Contradict [Easter 6; St. John 16:23-30]

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Jesus speaks to you pure doctrine today, in v.25 saying,

“I have said these things to you in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures of speech but will tell you plainly about the Father.”

One of the favorite pastimes of the unbeliever is to point out contradictions in the Bible. Worse than that, is the favorite pastime of the so-called-evangelical Christian who will spend his time pointing out how unchristian the Lutheran church is, and inadvertently reveal a contradiction.

A person who reads the Bible only in a wooden view is called a Fundamentalist. They will take every passage they read quite literally, regardless of what the translation turns out to be. In this way, they end up with contradiction sin the Bible that they need to explain away, however, Jesus doesn’t take too kindly to metaphors.

The latest and greatest example of this comes from the command in Deuteronomy where the Lord says, “Only be sure not to eat the blood, for the blood is the life, and you shall not eat the life with the flesh” (12:23). The problem comes in when we hear Jesus say, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (Jn. 6:53).

To this contradiction, we will say Jesus is using a metaphor and didn’t really mean what He said.

We run into a similar “problem” throughout the entire Bible. More famous is the Abraham debate. Was Abraham justified by faith as we hear in Romans, “For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God” (4:2) or by works in James 2, “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar?”

In the Gospel according to St. Matthew, our Lord states,

“For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.” (15:19)

But, in his letter to the Romans, St. Paul states,

“For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” (10:10)

Here is the contradiction: Jesus has said the heart is evil and yet St. Paul is claiming justification, in front of God, with that same heart. So who is right? Who is using metaphor and who is speaking literally and who is going to say so?

At the outset, we take Jesus at His Word. So, in one sense, reading Jesus literally, in the simplest sense, is ok to do. What its not ok to do, when we are reading like that, is make excuses for Jesus’ words when they get too difficult to understand. If you’re going to read the Bible literally, at least be consistent.

For example, the eating and drinking blood business we just mentioned. If we read the Bible literally, then Jesus contradicts God and there is no reason to believe Him or anything else He says.

If we force on Him the metaphor business, then there is also no reason to believe Him, because then all of Scripture becomes a self-help book of keeping you on the straight and narrow and keeping others out. It becomes of division instead of unity.

Repent. This is the default way we read the Bible. The easy reasonable things Jesus says are easy and reasonable precisely because we can put them into action with out own two hands. We can live a clean and moral life to the best of our ability and attribute it to God working in our lives, thereby showing everyone how great a job we are doing, with God’s help of course.

What then would we have to say about forgiveness, if we continue on this path? No, you say, no. God always forgives there would never be…“And Joshua said unto the people, Ye cannot serve the LORD: for he [is] an holy God; he [is] a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions nor your sins.” (Josh. 24:19).

If one part of the Bible is metaphor, then nothing prevents the rest of it from being a metaphor. If one part of the Bible is true, and another not, then nothing prevents the whole Bible from being untrue and who are you to say otherwise?

Dear Christians, there is a third way to read holy Scripture which employs the two ways already described, combined with a third view: the Christological view. This means Christ is at the center, not just of helping you do all the things you read in the Bible, but is also the subject of all the things you read in the Bible.

So when we hear passages about drinking blood we can agree with the literal sense, don’t be a vampire (it doesn’t work anyway) and don’t eat raw food cuz it makes you sick. And then when Jesus talks about it, we can say also that it is a metaphor for spiritual eating, because faith is necessary.

But now we can also say that because the prohibition was against animals and men and not against Jesus’ Body and Blood, we can be confident that if we can find Jesus’ Body and Blood to eat and drink, that it will give us what He promised it would give us.

Since Christ is the center of Scripture, Abraham can be justified by faith AND by works. By faith, because Jesus went to him first and washed away His uncleanness simply by giving His Word and by works, because by them Abraham shows that he heard God and understood Him.

Since Jesus is the subject of holy Scripture, our hearts can be both evil and justified at the same time. Evil, because we remain in our sin and Justified because Jesus has suffered, died and risen again in order to justify us before God.

In the same way, your sin can remain with you, or rather you keep returning to it, and the promises of God are not affected. The Father can still look on your sin with wrath and disgust, but now because of His Son, He can also view you through the crucifixion of Jesus, that is forgiven.

Jesus does not contradict God. Jesus is God. Jesus says hard figures of speech, but they only offend your reasoned certainties, they do not offend His work of salvation in any way.

You may squirm that you have to eat and drink blood, you may protest that you have to forgive your enemy, you may balk at the idea of free forgiveness, but just because you are offended or “feel” its not right, does not mean you are right.

Jesus speaks to us in our own language and employs it all in the literal, figurative, and mystical sense. If we try to make Jesus simply a man, we replace Him with us and we lose the meaning of the whole Bible.

If we let Jesus be Jesus; if we let Him say what He means and be right (instead of us), then we can begin to see the Light. We can begin to uncover the depth and richness of God Who does all things well. We can say to the skeptic, “Look to Jesus” and all these contradictions fall away.

Jesus can say what He wants, offend Who He wants, and mean it how He wants to mean it and all can be right with the world. We may even find a loving, caring, and forgiving God in the midst of all that and come to understand that He does it all for you.