Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures (Luke 24:45)

Twenty years ago we had our Summer holiday on Crete. We visited Knossos and did the usual things tourists do on Crete including buying things. I bought a bouzouki and this - the Phaistos Disc. The real one is in the museum at Heraklion. There’s an inscription that runs in a spiral on both sides in an unknown language. There must be millions of copies of this thing, possibly all over the world, and nobody knows what it means. The world, the circumstances in which it was written and the reason someone had for writing it are long ago forgotten. It’s a dead language - a language no one speaks any more.

That’s what keeps a language alive - people speaking it and allowing it to grow and to change to meet the needs of new times and new situations. New words to speak of the world we find ourselves in: imagine we could summon the writer of this disc from his time to ours, how many words would we need to teach him for him to begin to understand our world?

The earliest documents in the Bible maybe have their roots around the same time as this disc was made and yet we can open this and read it any time we like and understand it. Or do we? In our reading this morning it said that Jesus ‘opened their minds to understand the scriptures’. What does that mean? 

First off, they weren’t expecting him to come back from death - that much is obvious from their reactions to him: their doubts and their fears. Yet these were all devout Jews - so devout that they had given up all they had to follow the man they believed to be the Jewish Messiah. They knew the scriptures: they would have heard the words of the Law of Moses that Jesus speaks of read every Sabbath; each would have taken his turn in the synagogue to read from the Prophets as Jesus had done in Nazareth. Perhaps they sang psalms. They knew these words.

If people of Jesus’s time were expecting the Messiah, the writings we have from the time suggest they were expecting someone who’d drive the Romans out and re-establish the Kingdom of Israel, possibly taking the throne or taking on the role of High Priest. Getting executed by the Romans with the aid of the Sanhedrin wasn’t high on the list of anybody’s expectations.

Yet here we have Jesus telling his disciples that all that happened fitted with the scriptures - they just hadn’t understood them that way. He helped them to find their experiences in these ancient words and so they found new meaning in them and the earliest Christians found that their minds too were receptive to this new understanding of the old texts. Luke doesn’t do this kind of thing very much because Luke was a Gentile, but Matthew’s Gospel is full of it. Over and over he refers back to the Old Testament - especially to the Prophets - finding an understanding of Jesus in words that were previously understood in a different way.

I struggle with the idea that what lies between the covers of the Bible is ‘the word of God’ in the sense that he dictated it in some way. I don’t believe that the God who gave humanity intelligence, creativity and free will uses human beings as voice recognition software. I don’t think it makes any sense to imagine God saying things through, say, Isaiah, that no one would understand for another five hundred years - clearly they were originally intended to mean something else and there are plenty of commentaries you can read that will fill you in on that.

Do I think, then, that these are just words that can be interpreted any old way we like? No. Far from it. This is what too many fundamentalists and too many atheists don’t get. The words of the Bible aren’t a science text book, or a rule book, or a celestial telephone directory, or a manual. It’s a complex set of writings from human beings trying to understand how God is at work in their lives and in the world; trying to understand why things unfold the way they do - from the Exile of the Jews in Babylon to the Resurrection of Christ - and what they’re supposed to do about it. For me the Bible is an invitation. It’s an invitation from the God who entered his own Creation in the life of a human being to show us that he meets us where we are; who met the disciples where they were in their doubts and fears and simply said “Got any fish?”

The Bible, for me, is an invitation. It’s God’s invitation to spend time with him, thinking about these words, praying over them and, above all, letting them speak to us in our time and place. It’s Christs’s invitation, as a man who lived in a particular time and place, to allow him to open our minds to understand the scriptures and make sense of them in our time and place; to let them speak to our doubts and our fears. It’s an invitation to allow the Holy spirit to guide us in our understanding of these words to let us bear witness to what they are saying to the world we live in.

That’s why Scripture is not like the Phaistos disc. These are living words that speak to us today. They speak of God’s love for all humanity - not just a sect or a nation or a race. That love is reflected in the one commandment to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. In today’s world that neighbour could be an asylum seeker washed up on our shores as surely as, in the story Jesus told of the Jew who fell among thieves and was cared for by a Samaritan. When we’re discussing something with someone maybe half a world away on Twitter, or whatever, Christ’s reminder that anyone who calls his brother “fool” may be subject to God’s judgement. When that woman outside Tesco offers us a copy of The Big Issue and we have a few coins in our pockets then maybe the widow putting what little she had in the collection for the poor should give us pause.

“Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures”. That’s what Christ does. These are not dead words written in a dead language that were meant for the time they were written and only make sense in that context. This is a living language that is meant to be re-interpreted over and over again to allow God to speak to us in our times. If that weren’t so I’d be out of a job. More than that, though, it’s a call for us to bear witness.

To bear witness, when the world wants us to care more for the wealthy and the powerful than for the poor and forgotten, that God came into this world and walked among the poor. To bear witness, when the world would have us shut our doors to those fleeing war and hunger, that God led a band of refugees from Egypt to the Promised Land and that Christ’s early years were lived as a refugee. To bear witness, when the world is seduced by bread and circuses into believing that truth and integrity in our leaders don’t matter, that God brought down Ahab because he corruptly acquired Naboth’s vineyard.

Maybe not in those terms, but in the way we live our lives; in the values we embrace and stand by and defend; in the way we care for those in need and those who are hurting. In the way we allow the living word of God to live in our lives.