Whether your preference is for Shakespeare at Stratford, Law and Order on Friday nights at home, the afternoon play on Radio 4 or Da Vinci at the cinema, most of us, in one form or another enjoy becoming involved emotionally and imaginatively in drama of one kind or another.
Becoming a Christian can be thought of as an invitation to become one of God’s actors in his great drama of redemption. Living as a Christian then becomes the exciting challenge of playing our part, along with all other Christians, in God’s great play.I find this metaphor an exciting and stimulating one, not because I am into amateur dramatics (I find learning lines off by heart a nightmare not a dream!), but because I think it allows us to develop a stimulating and lively relationship with the Bible. And let’s face it, not all Christians find this easy today.
I work for Bible Society and our mission is ‘To make the voice of the Bible heard everywhere.’ Of course, that involves huge investment in the global task of translating, printing, publishing and distributing the Bible in many hundreds of languages – and much more besides. But we also are committed to helping Christians in our own country too. We speak about increasing the confidence of the church in the Bible. That’s where this insight about drama can help us.
It was Tom Wright, now the Bishop of Durham and author of many books helping us understand the different parts of the Bible, who first caught my attention with this picture. He suggested that we can think about the Bible as a newly discovered play written, say, by Shakespeare. People would be wildly excited if this were to happen and quality actors from around the world would be queuing up to get a part in its first performance, I’m sure. But, he went on to say, there’s one problem with it. The ancient manuscript has one scene, from towards the end of the play, missing. There’s plenty of material to understand the plot and to gain a very clear sense of all the major characters. We’ve even got the final scene, when all the story lines flow together and get unravelled. Having all this means we can make excellent sense of it all. So what should we do about the missing piece? Tom suggests that we would get the cast and the directors together, once they had absorbed all the written text we had. Next we could work up the first four Acts, so that they became absorbed in the play. Then we could ask them to improvise the missing pages in such a way that it also led into the final scene. No doubt, there would be various ways the scene could flow; probably there would be some clashes among the actors and certainly they might have their own views about particular lines. The result might not be exactly what Shakespeare intended but it would mean we had something pretty authentic and at least the play could go on! It would be wrong never to let the general public view it because a piece was missing.
