Write me a letter

Every so often, I think it’s important to remind people that the Bible isn’t really a book. We’ve called it that because we bound it that way, but we shouldn’t really bind ourselves to that idea. If we do, we’ll start thinking about it that way and try to consider everything as if it all belongs in the consistency and uniformity of a single volume. If we do that, we might miss out on the incredible diversity of its content.

I like to think of it more as a library in your hand. There’s narratives that seem historical or biographical, there’s some fiction and even some fantasy, there’s poetry and songs, sayings and advice, there’s even a correspondence section.

That correspondence section can be particularly useful for followers of Jesus. As long as you remember that it’s correspondence written to the followers of Jesus by someone who’s not Jesus of Nazareth about how to be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Because that’s its real value.

The epistles or letters that were included in Christian scripture are correspondence written by Paul and others to communities where the earliest followers of Jesus had established themselves. There’s twenty-one of these letters, thirteen of which were originally ascribed to Paul, but modern scholarship suggests he might have been responsible for seven of those at most. I want to say they were written to  established “churches,” but they didn’t really have that yet, certainly not as we would recognize it. (And that wasn’t a bad thing, either.) It’s just that these letters we read as scripture weren’t meant to be that at all. They were for people that probably knew the stories and teaching of Jesus - or at least were being taught them - and attempted to build communities around that. They were struggling to figure out how to put into practice being Jesus and sometimes it didn’t go well. So Paul, and others, would write to them. I suspect that there was probably many more letters than the pieces we have that were formed into our scriptural epistles.  Many, many more. 

So. Here’s the teaching of Jesus. Here’s some leadership building communities around that. And here’s the written wisdom and encouragement of some of that leadership on how to do it, how to respond to problems that arise, how to encourage, how to share, how to, well, be Jesus. How to live.

Here’s the thing about the letters. They respond to real world application of the teachings of Jesus: the questions, concerns, struggles and trials of living a radical new way. They’re the working through of “applied Jesus” in the lives of people in those days, with the constant reminder that it’s not just about behaviour, but about what’s in your heart and how that’s lived. It’s about living in the transformative power of love, grace and relationship and living out that power into the world. In many ways, they reveal how hard that can be and also how incredibly rewarding.