One of the most difficult and meaningful experiences I ever had was teaching the Bible at the home for kids with emotional disorders. Every day, I would sit with different groups of kids and talk about Jesus’ teachings to young people, many of whom had almost no experience with Jesus or the Bible. The experiences they had had were negative. Most kids saw everything about Jesus to be boring, disconnected from their lives, and aimed at telling them how bad they were. I noticed a strange phenomena, when they would try to quote Bible verses or say what the Bible said, they would add a “thee”, “thou”, “thy” or other words or phrases in an effort to make it sound loftier. I think the reason they did this was because they assumed that the Bible was something foreign and detached from their world. They couldn’t imagine that anything Jesus said would relate to their lives. I remember teaching about Romans 7, where the apostle Paul talks about his struggle with sin and how he often did things he hated and thought were evil, even when he set out to do the right thing. One young lady, from the rehab program, interrupted me in shock and challenged me that there was no way that was in the Bible. I showed her the words on the page and she struggled with the idea that Paul was a real person who sometimes dealt with things she dealt with. I don’t believe that the attitude is particularly unique to the kids I worked with. Lots of people are more sophisticated in the ways they express it, but it seems as though many people encounter the Bible in the same way, assuming it’s foreign and strange. This happens because they try to read it in translations that were done 400 years ago in Shakespearean English or in complicated versions meant for scholars, rather than books written for modern people to read.
This is a tragedy, really, because if you look at Jesus and how he taught, one of the most controversial things about his ministry was that he refused to allow his teaching to be taken away form ordinary people and be co-opted by the religious authorities of the time. There are several tense conversations between Jesus and religious leaders where they ask him to just let them endorse him and asking him to acknowledge their authority. He refused, often with angry words of condemnation. His lessons were taught using farming metaphors and the every day sayings of ordinary people. People gravitated to him because he spoke to them in their language and they didn’t need graduate degrees to understand him. As for the rest of the Bible, for many years the challenge in translating the words of the New Testament writers came about in the fact that they used very different words than those of the poets, philosophers, and historians of the ancient world. Some translators assumed that they had made up their own words because they didn’t mirror the writings of scholars of the era. What they eventually figured out was that the guys who wrote the Bible used words that were common, everyday words. The sorts of words that you find on a shopping list or a note to your spouse. The majority of the ancient literature that has been preserved was important and scholarly. The Bible wasn’t written like that. It was written for ordinary people to read and connect to. God did not intend for His word to be alien and difficult to grasp. He meant for ordinary people to read it and get to know Him through it. Sometimes, we need help with where to start or what to read, because there is an awful lot of material in the Bible. Some ideas can be harder and require explanation from a more learned person. However, the Bible is God’s effort to reveal himself to and connect to the people he created. The trick is getting past our assumptions about it and getting started.
