“I've told the story many times about how we discovered a "Bible full of holes," when it came to the question of the poor. Here's what we did. Our band of eager young first-year seminary students did a thorough study to find every verse in the Bible that dealt with the poor. We scoured the Old and New Testaments for every single reference to poor people, to wealth and poverty, to injustice and oppression, and to what the response to all those subjects was to be for the people of God.
We found several thousand verses in the Bible on the poor and God's response to injustice. We found it to be the second most prominent theme in the Hebrew Scriptures Old Testament—the first was idolatry, and the two often were related. One of every sixteen verses in the New Testament is about the poor or the subject of money (Mammon, as the gospels call it). In the first three (Synoptic) gospels it is one out of ten verses, and in the book of Luke, it is one in seven!
After we completed our study, we all sat in a circle to discuss how the subject had been treated in the various churches in which we had grown up. Astoundingly, but also tellingly, not one of us could remember even one sermon on the poor from the pulpit of our home churches. In the Bible, the poor were everywhere; yet the subject was not to be found in our churches.
Then we decided to try what became a famous experiment. One member of our group took an old Bible and a new pair of scissors and began the long process of literally cutting out every single biblical text about the poor. It took him a very long time….When the zealous seminarian was done with all his editorial cuts, that old Bible would hardly hold together, it was so sliced up. It was literally falling apart in our hands. What we had done was to create a Bible full of holes.
I began taking that damaged and fragile Bible out with me when I preached. I'd hold it up high above American congregations and say, "Brothers and sisters, this is our American Bible; it is full of holes."
We still have that old Bible full of holes. It serves as a constant reminder to me of how you can miss so much, even when it is right in front of your eyes. I learned in my little home church that people can really love the Bible, believe they are basing their lives upon it, and yet completely miss some of its most central themes. We don't see what would most challenge us and perhaps change our lives.
Yet, down deep in our souls, we do know the poor are there: in the heart of God, in the compassion of Christ, and in our own communities—if we would just open our eyes. Revealing the poor in the Scriptures and in our own world is always the prophetic task of faith. To discover the forgotten poor is more than the work of "social action," as some would call it. It is rather to put our Bibles back together again. Indeed, it is nothing less than to restore the integrity of the Word of God—in our lives, our congregations, our communities, and our world. What could be more important?”
(Courtesy: “God’s Politics: Why the Right gets it wrong and the Left doesn’t get it,” Jim Wallis)
As I read through the above paragraphs time and again, I couldn’t help myself from asking, “What will my Bible look like if I am to go through the same exercise of taking out my Bible, a pair of scissors, and begin cutting out all the Scriptures that I pay no attention to, all the biblical texts that I just ignore”. And I wonder what will be the condition of the Bibles of our Christian population in the ‘Christian State’ of Nagaland if all of us are to try this same exercise. How many of us will still have our Bible intact? How many of us will end up with a Bible that’s falling apart, a Bible full of holes?
K. Ela
