A woman, a man, and a flock of sheep

Tell me, you whom I love, where you graze your flock and where you rest your sheep at midday. Why should I be like a veiled woman beside the flocks of your friends? Song of Songs 1:7

One thing I felt I wasn’t too bad at as a minister was encouraging people to read the Bible. No problem there! “The Bible is the word of God, so aim to read it every day!” Simple.

But telling people to read the Bible is one thing, teaching them how to read it is very different; and in that respect I fear I fell short. And perhaps I’m not the only one.

You might say (especially if you want to be kind) “What’s your problem? All people have to do” (assuming they can read; I know not everyone can) “is open the Bible and read it. Again, simple”.

But wait a minute. Is it simple? Look at Song of Songs 1:7, which I have quoted at the top. Oh yes, anyone who is literate can read those words, parrot-fashion if necessary. But what’s the good of that if they simply baffle our understanding?

The speaker is a woman, and the person she is speaking to is the man she loves. It would appear that he is a shepherd. But what more do we know? She seems to be a bit aggrieved at the way he is treating her. But – who is she? And who is he? Why is she “veiled”? Or is she in fact veiled? What’s troubling her? And who are these “friends”?

“Oh, you have to look at the context”, someone will say. And quite right too. That’s a vital rule when it comes to reading the Bible. But it doesn’t really solve the problem here, for “the context” is in effect the whole book, all eight chapters. And even after you’ve read them right through, you may not be much the wiser.

For one thing, there’s no mention of God - nor, of course, of Jesus, this being in the Old Testament. To be honest, you might even find yourself wondering “What is this book doing in the Bible!” (I’ve picked out Song of Songs 1:7 pretty much at random, by the way; I could have chosen almost any verse to make the point – which is that reading the Bible is not a simple matter.)

I suspect most of us, if we read this little book at all, hurry through it out of a sense of duty, and then turn to a Psalm or a bit of a Gospel or a letter; what a relief! But is that really satisfactory? Aren’t we rather like the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:31: when asked if he understood what he was reading in Isaiah he replied, “How can I, unless someone explains it to me?” How indeed?

Picture, please, a pile of books… a crime novel, a cookery book, a car maintenance manual, an anthology of poetry, and a fairy tale. All these have one thing in common – yes, they’re books! But pretty well nothing else. And – and this is the point – they all need to be read in different ways. Try and read a telephone directory the same way you read a novel and you’ll soon lose interest (no shortage of characters, but not much of a story-line).

We can draw a comparison with the Bible. It consists of what we call “books”, sixty-six of them, though some are little more than a page or two. And if you were to read, say, the Psalms the same way you read Revelation, or Mark’s Gospel the same way you read Isaiah, there’s only one result: confusion. Before we set out to read a book we need to be clear what kind of book it is, and then read it accordingly.

Because we believe the Bible is the word of God, we believe it is true. But even that little word isn’t quite as simple as we sometimes think. Take the Narnia stories: are they true? Answer: yes - and no.

On the one hand, no of course they’re not; they are stories, fantasies, the product of somebody’s imagination. No such place as Narnia has ever existed, no such lion as Aslan neither. But on the other hand, yes they are; Aslan stands for Jesus, dying and rising again; the White Witch stands for the devil. In these children’s stories C S Lewis retells the Christian story – the true story – in imaginative form.

You don’t hear it so much these days, but when I was a young Christian over fifty years ago, you heard people say things like “I don’t bother about all this interpretation stuff – I just take the Bible in its plain, simple, straightforward sense”.

Which sounds great: but what about when the meaning of a verse or passage just isn’t plain, or simple, or straightforward? What’s the plain, simple and straightforward sense of Song of Songs 1:7 - whether we pluck it out of context or try to see it in the book as a whole?

How then should we read the Song of Songs? How, indeed, should we read the Bible as a whole? We’ll have to come back to it next time…!

Thank you, Father, for the rich variety of your word, the Bible. Thank you for the largely simple parts which I can read and benefit from immediately. But thank you too for the challenging and puzzling parts which often only yield up their treasures after perseverance and determined reflection. Please help me by your Spirit to give those parts the time and patience they need. Amen.