Shrug Not Your Shoulders

If, today, you find it difficult to engage meaningfully with the Scriptures, might I invite you to join me on a brief, Elephantine adventure? It will do us both some good. For it is one thing to read the Scriptures and be puzzled, but it is another thing to read them and be bored. Thus, I aim to at least slightly rouse us to the plain wonder of something as seemingly ordinary as a dusty old book.

Hearing God Speak

I might almost dare to say that the unforgivable sin of Bible-reading is that of being bored. We do not even need to heed the shocking images, or the cunning wit, or the heart-wrenching poetry of this ancient book — we need only consider the fact that this ancient book claims to contain the words of God himself. We might treat such a claim with thorough disgust and spend our lives trying to disprove it, or we might go mad with wonder and lose ourselves in sheer joy over it — but we most certainly must not be indifferent about it. If the Bible is true, then the transcendent becomes immanent, and it continues to do so every day; if the Bible is true, then within its pages we find that the God of the endless heavens is also the God of the earth and altar; if the Bible is true, then the word made writ brings us over and over again to the Word made flesh. And, astonishingly, in the Scriptures, the thundering voice of God which was too much for the Israelites to bear, becomes bearable for us. We can hear God speak in the still small whisper of our silent reading. 

So if we come away from the Scriptures with not much else than a shrug of the shoulders, then the time has surely come to examine ourselves — for we would not merely shrug our shoulders if we had truly heard the Lord of the cherubim, if we had really listened to the God of fire and wine. We would weep, or we would tremble, or we would fall to the dust, or we would ponder inscrutable mysteries, or we would tear our clothes, or we would laugh and become insane for the love of pure sanity — but the one thing we would not do, is shrug our shoulders. 

Be Strong: Act Like Bores

"Would that you were either hot or cold," the haunting Christ said to the Laodiceans. “But because you are neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, I will vomit you out of my mouth.” I run with his fascinating illustration, and say that if the Scriptures do not set fire to your heart, or if they do not satisfy you as a drink of cold water on a hot day, but rather you receive them only as a lukewarm nothingness, then the problem is not the Scriptures. 

Or, to put a new flip on an old saying, the Scriptures are boring only to those who are bored. And the "bored" do not even rise to the dignity of “bores,” for bores at least have some life in them — they have their routines, their rituals, their liturgies. They are so bold as to do the same things every single day, and to do them contentedly. They do not fear monotony, and for this alone they possess a strength unique among all mankind. To riff off of Chesterton, in this way the bores imitate God, for God is strong enough to exult in monotony: he has never gotten tired of making identical daisies. 

But not so with the bored. They can be bored by the greenness of the grass, or the running water of a stream, and therefore they can be bored of even the Scriptures, and therefore they can be bored even of God — God, the fountain of infinite variety and unchanging sameness, that fixed star which shines in changing colors too dazzling to comprehend. Oh that we could all rise out of the mire of being bored, and ascend the dazzling heights of the bores! 

And for the Unaffected

But there is also a difference between those who read the Scriptures and merely shrug their shoulders, and those who read them but despair of ever responding to them appropriately. A man or a woman or a child (though children are less susceptible to this painful phenomenon) might have their Bible open before them, might read attentively and prayerfully, and yet not feel the accompanying grandeur and awe and glory — and yet they do feel sorrow for not feeling as they ought. 

Such a one as this is, surely, in a far better state than the bored person. For at least the sorrowful, unaffected person knows that they ought to be affected. They know that they have gone where angels fear to tread — and thus, they fear that they have not feared. They weep that they have not wept. They despair that they have not despaired. And in this way, they are yet strangely affected.

To paraphrase Augustine, the desire to desire God is itself a form of acceptable desire; to long for the right longings when it comes to God’s word is itself a kind of right longing — for this is borne from having tasted and seen that the Lord is good. Such a person longs to feast at Christ’s table, because they have eaten there before, and they cannot forget the delicacies they enjoyed — nor especially can they forget the glorious presence of their Host and King, their Friend and Lord. 

And that is, ultimately, what makes the Scriptures what they are: they are the words of Christ about himself, and in his words he himself can be found. We meet Christ in the Scriptures. They all speak of him, because they are all spoken by him (cf. 1 Peter 1:11).

And no one ever, ever shrugged their shoulders when they heard Christ speak. They worshiped him, they taunted him, they loved him with an unquenchable love, they hated him with an uncompromising hatred, they hailed him as Holy One of God, they reviled him as the prince of demons — but no one ever shrugged their shoulders. The one who reads the word of God and merely shrugs their shoulders, has not actually heard the words of God.