Telling the Right Story

Fr Richard Healey discusses discusses the critical approach to interpreting scripture, using a Swedish anecdote about storks and birth rates to caution against confusing correlation with causation. Richard stresses the importance of discernment and understanding the context and genre of biblical texts, specifically pointing to the Gospel of Mark. Listeners are encouraged to thoughtfully engage with scripture, avoiding simplistic interpretations, and to consider reading the Gospel of Mark within a week to appreciate its depth and movement.

(00:00:00) – Back in the 19th century in Sweden, someone remarked to a friend: you can tell how many children are going to be born in a particular household by the number of stork nests that you see on the roof. And they kind of looked over each of the streets. And this house had two stork nests and two babies, two children. The next house had three stork nests and three babies. The fourth house had five stork nests and five babies. And so eventually it came to the attention of a statistician, and they got some government funding, and they began to go around the whole of Sweden and to test this hypothesis. Could, in fact, you tell the number of children that were going to be born in a particular house by counting the number of stork nests. And sure enough, this pretty much proved to be the case right across Sweden. You could count the number of stork nests and then work out how many children were to be born, or how many children were going to be in that house.

(00:01:11) – And hence we get that old table that the thing that the Disney cartoons kind of presented to us, that storks were the ones that would bring these new babies to particular households. Someone else with perhaps a little more wisdom came along and said, well, actually, storks build their nests next to chimneys, and if there are three chimneys on a house, you know, you can work out the size of the house. And if a family has a bit more money [remember, Sweden is a pretty cold country through the winter] you would build as many chimneys as you possibly can to have as much heat as you possibly can within the house. And so if it’s a larger family, a larger house with more wealth, with more capacity to support their families, then it’s more likely that they’re also going to have more children. And so one of the lessons from this is realising that you can’t trust Disney to teach you biology. But the second thing is that you can’t go from correlation to causation, that just because you can see a connection between two pieces of information, between the number of chimneys, the number of stork nests and the number of children in a house doesn’t mean that there’s any causation whatsoever.

(00:02:35) – There’s no causation between these facts. And as we celebrate this Sunday of the Word of God, we need to bring those kinds of pieces of information to the front of our reflection and the focus of our wisdom. Because too often when we’ve read Scripture, we’ve taken those old tales or we’ve taken ideas that we once heard and simply just accepted them and simply applied them without a whole lot of discernment and a whole lot of wisdom. And we need to bring that, particularly within the Catholic Church. We have this tendency to say, no, we don’t just read the scriptures in a literal way. We also have to read it in a literary way. We have to look at what kind of genre is it? Is it poetry? Is it a narrative? Is it a historical account? There are all kinds of different narratives and different kinds of genres that are present. Even in the book of Psalms there are psalms of love lament, there are psalms of praise. There are Psalms that bring the whole sense of compassion and just songs like Psalms that are meant to be sung.

(00:03:53) – Most of them are probably meant to be sung. We don’t know the melodies. We that’s all been lost to us. But any given passage, we can’t just read the literal meaning. We have to know the literal meaning. We have to read the context. We have to be able to read the actual words that are there. But we need to think and to ponder. Well, when was it written? Who wrote it? What was the situation that they were facing when they were writing these words? The books of poetry, the books of prophecy are not meant for us. They were meant for the people that they were there when these texts were being written. The book of Revelation, again, isn’t written with us in mind. We can read it and it’s written for us, but it’s not written to us. It’s written for that particular context and those particular communities that are there at the time. And whenever we bring this to a pondering upon the gift and the richness of Scripture.

(00:05:00) – We need to do that work. We need to continue to be mindful of all of that. We bring our own experiences. We bring our own circumstances, our own context to our application, to our pondering of this. But we need to be attentive to what we’re doing and when we are doing it. So in the gospel tonight, you know, when Jesus goes to the house of Simon and his mother in law is sick in bed, and so Jesus goes and heals her. And the first thing that she does is to get up and to wait on them. You know, we can bring a feminist reading to that and say, ah, that’s typical, that Jesus only healed her in order that she would be able to provide a meal for them and be able to give them something to eat. Again, that’s not the right reading. It’s a reading. But it’s very unlikely to be the right reading. We need to ponder. But what is the context of the rest of the gospel of Mark? How does he invite us into this story? And Mark, like all of the Gospels, invite us into these experience of discipleship? So it’s much more likely that the point of that story is about this invitation that when we are healed, when we are set right, the natural response to that is to serve, to be part of a community that offers that hope and that joy and that wonder that we don’t keep all of these things to ourselves, that when we are changed and transformed naturally, we want to give back naturally.

