In the late 1960s, a Brazilian educator by the name of Paulo Freire began to criticize the model of education that he called the “banking model: the institution is the owner of knowledge and passes that onto the students.  He noted how the experience of those considered to be at the bottom of any society was not represented in their educational systems. A good example is how until recently here in Canada, Indigenous perspectives were excluded from the BC curriculum.  Freire taught something called “the pedagogy of the oppressed” – a method of teaching in which the students are assumed to have knowledge and expertise to bring to the table, and where insight is gained by the sharing of ideas and thoughts together.

At the same time, Base Ecumenical Communities were on the rise around the world, but particularly in Latin America. Small groups of Christians, many of them Indigenous, or poor, or both, came together to read and discuss the Bible “from the ground up” – from the perspectives of their own lives and experiences. Freire’s model of learning and the emerging liberation theology of that region became key parts of the community’s lives.  They came together for both as encouragement for their day to day lives and for their struggle for dignity in a very hierarchical system.

Other groups also brought their own experiences into dialogue with Scripture. One of the first feminist theologians, Mary Daly, showed how male language and perspectives have dominated the interpretation of Scripture. One of her most famous quotations is “if God is Man, then Man is God” – a short form way of describing how religion has revered the masculine and put down the feminine.  Black Womanist theologians added the critique coming from racial theory to the critique of patriarchal religion.  Asian theologies from Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, ecotheology, political theologies, process theology, Indigenous theology, Queer theology,  disability theology – they all brought their critique and their own unique perspectives to the reading of the Bible.

Meanwhile, many traditional theologians and Biblical scholars criticized those theories for being too biased, too coloured by one point of view or another, or as socialist, or communist, or too radical, or just plain wrong.  The point, of course, that Freire would have made, is that we each come to the text, as I said a few weeks ago, with our own set of lenses – it’s just that some folks don’t admit it!  For him and for liberation theologians, the primary lens through which Scripture should be read, is the lens of economic class.  Christianity, after all, was first made up of the poor; the Gospel was spoken largely to the poor; its early leaders for the most part were poor; and economics was one of the main topics of Jesus’ preaching. Jesus talked about money more than any other single topic, according to the New Testament.  Yet it is the topic we, who are mostly considered pretty well off by global standards, really don’t want to hear about.

This is a time when we see billionaires and their advisors clutching the Bible while destroying jobs, rounding up asylum seekers, cancelling social programs, and basically making life a whole lot harder for the poorest of people – and in our own nation, people are turning their backs on refugees and immigrants, and we have an epidemic of homelessness and poverty. Which we have still failed to address.  Devastating wars are being fought with religion too often backing the aggressors. We no longer claim to be a Christian nation – but many of our leaders claim to be people of faith – including Mark Carney, Pierre Pollievre, and Elizabeth May. One wonders what holy books some of them are reading?

So let me give you one example of how differently the Bible can be read, depending on who’s doing the reading.  The parable of the non-productive fig tree is a troubling one for many, in part because of the lens through which we’ve read it.  When we think about God, we often think of a powerful male figure – so we assume that the landlord who wants to condemn the tree in the parable must be God.  And as cradle capitalists, the other assumption is that if something isn’t productive, you get rid of it – because productivity is what we’re about, and everything is disposable.  The gardener is wasting resources, wanting to nurture this tree one more year.  But this powerful figure grants the boon of one more year – and so it becomes a parable of the god of judgement who tempers judgement with mercy – but only for a time.

Now hear this alternative reading from historian Diana Butler Bass in her Substack The Cottage. I’m going to quote her at length because I think she does such a good job of interpreting the parable as people in Jesus’ own time would likely have heard it, while addressing today’s political and economic realities.  It reads

Luke begins this selection with two news stories that everybody was talking about — the murder of Galileans at the Temple and the collapse of a tower on eighteen people. In the first instance, Pilate had Galilean pilgrims killed in the Temple courtyard, and their blood mixed (either figuratively or actually) with ritual sacrificial blood there, a shocking defilement of both these particular Jews and the Temple itself.

The second episode, the tower collapse, may have been related to Pilate’s great project at the time — the construction of a new aqueduct. Pilate had pillaged Jerusalem’s treasury to build it and had (mostly likely) used slave labor to make it happen. The people in Jerusalem rioted against him. And some historians have suggested that the tower collapse may have been an act of sabotage either by Pilate (to keep the workers in line) or angry Jews in an attempt to stop the entire thing (in which case, it would have involved political suicide).

