BibleWorm

This week we read John 11:1-44, the story of Lazarus being resurrected from the dead. We see the fully human Jesus unfold and bloom in this story – a Jesus who must hold back from healing someone for whom he holds a particular love, a Jesus who weeps for a man’s death before he calls him back to life. We hear this Jesus say “I am the resurrection” – the light, the word, and now even the resurrection. In just one chapter, he embodies the biggest and most abstract realities, and also walks into the depths and particularities of human suffering.

On this special Ash Wednesday episode we’re discussing the image of Jesus as both the shepherd and the gate in John 10:1-18. We talk about what it means to be gathered into the sheep pen and why, according to this text, you can’t simply stay there. Somebody is going to lead you back out into a dangerous world—what matters is who you follow. We think about Jesus as the gate, who keeps out the thieves and outlaws and lets only the good shepherd in. And we think about Jesus as the good shepherd, who knows our names and is willing to lay down his life to keep us safe. And, on this Ash Wednesday, we ask what it means for us to be people of faith willing to go forth into a dangerous world, leaving the safe confines of our spiritual enclaves to bring abundant life to the world.

This week we read John 9:1-41, the story of a man whose blindness is healed by Jesus. We watch the incremental changes in the way the man seems to understand what has happened. We wonder about the different beliefs that may lie behind the statement that God’s work could be revealed through this person in particular, precisely because he is blind. And we think a lot about the things that garner our attention, that make us think we know, that actually blind us to whole layers of reality.

This week we’re reading the story of Jesus’s offer of living water as told in John 7:37-52. We talk about the significance of the Holy Spirit as living water, and wonder about what it means when Jesus says that living water will flow out from the heart of believers? Is it possible that we can be sources of living water? We notice that the religious leaders reject the idea of Jesus as the messiah simply because he comes from Galilee, and we wonder whether we, too, sometimes miss the amazing things that God is doing in our midst because we get too wrapped up in the fixed meaning of Scripture. And we wrestle with the tension between the religious scholars and the common people, in that day and in our own. How might it be possible to embrace the wisdom of the people while also guarding against dangerous theologies. All that and more in today’s BibleWorm!

This week BibleWorm reads John 6:35-69--which is 10 verses beyond the narrative lectionary, because we just couldn’t help ourselves. Why does Jesus lean so hard into the shocking language that his followers ought to eat his flesh and drink his blood? What is it about food – as a universal human need, and also as an appetite that can go way beyond need - that opens up what Jesus is asking of his followers? Does the metaphor suggest an elevation of spiritual needs in place of physical ones, or does it wrap them ever more closely together? This teaching is difficult, say the disciples - indeed it is.

This week BibleWorm reads two miracle stories told in John 4:46-5:18. In the first story, Jesus saves the child of a royal official, who believes Jesus’s word even before he sees evidence of the healing. In the second story, Jesus heals a man who has been sitting by the healing waters of Beth Zatha for 38 years with no one to help him into the pool. We wonder how a community could allow someone to suffer for so long and marvel at the healing Jesus offers him. We ponder the motivations of Jesus, who seems reluctant to heal in one case and heals without being asked in the other. And we struggle with how to read miracle stories in our own day, when all too often those who need miracles seem not to receive them. How do we read miracles stories in a miracle-free world?

On this special episode, we are joined by Laura Kahn, board chair of an organization called Jewish Interest Free Loans of Atlanta, to read from the Jewish lectionary parshah Mishpatim (Exodus 22:21-28). We discuss the ways that JIFLA enacts and embodies the teachings of Exodus 22 when it comes to their lending practices.

This week, BibleWorm reads John 4:1-42, a story of Jesus’s encounter with a Samaritan woman. What starts off as an almost comical “Who’s on first” kind of scene, where the woman and Jesus seem to be speaking right past each other, ends with a gorgeous and profound and HUGE statement from this woman – that Jesus may be not just the messiah as the biblical tradition has understood that, but the savior of the world. Our reading moves freely between the metaphorical, metaphysical, and truly just plain sense. These are two humans who are working past social norms. And the element of the conversation that captures her imagination is not lofty metaphor. But it’s enough. And when it comes down to it, enough is …. enough.

This week BibleWorm reads the story of Jesus’s nighttime visit from the Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3:1-21. We talk about what it means to be born again from above, giving up one’s life as a child of the Empire to be reborn into a life of reconciliation with both God and neighbor, We wrestle with the idea that those who love the darkness are already condemned, and we wonder what that means for our own denials of past and present injustices that prevent us from receiving the new life promised by God. And we marvel at that most famous claim that in Jesus God moves toward the world not in condemnation but in reconciling love—and we wonder if we might be able to do the same.

This week we read John 2:13-25, this gospel’s version of Jesus’s spectacular scene in the Temple at Passover. Unlike the synoptic gospels, John does not suggest any corruption or dishonesty at play in the Temple system - so what is bothering Jesus? We have an honest, interfaith conversation about what happens when one person stands up for what they think is right, in a way that ensures that many others cannot do what they think is right. We wonder how lonely it might have been for Jesus to walk through the world knowing already the pitfalls of human nature; knowing that he couldn’t really entrust himself to anyone. And we recognize again and again the abiding patience of the disciples, who couldn’t possibly understand the import of what Jesus said as he said it, but held onto the memory of it to unlock it later.