The notion of the “Scriptures” has undergone radical changes across the centuries. Today, we picture them as a single book, the Bible. Indeed, we picture that book as private property, perhaps a personal guide for all things spiritual. Even when we hear its words being quoted in public or in Church gatherings, we imagine the readings as something bound-up in this private mode. More than that, the text of the Scriptures is frequently reduced to ideas, as propositions to be weighed and considered. All of this is largely foreign to the Scriptures in their original form.
The Scriptures are “Scripture,” inasmuch as the Church deems them to be so. Outside of the Church, the word itself has no meaning. The word means, “the Writings,” specifically, the “writings” which the Church reads as the word of God, as authoritative, as revealing Christ to the Church in the Church.
In their original form, the Scriptures were exceedingly expensive. The best vellum copies of the gospels (made from calf skin) required the hides of some 100 calves. An entire set of the Scriptures would require five times that many. The most common form of the Scriptures are what today are called “lectionaries,” that is, the selections from the Scriptures that are prescribed for reading in the services of the Church.
Early copies of the Scriptures had no markings for verses or chapters, nor even spaces between words (it was a sort of economy when the vellum on which it was written was so expensive). The Scriptures were public documents, copied and preserved by the Church for the Church. When St. Paul, for example, quotes from the Scriptures, he is not doing so with a handy Bible by his side to consult. He quotes from memory.
It was once a common practice that monastics learned the whole of the Psalter by memory, while the same was expected of Bishops. Today, such feats of memory seem outlandish, but they are not as far beyond reach as we imagine.
There is a greater act of memory that takes place in the life of the Church that continues into our present time. It is found in the Liturgy as it is celebrated in the midst of the congregation. It is, in fact, the most natural place for the Scriptures: it is where they belong. It is the true place where the Scriptures are remembered.
For example, each year in the period known as “Holy Week” (from Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday through Pascha) the Orthodox Church takes a deep dive into the narrative drama of the last days of Christ’s ministry: His betrayal, arrest, trial, scourging, crucifixion and burial through to the accounts of His resurrection. The narratives of Christ’s passion are rehearsed both in the actions of the services as well as in the context of hymnography that meditates on the meaning and purpose of what is taking place. Many of the services in the early part of the week are largely composed of sung text, poetic expositions on the Scriptures for that day. The services known as the “Bridegroom Matins” (named for their poetic meditation on Christ as the Bridegroom) begin on the evening of Palm Sunday and last through Holy Wednesday. The typicon (the service directions) call for the reading of the entirety of all four gospels over the course of the first three days of Holy Week. On Holy Friday, after the icon of Christ’s burial shroud is placed in the tomb, the Psalter begins to be read from beginning to end, in a continual repetition until Saturday evening, when the reading of the Acts of the Apostles replaces it. The services tend to have liturgical actions, with varying levels of congregational participation, that take Biblical text and poetic discourse and combine them with actions in which the gospel story of Christ’s passion is liturgically dramatized in the parish setting. In something of a tour de force, the Vesperal Liturgy of Holy Saturday has 15 readings from the Old Testament, demonstrating and rehearsing the Paschal pattern that permeates the whole of Scripture.
What I want to stress is that all of these actions are a “reading” of Scripture. In particular, they are a reading that points out that the “pattern” in the whole of Scripture is revealed in the primary pattern of Christ’s Pascha (death and resurrection). His Pascha reveals not just God’s purpose, but our purpose, and the purpose of all things. This is, perhaps, an interesting way to “read” the Scriptures. We are a deeply text-based society (whether the text is in a book or on screen). We tend to overlook (or ignore) the fact that Christ never wrote a book or a letter. He gave us something else.
Three of the gospels, as well as St. Paul, relate this story of the Last Supper.
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” (1 Corinthians 11:23–25)
These are Christ’s words that we have received, but the Church’s memory of those words, even before they were written down, were embodied in the actions of the Divine Liturgy, even in its most primitive form. It is a portion of “Holy Week” that is enacted at every celebration of the Liturgy to this day.
The truth is that the Scriptures are not “read” unless and until they are enacted. Christ says this about His own words:
“He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.” (Jn 14:21)
And this:
Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (Jn 8:31–32)
We should note that in this second saying, “knowing the truth” comes after “abiding in My word.”
St. Paul has a different way of saying this:
You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men; clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart. (2Cor. 3:2-3)
Perhaps the greatest betrayals of Scripture have been the many movements that have reduced it to a text. It is not that the Scriptures cannot be studied, but that the true study of Scripture is not found in the acquisition of information. Rather, its true study is that which results in a life transformed into the image of Christ.
The Liturgies of the Church embody this instinct. There, the Scriptures are not just read aloud, but read liturgically, with actions, candles, incense, processions, and response. The hymns that accompany its reading serve an interpretive role as well. In the Divine Liturgy, the Scriptures always lead to the climax of the Eucharist in which everything is gathered into the Lord’s Pascha: “showing forth His death ’til He comes.” (1Cor. 11:26) “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” (Jn. 6:53)
The saints whose lives are commemorated in the liturgy also serve an interpretive role. They are lives that reveal themselves as conformed to the image of Christ. They are what the Scriptures look like in human form, the death and resurrection of Christ repeated and glorified.
St. Paul expresses this in intensely personal terms:
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”(Gal 2:20)
In one of the most extreme examples of performative interpretation, we have a small story from the Desert Fathers:
One of the monks, called Serapion, sold his book of the Gospels and gave the money to those who were hungry, saying: “I have sold the book which told me to sell all that I had and give to the poor.”
And this is Christ’s Pascha.
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