As humans are prone to do, people wanted to place blame. The Galileans, the eighteen — they’d come up against Rome and lost. Did the dead deserve their fate? Rebellion resulted in death. Roman justice after all. Maybe Pilate got his point across. Maybe the citizens of Jerusalem were terrified into submission.

That is, after all, what empire does — theft, enslavement, murder, defilement. These two events reveal the very nature of imperial violence.

Maybe that’s why Jesus wants his hearers to repent. Jesus doesn’t think that their personal sin caused this — no one is more or less of an offender than any of those who died. No one, in this sense, deserved to die. People just die, especially people held in thrall by violent kingdoms of this world. Because that’s what every Rome in human history always does — kills in order to survive. And Jesus surely doesn’t desire revenge.

Instead, we need to “repent” of collaborating with Roman violence, repent of giving in to kingdoms built on injustice, repent of blaming victims for their suffering, and repent of believing that the murderous power of empire is the only power. But how? How do we do that without becoming like Rome? Can we resist empire without giving violence for violence?

Answering these implied questions, Jesus tells a story. He contrasts the murderous reign of Pilate to the garden with an unfruitful fig tree. The owner of the vineyard orders the gardener to cut down the barren tree. Perhaps the gardener secretly welcomed the idea of destroying the landowner’s tree. But instead of taking an ax to the tree, the gardener begs, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”

Did you know that trees have legal rights in Judaism? That’s right — it is called orlah and it forbids eating the fruit of newly planted trees during their first three years of life. Orlah is drawn from Leviticus 19:23-25:

When you come into the land and plant all kinds of trees for food, then you shall regard their fruit as forbidden; for three years it shall be forbidden to you; it must not be eaten. In the fourth year all their fruit shall be set apart for rejoicing in the Lord. But in the fifth year you may eat of their fruit, that their yield may be increased for you: I am the Lord your God.

Christians tend to read the impatient landowner as God — and Jesus assuaging God’s wrath against Israel with a plea for divine patience.

But that’s ridiculous. No Jew hearing Jesus’ parable could have thought that the landowner was God. Because God won’t break God’s own law about trees and fruit.

The landowner isn’t an angry God. The landowner is Caesar. The landowner is Herod. The landowner is Pilate. The landowner is all these murderers — those who destroy people and trees — the breakers of the Law, profiteers at the expense of God’s creation, effectivity the rapists of the land of milk and honey.

Jesus contrasts their rage with another vision — the land isn’t “wasted.” The land is holy. The land needs tending, patience, and care. Trees take time to grow and fruit. The goodness of the Law knows this. The Law not only governs human relations but the very life of creation, the contours of God’s kingdom.

This is reading the Bible “from the ground up”. It’s hearing the voice of those hurt, violated, put down, impoverished by the systems that dominate us all.    Despite the fact that Diana is a white, middle class, well-educated woman, she’s able to bring her scholarship to help amplify the radical voice of Jesus in solidarity with the poor.  I think Paulo Freire and liberation theologians would approve.

Way back when I started this series, I said I was preaching on how to read the Bible because I felt that a lot of Christians, especially liberal Christians, had somehow gotten the idea that the Bible wasn’t really for us.  It either belonged to fundamentalists, or it belonged to scholars.  But what I hope you know is that this is your Bible, too.  You know where it came from; you know there are multiple ways to read and interpret it; you know that you can read for knowledge and for inspiration; you know that there are lots of places you can go to help you interpret God’s will for today.

Don’t be afraid to bring your own voice to join with the scholars, the feminists, the radicals, the critics, the Base Ecumenical Communities, the poets, the liberationists – all the people who wrestle with the Bible to wrest a new revelation for Today.  This is your Bible too, my friends – a gift from our ancestors in faith and from our God.

Let me read you again what A Song of Faith (2006) – a UCCan statement of faith –  says about Scripture:

Scripture is our song for the journey, the living word

passed on from generation to generation

to guide and inspire,

that we might wrestle a holy revelation for our time and place

from the human experiences

and cultural assumptions of another era.

God calls us to be doers of the word and not hearers only.

The Spirit breathes revelatory power into scripture,

bestowing upon it a unique and normative place

in the life of the community.

The Spirit judges us critically when we abuse scripture

by interpreting it narrow-mindedly,

using it as a tool of oppression, exclusion, or hatred.

The wholeness of scripture testifies

to the oneness and faithfulness of God.

The multiplicity of scripture testifies to its depth:

two testaments, four gospels,

contrasting points of view held in tension—

all a faithful witness to the One and Triune God,

the Holy Mystery that is Wholly Love.

Amen.