Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“He said, ‘Throw her down.’ So they threw her down; some of her blood spattered on the wall and on the horses, which trampled on her.”
NL Daily Devotion for Saturday, November 11, 2023
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
The Bible: Not for the weak of stomach. I worked with a pastor who told our youth group that the Bible was absolutely full of violence and sex, and they were astonished. But it’s true! The biblical writers did not shy away from the realities—the embodiedness—of human existence. We tend to downplay these things in our day-to-day church discourse. I once preached a sermon in which I asked how many people present knew the story of David and Bathsheeba. Only about six hands went up in a congregation of close to 90. I was flabbergasted. But our society doesn’t want to acknowledge that David slept with someone else’s wife (and even if it was consensual, the power imbalance was ridiculous, just one reason leading some scholars to name it as rape), got her pregnant, had her husband murdered, and then married her. It’s too uncomfortable to talk about, to try to unpack how this could be God’s chosen king and one of the most beloved figures in our history and the ancestor of Jesus. So we just sort of gloss over it.
Likewise, we all know that Jezebel wasn’t great. Even if we don’t know the Bible story, culturally we know that “a Jezebel” is a lousy woman of one kind or another. But we don’t often talk about her violent, gory death, nor stop to unpack whether it was justified (which I talked about last time I reflected on this portion of scripture).
The Bible is a work of incredibly beautiful, impossibly troubling, wonderfully thought-provoking literature, which calls us into conversation with our own humanity, and continually offers insight into who God is and who we are in relationship to God. Let’s not shy away from the nitty-gritty of our embodied mortality. We might have great things to learn from it.
Are there Bible passages I prefer not to read? Why or why not?
