Delivered on Sunday 09 December 2007 in St George's Chapel

Luke 1:5-20

Today, according to the Book of Common Prayer tradition is a kind of Bible Sunday. The Collect with its demand that we 'read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest' the blessed Scriptures is a good enough signpost to the intention. [1] It's all very well, though, to demand that we read the Scriptures: but how do we read them? A well known critic of the Christian faith - spotting the obvious difficulty - recently commented that 'irritated theologians will protest that we don't take the book of Genesis literally any more. [Instead] we pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as allegories'. [2]

This particular critic has, I believe, made two ignorant errors and one unwittingly good point. Let me start with the two errors. The first is this: he assumes that anything that is to be read as allegory is to be written off. I think by allegory - he is using the broadest possible definition - if you are not reading literally, then you are reading allegorically. And if you are reading allegorically you are involved in some kind of second rate process. Is he right? Let me read you a short extract written by the satirist Jonathan Swift. As he wrote in the summer of 1729 he believed that the Catholic population of Ireland was seriously oppressed and as a consequence very poor. He pondered a solution. The result is his 'Modest Proposal':

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout. [3]

If anyone thinks that Swift is seriously suggesting cannibalism then they have sorely missed the point. This is satire. It is not to be read literally; it is to be read for what it is - satire, it has to be read 'allegorically'. My point here is simple: just because something is to be read allegorically does not mean it has to be written off. If that were the case, what we would do with our poets and song-writers, our contemporary painters and sculptors?

His second error is in his use of the words any more. He claims that we don't take the book of Genesis literally any more. Actually from the very start readers of the Bible were adamant that the text had to be read in a number of different ways; the early church is full of an almost irrepressible diversity of readings. Our critic has shown that he has no knowledge of ancient church literature or practice. He expects that ancient will mean primitive; he expects that modern will mean sophisticated - how wrong he is.

So these are the two errors: a supposition that to read something allegorically is madness, and a supposition that we are far more sophisticated readers than our forbears. Now these two errors are made exactly because our critic has one good point. As I said before he makes the point unwittingly but it is nonetheless a good point. And it is this: he supposes that there is only one way to read a text - literally. As I have already shown with the Swift passage this is clearly not true. But what our critic probably doesn't know is that the majority of biblical scholarship is based on a kind of literal reading. For many years now there has been a preoccupation with the origin of the text. Who wrote this text? Can you spot where it might have been edited? What was its original meaning? It is the kind of literal reading that sets up two worlds: the world in which the text was written and the world in which we read the text. And it's the kind of literal reading that drives a great wedge between these two worlds. It drives these worlds apart.

The breaking apart of these two worlds causes us to believe that our world, with all its technology and knowledge, should judge the world of the Bible. But in reality the world imagined by the Scriptures is a world more richly furnished than our own - it contains angels and spirits, most importantly it contains God. And because it contains God it is the largest of all possible worlds. And the largest of all possible worlds needs to be read with a creative imagination. We have much to learn from our forbears, those readers living and reading in the pre-modern age.

Let us take today's second reading as an example. Rather than worrying about whether or not this passage is - as some scholars put it - an addition to the tradition, let us try to read it as it is. In other words let's get into the narrative. The first thing that strikes us as we read the opening passages of Luke's gospel is that there are two stories - one after the other - both following the same kind of pattern. The first is the promise of John's birth and the second the promise of the birth of Jesus. The first promise is made to Zechariah, the second to Mary. Both stories involve angels. Both stories promise extraordinary births; in the first to parents of great age, in the second to a virgin. The babies are both going to be prophets - although there is no question as to who stands in whose shadow. And I could on; the two stories are full of parallels. And yet if you are submerged in the world of the Bible you will understand that both stories are full of Old Testament images. From the first verse we are plunged into the world of Judges, Samuel, and Ruth, into the prophetic utterances of Zephaniah and Zechariah. Both stories are awash with scriptural reference. What is particularly striking though is the different reaction seen in each story. The baptist's father hears all this biblical reference - he hears the bells ringing - but he thinks he knows better. He asks 'How can a child be born to old folk like us; it's not possible'. He shrugs disbelievingly at the angel, 'Whatever'. That inability to recognise the truth means poor Zechariah sits speechless - he has nothing to say. Mary, by contrast, also hears the scriptural overtones - hears the bells ringing - and frightened though she is has the presence of mind to interpret her experience of God through the Scriptures she has 'read, marked, learnt, and inwardly digested'. She remembers Hannah's song - told way back in the first book of Samuel - and she imaginatively recasts it. She gives it a version all of her own, what we now call the Magnificat. Zechariah and Mary, they both read the scriptures but one is tickled by their foolishness, the other troubled by their serious truth. One is struck speechless; one strikes up in praise.

Mary's way of reading scripture is a turning toward scriptural imagination. It is the attempt to live in this world as one created by an unseen power; as one drenched with grace; as one offering us the possibility of transformation. It is an attempt to play in the imaginative fields of God the imaginative creator. It is an attempt to understand our own story and every story we hear within the Scriptural world as truth. Just imagine that.

[1] The Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent

[2] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press), 2006, p. 238

[3] Jonathan Swift, 'A Modest Prosopal' in A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: O.U.P., 1984, p. 493-4