The B-I-B-L-E

My mother began working outside the home when I was nine years old. She had a job as a secretary in a local insurance office. Work schedules were arranged with a half day off on Wednesday and work on Saturday morning. All the businesses in town, including banks, followed this time table. This allowed working people to come to town Saturday to do their business tasks, pay bills (we paid bills in person then to real people), shop for groceries, see an afternoon movie and still get home in time for chores. Gayle, my sister, and I would go to town with mama on Saturday mornings.
Mama would park at the McKey Tillman Insurance Agency and we would walk the five blocks to our Carnegie Library. We spent most of our morning there with tolerant librarians who didn’t care if I stayed in the adult section. After I read every biography that appealed to me, I moved on to fiction. O Frabjous Day!!! Murder mysteries, poetry, murder mysteries, novels, murder mysteries, history, murder mysteries... No one censored or regulated my reading. Every week I would check out the limit and return them, read, the next Saturday. With no T.V. and no phone, reading was my main entertainment and an open door to a wider world. I became a word junkie... can you tell?
I perfected the art of reading in a moving car without getting car sick so I could read on the bus while traveling thirty minutes to school. At every plopping spot of mine in the old farmhouse, a book waited for me... plastic covered... full of wonderful, glorious words... new words... old words... words I didn’t understand but words I loved.
One of our favorite family games was the Word Power game in Reader’s Digest. Every month, we would take turns stumping each other with those words and definitions. Mama was a crossword puzzle wizard. We would do the crossword with a timer... each one got only one minute to fill in as many words as you could, using your special colored pen, and then it was someone else’s turn. The one who got the most words right, won.
The richness... the texture... the options... the poetry...the sayings... the sounds of our language ripple through my soul like the mountain creek that runs through the farm...Lord, have mercy... bless her heart... fought like cats and dogs... a tad shy... tilted toward Tildy... I’m fixin’ to go home... set a spell...if wishes were horses then beggars would ride... wonderful, lyrical, descriptive words that paint pictures in our minds and hearts.
I remember the first time I read a version of the Bible that wasn’t the King James version. It was the Good News version in modern English. Published for the first time in the mid-sixties, it transformed my image of the Bible... of the Holy Writ... of the words themself and the soul of those ancient words. When I sat in my first (and last) New Testament class at Southern Seminary and heard Dr. Frank Stagg read the Bible, I was stunned to see he was reading from the Greek and translating as he read. I briefly, very briefly, considered taking Greek. I love to read three or four versions of one verse because each has a new image... a different understanding... calls out something new in me. What a precious opportunity, what freedom to explore the nuances of each interpretation... different voices in a choir that blend into a beautiful whole.
My Bible fell open to Hebrews 2 this morning. I read it first in KJV, then three other translations. Here are the verses that caught my ear as I read it aloud (reading the Bible aloud is a lot of fun... try it... it changes your perception of the words).
" Forasmuch (what a lovely word) then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he (Jesus) also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil: and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage... For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted".
"Since therefore, the children share flesh and blood, Jesus likewise shared the same things, in order to destroy through death the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death... Because of having been tested by suffering, Jesus is able to help those who are suffering".
"Since, therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook (love that word, too) of the same nature that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage... For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted".
"Since the ‘dedicated band’ were frail mortals, he himself became one, too, so that by dying he might break the grip of the one who controls death- that is, the devil- and set free those people, who all their lives, have been dominated by a fear of death... Since he himself has been tempted and has suffered so deeply, he knows how to sympathize fully with those who are also being tempted".
Each version of these same words reaches me in equally powerful but different ways. The images invoked by the translators... the words, those beautiful words, have such richness and depth ... frail mortals and children... bondage, slavery, domination...but in them all, the fear of death... they all used the same words there... wonder why? So, bring on the words... all the words... Like my librarian in my long ago South Georgia library, let me wander among all the translations... all the books of the Holy... looking for the words that speak to me of freedom and love and hope and joy and peace and forgiveness and no more fear of death... Thanks be to God for Jesus who became a frail mortal, for Lenten disciplines that free me from the fear of death, and for the help, succour and sympathy that are available to me in my relationship with Jesus.