon a time,” but with “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus . . .” (Luke 2:1–3 KJV).

They are rooted in the context of empire and resistance, of oppression and defiance.

Jesus takes the Resistance beyond prophecy, beyond songs of hope and lamentation, beyond satire and mockery, and beyond

apocalyptic visions to declare the inauguration of a new kingdom. With his birth, teachings, death, and resurrection, Jesus has started a revolution. It just doesn’t look the way anyone expects.

In the desert, wells give and draw life, their waters evocative of the womb.

Flannery O’Connor once said, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story.”1

“Jesus himself, the entirety of his acting, teaching, living, raising and remaining with us is the ‘gospel.’”2

This is what the New Testament is about. It’s the good news of Jesus told from multiple perspectives—“the gospel according to . . .” The books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—often referred to as the Synoptic Gospels—tell the story through spiritual biography, drawing from eyewitness accounts, existing source material, and the authors’ own memories to recall what Jesus did and taught.

God did not see fit to print the gospel on a coin, so why should we?

Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden dimension of ordinary life—God’s dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever.”

The kingdom, Jesus taught, is right here—present yet hidden, immanent yet transcendent. It is at hand—among us and beyond us, now and not-yet.

In this view, Jesus basically shows up to post our bail. His life and teachings make for an interesting backstory but prove largely irrelevant to the work of salvation. Dallas Willard called it “the gospel of sin management.”5

any view that reduces Jesus to a sort of deus ex machina, necessary only for a single moment of rescue, strips the incarnation of all its power and tells a far simpler story 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

Jesus lived to save us from our sins.

“To walk from a ward of innocent victims to a ward full of the perpetrators,” Amanda wrote

in an e-mail to me, “and to show equal love and service is not humanly possible. It’s divine. It’s the gospel.”

“to point to Christ and to preach the gospel and to remind people that they’re absolutely loved, that none of their f-ups are more powerful than God’s mercy.”6

“a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table

where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcast are honored.”

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.

And yet the scandal of the gospel is that one day the God of our theology books and religious debates showed up—as a person, in flesh and blood.

We fondly praise the “good Samaritans” in our midst without realizing that in making a Samaritan the hero of his story, Jesus was centering a religious and ethnic minority ostracized by his first-century Jewish community.

I am a messy and embodied person, and this is a messy and embodied faith.”

“I am a Christian,” declared Austin Channing Brown, an author and activist whose work focuses on racial justice in the church, “because God knows my pain, not in an abstract way, but in a real, bloody, enfleshed way.”

I choose to live as if the things Jesus died for were worthy of God’s sacrifice and therefore worthy of mine.”

We are storytelling creatures because we are fashioned in the image of a storytelling God. May we never neglect the gift of that. May we never lose our love for telling the tale.

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.

“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

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.

the number 153 in rabbinic numerology signifies “completion”

holds authority. Among Christians, many women do—Lydia, Junia, Priscilla, Phoebe. Paul refers to them as his coworkers and speaks of them as equals.

So the question for modern readers, then, is whether the point of the New Testament household codes is to reinforce the Greco-Roman household structure as God’s ideal for all people, in all places, for all time, or whether the point is to encourage Christians to imitate Jesus in their relationships, regardless of the culture or their status in it.

In a sense, the Epistles are a lot like wisdom literature, for they remind us that wisdom isn’t just about knowing what is true; it’s about knowing when it’s true.

It’s important to understand that in the first century, same-sex relationships were not thought to be expressions of sexual orientations but rather products of excessive sexual desire wherein people engaging in same-sex behavior did so out of an excess of lust that could not be satisfied.5

Now, lest you think this only applies to same-sex relationships, consider this: Paul uses the very same language in a letter to the Corinthian church to argue that women should wear head coverings and men shouldn’t have long hair. “Judge for yourselves,” he wrote, “Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?” (1 Corinthians 11:13–15, emphasis mine). He goes on to decry short-haired women and men with covered heads as similarly “unnatural,” appealing to everything from the created order to male authority to the opinions of angels. “If anyone wants to be contentious about this,” he concluded, “we

have no other practice—nor do the churches of God” (11:16). And yet many of the same Christians who condemn all same-sex behavior as “unnatural” according to the Bible, don’t apply the same standards to head coverings or hair lengths among the men and women in their own congregations. Most understand Paul’s language to the Corinthians to describe cultural customs, based on ancient views of gender roles, not universal truths.

My experience loving and engaging with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends has convinced me that the Bible has been unfairly used against them, often with tragic results, but Christians can disagree on that. And they often do, fiercely.

With all these cultural angles to consider and heated debates to navigate, a lot of folks lose faith in the Epistles. They assume that Paul was just a first-century misogynist, the churches of Rome, Ephesus, Corinth, and Colossae merely products of their time, just as divisive and dysfunctional as churches today.

Like it or not, you can’t be a Christian on your own. Following Jesus is a group activity, and from the beginning, it’s been a messy one; it’s been an incarnated one.

In the buildup to the American Civil War, Christian ministers wrote nearly half of all defenses of slavery, often citing Scripture in support of the Confederate cause.

The Southern Baptist denomination exists today because Baptists from the South did not want to be told by Baptists in the North that owning black people was wrong. After all, they argued, the Bible is clear: “Slaves obey your earthly masters” (Ephesians 6:5).

As it turns out, the letters of Paul weren’t written by a crotchety misogynist intent on regulating the behaviors of women and minorities for millennia to come, nor were they composed by a godlike philosopher disseminating soteriological truths into the universe from an ivory tower. The apostle Paul was a smart, worldly, and broad-minded Jew who had been utterly transformed by what he saw as his singular mission in life: to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and welcome them in to Israel’s story. In pursuit of that mission, Paul was determined to break down every religious, ethnic, and cultural barrier that stood in the way.

Paul experienced a dramatic conversion on the road