Published by Dwight on 15 Dec 2009
Proclivi Scriptioni Praestat Ardua
The following sermon was delivered on Dec. 13, 2009, at Trinity’s 8:45 worship service. Because no audio recording was made, the text of the sermon is reproduced here:
There are no known original Bible manuscripts in existence. The Bible as we know it has been pieced together from hundreds of hand-copied manuscripts and fragments dating often from centuries after the books were actually written. Obviously, these many ancient sources don’t match up in every way, so figuring out the original authors’ intentions is a big job.
When faced with two ancient manuscripts of the same biblical passage that differ in some way or another, one rule of thumb that modern Bible scholars turn to in order to determine which version is likely to be the most accurate is that the more difficult reading is preferable to the easier one (a translation of the sermon title, proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua, according to Bart Ehrman in Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why [New York: HarperCollins, 2005], p. 111). Here’s why: scribes, the people who made those handwritten copies of biblical texts, would sometimes change those texts in an attempt to improve them. If they saw something that they took to be a mistake, they would try to correct it. If they saw two accounts of a story told differently, they would try to harmonize them. If they came across an idea that ran contrary to their theological opinions, they would change it to make it more palatable (Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, p. 111).
The U.N.C. religion professor and Bible scholar Bart Ehrman gives the example of Mark 1.41: when a leper comes to Jesus begging to be healed, according to most English Bible versions, Jesus is “moved with pity” and he heals the man. Professor Ehrman notes, however, that the very oldest surviving manuscripts of Mark say that Jesus was not “moved with pity” but instead “became angry.” Professor Ehrman believes that later scribes reproducing Mark’s gospel changed Jesus’s anger to pity because pity made more sense to them, and that we have been left all these years later with Bibles that don’t say what Mark originally wrote (Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, p. 133f). The more difficult reading is preferable to the easier one—remember that rule of thumb as we turn to John the Baptist.
* * *
Would you have been among the crowds streaming down to the Jordan to be baptized by John? Try for a moment to transport yourself back two thousand years and across the world to ancient Israel. Imagine that you are a faithful “mainline” Jew living in one of the towns or cities, maybe even Jerusalem, in the region surrounding the Jordan valley. You hear about this prophet, this preacher, this “John the baptizer” who’s attracting crowds along the river bank. Would you go?
The answer would probably at least partly depend on whether you considered this man John to be a true or false prophet. How would you decide? Well, consider for a moment John’s words to the crowds:
“Brood of snakes! What do you think you’re doing slithering down here to the river? Do you think a little water on your snakeskins is going to deflect God’s judgment? It’s your life that must change, not your skin. And don’t think you can pull rank by claiming Abraham as ‘father.’ Being a child of Abraham is neither here nor there—children of Abraham are a dime a dozen. God can make children from stones if he wants. What counts is your life. Is it green and blossoming? Because if it’s deadwood, it goes on the fire.” (Paraphrase of Luke 3.7–9 by Eugene Peterson in The Message.)
How’s that for a little Christmas cheer? But remember: the more difficult reading is preferable to the easier one. John tells no one what they want to hear, but what they need to hear.
* * *
Two millennia and light years apart in culture, it’s hard to say what our equivalent to a John the Baptist would be. If there were someone preaching and prophesying and baptizing in the French Broad, chances are none of us in this room would go—we’d probably hear about him on the local T.V. news, shake our heads or laugh out loud, and go about our lives.
Is there a modern-day American equivalent to John the Baptist, even if only in terms of comparable popular impact? Some might see a Rick Warren or a Joel Osteen in that role; others might think long and hard but come up empty. To find someone with a truly society-wide impact who is also a religious figure, you’d probably have to go back to Martin Luther King, Jr., or perhaps Billy Graham.
Then again, given that Palestine in John’s day was a bit of a backwater as far as its place in the Roman Empire was concerned, maybe we need instead to think smaller than a society-wide scale. Maybe our John the Baptists are Barbara Nagy (a Presbyterian medical missionary to Malawi) or our Trinity team that’s preparing to go to Guatemala. Maybe I’m John the Baptist. Maybe each of you is a John the Baptist as you go about your day and interact with the world around you. Maybe the church, even this one, is called to be John the Baptist to the world out there—whether or not that world comes streaming down to our river bank.
But if so, do we prefer the more difficult words, or the easy ones? Do we tell the story that the world wants to hear, or the story that the world needs to hear? Do we take the easy way, or the hard way?
Fred Craddock tells of a recurring childhood experience:
I lived near a railroad track as a boy, and I remember a number of mornings getting awake, getting up, going into the kitchen to get some breakfast, and there’d be a strange, ugly looking, poorly dressed man at the table eating—just eating away, eating away. And when he left, I would say, “Mom, who was that?”
She’d say, “Well, his name was Henry, and he said he was hungry.”
“Well, where’d he come from?”
“He came down the railroad tracks.”
People called them hobos. They walked the tracks begging, maybe stealing, getting what they could to stay alive. They’d stop by our house, and there, sitting in the kitchen eating what we had to eat, just eating it like they’d never have another meal. And I’d say, “Mama, weren’t you scared?”
She said, “He’s hungry.”
“Well, I was scared of him!”
“Well, he was hungry.” (Craddock Stories [St. Louis: Chalice, 2001], p. 109)
Young Fred, perhaps like the crowds streaming down to the Jordan, was looking for comfort and joy; his mother, like John the Baptist, reminded him that they couldn’t really be comfortable as long as Henry was hungry.
* * *
Christmas is a beautiful time of year, and the story of Christmas is a beautiful story. But Advent is not only about the beauty—Advent tells a story that has some hard words. Christmas is about a bright star rising in the east, and that’s a story that we never need to stop hearing. But Advent, while pointing to that star much as John pointed to Jesus, reminds us that life struggles on, even in the midst of the season’s comfort and joy; Advent reminds us that the star in the east is surrounded by the darkness of a night sky.
Thanks be to God that God is with us, both in the light and in the darkness.
—Dwight Christenbury
