The “Buried and Risen” Bible
Apr 26th, 2008 by John
The Bible died, was buried and rose again on the third day.
While I was in the Detroit, MI area for the Annual Great Lakes Conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church for the past few days, Julie and some friends attended the Good Friday service of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Grand Rapids, MI.
Why is this significant? At the end of my novella Out of Print: A Novel, I have one of the characters tell about an Orthodox custom. At the Good Friday service, an icon of Jesus is taken from the cross, wrapped in cloths and buried. Actually, the Epitaphion (or tapestry) is carried around the church, then is “buried” in the bier/tomb. And, along with “Jesus,” the Bible is also placed in the tomb. Congregants walk up to the bier and kiss the dead Bible. Julie saw all of this at the service. (She actually took a picture of it, but I can’t get it uploaded into this post.)
Friends, without the Living Word–Jesus, the Written Word–the Bible, is just a dead book to us. It is the living Christ who energizes the sacred text to be a blazing fire, the penetrating sword, the nourishing food, and the light to guide our way. When Jesus died and was buried, the Bible (at that time) was dead and buried, too.
On Easter morning, not only does Jesus arise to a new dimension of life from the tomb, so does the Bible. The living Christ energizes the Bible as never before as the Word that brings new birth, new life and growth, unbelievable and timely insight, and staggering transformative power.
What a beautiful drama! Living Christ, living Word! God’s love endures forever!
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John… just finished your compelling “novella” – Out of Print. If Left Behind is a best selling series about the sudden disappearance of Christians around the globe, then Out of Print ought to hit the same sales figures… this time, about a written Bible that mysteriously vanishes. A curious premise, requiring a temporary suspension of logic… but hey, we’re post-modern for cryin’ out loud! What emerges are challenging vignettes that help us see things with brand new perspective. It’s more than the absence of the most cherished book ever written. It’s the power of the message when it is given life and breath in the human utterance. It is person to person sharing the powerful words that transform. It is recovering the value of the sacred text whose worth is diminished by the sheer pervasiveness and availability of the Book on the shelf, in multiple versions and buried in footnotes and explanatory commentary and cut up into bits by cross-references and verse numbers. Timeless phrases – “my grace is sufficient for you…” – when spoken with authentic eye-contact and passion; that’s where the power is. So denominationalism fades. Theological debate quells. Couples find common purpose and hope. Churches recover a sense of mission. Ethnic barriers disappear. God speaks in community. Yours is a story well told; with a powerful message that needs to be heard. This Good Friday story, you and Julie there in the Orthodox church, moved by the power of the symbols…. sums it up. THANKS, John.
Ken,
Thanks, brother, for the affirming review of *Out of Print.* I am glad you found the little book “compelling.”
If you can promote it to your friends out there and get a number of people who want one, they can get it from the website
http://www.outofprintnovel.com OR you can contact me and I can mail a quantity to you at a little better price.
John