(00:06:38) – We want to be part of this community that is called into life. And we want to share that gift. We want to share that grace with those who are around us. Likewise, at the end of the Sabbath. And we we don’t know that from our reading, from this particular passage that the church gives us tonight. But if we think, well, it flows directly on from last weeks when the context was the Sabbath, then it makes sense, as that’s why no one was there during the day. It was just Jesus and the disciples going back to the house. But once the evening came, that’s the conclusion to the Sabbath. And so people were then free to move and to travel. And so they all came crowding around the the door to the house, seeking to be healed, seeking to find that freedom, to find that life. And Jesus begins to bring this new possibility of new joy, new wonder, as he, one by one goes and heals each of the people that are there.

(00:07:42) – And as he finally finishes for the evening, all the people that needed to be healed that night are able to go home. He spends a little time there with the disciples, and then when it was still in the middle of the night before dawn, Mike loves to give us those double details. He always kind of gives us information and often repeats it just to make sure that we understand exactly what is happening. Long before dawn, while it was still dark, Jesus goes to a lonely place to be by himself where he can pray. We can commune with the father because it’s always the essential element of his life and his ministry. He has to keep going back. He has to find that fullness and that freedom that only comes when we take time to rest in God’s presence, when we let him love us into life. And in that clarity, he’s then able to know what his next step should be. So when it’s dawn and the disciples go hunting for him, and that’s the the image that is there in the in the Greek text, they kind of go seeking him, hunting for him, and they find him because they’re good marketers.

(00:08:54) – They said, look, there’s this crowd of people and they’re all wanting you. They’re wanting their attention to build on this momentum. But instead Jesus says, no, let this go elsewhere, because my purpose is to preach. My purpose is to announce the good news. He could easily have just stayed in that particular town and continued that work. But no, he felt this impulse to go, to continue to travel. And sometimes we need to to bring that to birth in our own situations. There are times when we can grow stagnant and just in where we are and what we’re we’re doing at the moment. And there are times when that the spirit will invite us to go elsewhere to share that good news with others, to to continue that work of preaching. There are times when that particular patch that we’ve been assigned has dried up, and we need to to share that gospel. We need to share that possibility with a new community, people that are able to experience that goodness. And that’s grace. On this Sunday, though I invite you though to to really take the opportunity over the next week to listen or to read the gospel of Mark.

(00:10:11) – It’s the shortest of the Gospels. It takes about an hour and a half to read it. So if you read it for about 15 minutes a day, you would finish it in the course of a week. So it’s not a difficult thing to do. There are also a bunch of different readings of the gospel. Uh, the Sir David Suchet is, is one that is beautifully kind of done. He has such a wonderful voice. And you can find it on YouTube where he would just read it from heart. He’s got that gift of being able to, you know, act as though he’s able to to learn the lines and to present it in such a compelling and beautiful way. There’s many other options that are there, but to read or to listen to the gospel of Mark this year, this week, to let those words just to be there, but reading it in a, in a shorter period. You know, when we read it just in the little episodes, the little paragraph by paragraph, we don’t get the sense of the whole movement of the gospel, the dynamism that is there.

(00:11:16) – And it’s something happens when you do sit down just in one go, read through it, or over the course of a week is the next best option to do that. So I really encourage you over the course of this week to take the chance to ponder those words, to let the love and the mercy of God be felt and experience by taking time to read one particular book, to read the gospel of Mark, for example, and to allow those words to bring us to life and freedom today.

Morning Mass

(00:00:00) – Back in the 19th century in Sweden, someone noticed that along their street that in the first house they saw that there were three children, and when they looked up at the roof, they realized that there were three storks nests. And they went to the next house, and there were two children, then two stork nests up on the roof, and they went further along the street. And this house had five stork nests. And how many children do you think it had? Five, yes. And some government official then heard of this person and their predictions that they could tell the number of children by the number of stork nests that were up on the roof. And so they got some funding and they began to do a survey right across Sweden. And indeed, they did discover that this was true. Wherever you went in Sweden, the number of stork nests could predict the number of children that would be born in that house. And hence we get the fable that it’s the stork that brings the babies to our households.

(00:01:20) – Well, at least that’s what I learned when I was watching Disney cartoons back as a child. So the first lesson that we learn from this is that never trust Disney, never trust the cartoons to teach you biology. But someone else who was a little bit wiser realized that actually, storks build their nests next to chimneys, and the number of chimneys that you have on your house is an indication of how much money you have. And so if you have a larger house, you’re more likely to be able to have a larger family. And so it was simply that correlation had nothing to do with the storks bringing the babies. So the second thing we learned is that correlation does not equal causation. And yet so often in our lives, in particularly in our religious lives, in our reading of Scripture, we grab hold of these old facts that we think are true, that we declare to be true. And we continue to postulate, we continue to speculate, we continue just to spout these old tales that have no basis in actual fact.

