I think frequently about a conversation I had with a Christian leader who was explaining why her community doesn’t spend much time with the Bible anymore. “We all read it a lot growing up,” she said, “so we already know what’s there.”
I’ve had may versions of this conversation. Beyond any specific question about tough or violent biblical texts, even Jesus-centered Christians often articulate a feeling of “been there, heard that.” Being told to keep on reading the Bible feels like being told to keep returning to your third-grade math textbook: I’ve absorbed the relevant info here. Jesus is Lord. Love everybody. Stop being a jerk. Twelve times two is twenty-four. I get it. Message received. What more do you want from me?
As twenty-first century people, we are constantly inundated by information. We have learned to listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed. We teach students strategies for skimming. We pay subscriptions for experts or AI to identify key takeaways of books we don’t have time to read. We make a science of efficiently extracting information.
When we open a Bible, we tend to default to a similar approach. We immediately start sifting for the core theological insight, the key principle, the central “point,” the essential moral takeaway. Once these golden kernels are extracted, we feel free to toss the story aside like the husk off an ear of corn. Who needs it? Seriously, I’ll pay double for the store to strip it down before I get there.
For an example of how this approach to Bible reading plays out in practice, let’s consider Mark 3:1-6, a story where Jesus ignites public controversy by healing on the sabbath. So what is this story really about? What’s the grand takeaway?
The first thing we notice on a skim-read is that this is one of dozens of similar incidents where Jesus heals somebody. Theological insight: Jesus cares about people and has the power to make them well. We might also note that Jesus’ claim of authority to decide how religious laws apply implies something about his sense of his own identity. Theological insight: Jesus speaks for God. Important information, but hardly news to many of us.
If we dig deeper, we might discover a lesson about how the sabbath should be kept. Moral takeaway: sabbath isn’t defined just by what we avoid but by what we make room to embrace. If we get really clever, we might even conclude that sabbath laws are a stand-in for religion and its rules more generally. Core principle: the rules exist to serve human flourishing, not the other way around.
We could sit with this text and probe it for theological insights and ethical principles. There would probably be much more there than we first imagined. But eventually we reach a point where we’ve squeezed out every drop of juice. We’ve heard what the text says. We understand what it means. So why look back?
Here’s the thing we often miss: what a text means is quite different from what a text does—what it invites or what it exposes. The meaning of a text is stable over time. Gather the right information and you can likely uncover it. The preacher, the podcast, even a chatbot can probably tell you what it means (with all the caveats for why and how we sometimes disagree). What the text does, however, is profoundly unpredictable. This ‘doing’ is an emergent quality, continually reborn at the intersection of meaning and moment.
Hebrews 4:12 says, “God’s word is living, active, and sharper than any two-edged sword. It penetrates to the point that it separates the soul from the spirit and the joints from the marrow. It’s able to judge the heart’s thoughts and intentions.” Note how different this picture of the Bible’s function is from what many of us were taught—it is alive; it penetrates, separates, judges. As you change over time, as the context changes, so does what the word might penetrate, create, break open, or expose. In this description, the text is not an object for dissection; it is the one holding the scalpel!
A while back, I was asked to lead a group in conversation about an aspect of their communal life that was going badly wrong. I choked. I felt the tension and resistance in the room, read the angry faces, and I stumbled and stammered and hedged and froze. A couple months later, I was asked to address the same problem with a different group. The week before that second gathering, I happened to read Mark 3:1-6.
I’ve taught on this story dozens of times, mined it for every glimmer of meaning, but this time something happened that had never happened before: I experienced genuine awe at Jesus, kind and courageous, standing rooted in his Father, with shoulders back, staring down spiritual resistance. I felt my own spine straighten, my chin being lifted like a hand was tipping it up. I went into that second room with Mark 3:1-6 on an index card tucked into my pocket. And the conversation was radically different. Because I was different—changed by encounter, not extraction.
This is one of the biggest reasons I will never stop returning to the Bible, will never stop encouraging other people there. Not primarily because we don’t know what the Bible says. But because we never know what it may do.
