the work of faithful interpretation. We apprehend the saving Word of God
only as we play the scriptures in ways that allow their splendor to show
itself. The beauty of God’s music comes to life just in our beautifying
performance of it.
This model also draws our attention to the ethics of interpretation. As
David Dawson explains, for Origen “the ethical task is to read in a way
that allows or enables that occurrence [witnessed by scripture] to ‘hap-
pen’ again for the present-day reader.” 9 And this “happening again” is
made possible just through beautiful readings of scripture by which read-
ers themselves are transformed, beautifi ed. Not that that transformation
happens mechanically or in predictable patterns, of course. The realities of
interpretation and its effects are too complex to map exactly. But if in fact
scripture is “the Spirit’s instrument by which the living Christ speaks,” 10
if in fact the Word is speaking to us in our hearing of the scriptures and
awaiting a response from us, as Origen insists, then we cannot not be
changed by that address. 11 The liturgical, homiletic, and devotional hear-
ing/reading/speaking of the scriptures becomes “the mediational locus”
of our encounter with the living, life-giving God, 12 an encounter that
again and again awakens us to live with and within Christ for the sake of
the world, making us “active actors in the theodrama” that is the reconcili-
ation of all things in the embrace of the Triune love. 13
Augustine, in his meditations on the Psalms, provides an excellent exam-
ple. As he describes it, the liturgical recitation of a Psalm enables believers
“to express what is otherwise hidden from him or her,” and in the process
“unseals deep places, emotions otherwise buried,” which, unearthed, can
be confronted in spiritual direction and offered up in praise or laid out as
petition. In this way, reciting the Psalms trains the believer to converse
with God and with the church. “The act of recitation becomes an opening
to the transforming action of grace.” 14 Drawing Augustine’s interpretive
model into conversation with Origen’s, we can say that “hearing” the
scriptures faithfully gives us the “ear” necessary for “playing” them. Once
we have learned, through long obedience, “how to make the voice of the
Body of Christ in worship our own,” we can read scripture in ways that
decide for God, that body forth our love for the Father “to whom the
Body of Christ by grace always speaks,” 15 as well as our love for the Body
itself, because it is Christ’s and Christ is God’s.
Of course, when I say that we have to make the scriptures beautiful, I
do not mean that we give the scriptures a beauty they do not have other-
wise. Instead, we beautify the scriptures with the beauty we ourselves are
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