(00:02:41) – Sometimes when we read the scriptures, we read it with the completely wrong story in mind, and we need to relearn a new way of encountering these words. Allow these words to speak to us in a new way. That there is a right way, or at least there’s a better way and there’s a worse way. We want to avoid binaries. It’s one of the problems that the Western world has had ever since the time of the Greek philosophers, who kind of pushed us into this very dualistic, binary way of thinking, and we need to move beyond that. But part of that is in the gift of what contemporary scholarship is, is able to offer to us that we’re discovering that so often these wrong stories have dominated the ways that we’ve read the scriptures. These wrong stories have dominated the way that we’ve understood the teaching of Jesus, and we need to be immersed once again in the way of wisdom, the way of love. A story is better when it teaches us to love. A story is better when we discover through that story the mercy of God.

(00:04:01) – A story is better when we are able to experience a God who is greater than us, not less than us, not narrower than us. You know, so often we’ve been caught up in these little stories about God and about love, when the Lord is always inviting us to more, to the greater than this gift of new possibility, this gift of being able to go beyond the little world that we’ve lived in, and to discover this grand vista of God’s love and God’s goodness and God’s truth. The gospel today, you know, brings us into this same encounter. We don’t understand if we just read the gospel today. Why? There’s this movement to the house. Why the Simon’s mother in law is being healed. Until we’ve read the bigger context, until we remember that last week it was set on the Sabbath. So that’s why it’s not until evening and the Sabbath is over that the crowds of people come because they are able to now move beyond their the limitations that the Sabbath provided, that you weren’t able to travel more than a reasonable day’s walk.

(00:05:18) – And so you get this crowd of people gathering around, but you also hear the limitations of, well, why did Jesus heal Simon’s mother in law? You know, what was that all about? And you get that kind of anti patriarchal kind of story that that might indicate, well, you know, he heals her so that she can get up and serve. But in fact, a better way of reading that story is that when we are healed, that when we do encounter the mercy of the Lord, when we do experience that ability to be whole and complete once again, the naturally we want to serve naturally. We want to share that joy and wonder with others that we can’t contain that to ourselves any longer. And so there’s a truth in a different way of reading the scriptures. But we need to also be careful and cautious about. Is that the best way of reading that is that the most authentic? Is that the most loving? Is that the most helpful for us? And Scripture is always calling us to that rich encounter with the God who is so amazing and so astounding that there’s always these new depths of wonder to discover in God that we should never be satisfied with thinking.

(00:06:44) – I’ve heard that story before because the Scripture is the Word of God, and so it allows us to encounter the living love of God. And so whenever we read the Bible, whenever we open ourselves to that gift, we’re being invited to a new encounter with God that all of the Bible, all 73 books that we have in the Catholic canon, all of them are Jewish meditation, literature, even the New Testament books, even the 27 Gospels and letters and Acts and revelation that we have there in the New Testament collection. All of them were written by Jews, and all of them are written in this whole milieu of of this continual reflection. They invite us to this reading and rereading and re encountering with the love of God, and we in particular words strike us. Of note that you can pause when a particular word is highlighted. If it brings a resonance with another text. Think about that. Maybe go and and read that earlier text when we we when we first hear that word. The principle of first mention is always one of the the key ideas that to interpret the scriptures, you know, when you see something that reminds you of the story of creation, that’s usually purposely put the.

(00:08:11) – Because the authors of this scripture were all immersed in this practice of meditating and allowing these words to slowly bring forth this fruit. It’s one of the gospel. Today takes time to tell us that after Jesus had done these extraordinary healings, after he’d been casting out the works of Satan, after he’d been freeing people from demonic possession and from all kinds of different afflictions. That he was tired, and yet he doesn’t spend the night resting and recuperating. Early in the morning, long before dawn, he goes to find the best fulfillment that he can by praying with the father, by going there and spending time in that lonely place to be with God. And that we all need that we all need that time to be refreshed and renewed and recuperated within our life. And there’s only one way to experience that, and that’s by letting God’s love fill us and and overwhelm us. And that is response to that. Even though Simon and the rest of the disciples come gathering around Jesus and say, everyone is looking for you, and of course they’re looking because they want more of the same.

(00:09:25) – They want more healing. They want more of the action. But Jesus says, no, let us go elsewhere because I need to preach to other places, and other people in other communities need to encounter this word as well. Paul has the same impulse today in our second reading, he says, I cannot not but preach the gospel. I cannot do this. I mean, I cannot not do this. I have to proclaim the good news, because that is the only thing that brings life and goodness to me. How many of us can say the same? How many of us have that burning zeal within us that stirs us and says, look, I have to share the love of God with those around us. That is what happens or should happen when we pray and when we encounter the Lord, and when we let the Word of God speak to us that we’re not left the same. It’s slowly, bit by bit, we’re changed and renewed and transformed. And this Sunday of the Word of God, let’s indeed let God’s Word call us to life.

(00:10:32) – Sometimes it will challenge us to say, let’s go elsewhere. Let’s allow this love to be shared to a different community, a different people. Let’s allow God to call us, to invite us, and to let His Word burn within us so that we can be changed and transform to be the people that we’ve been called to be.