In my homiletical workshops, I often take the preachers through an exercise in reading that I learned from Meier Sternberg (“The Poetics of Biblical Narrative”) by way of a graduate course in hermeneutics from Prof. James Voeltz at Concordia-St. Louis. Sternberg uses the David and Bathsheba narrative from 1 Samuel 11 to show how a narrator uses gaps to make subtle rhetorical points. What is left unsaid is as important as what is said. It’s basically an exercise in slow, careful reading, pausing at the end of each sentence and paragraph to ask questions about what we know and what we don’t know from the text. The preachers in the workshop are invariably surprised at what is not said, but always assumed, in the failiar David and Bathsheba narrative. It turns out to be a much more nuanced story than the one we learned in Sunday School.
That’s what makes reading narrative so interesting. Our minds are constantly engaging the text and trying to fill in the gaps. Think of a good murder mystery and how the author leaves us guessing as to who committed the crime. Our minds are engaged with the text, trying to fill in what isn’t being told to us, while the author directs or misdirects us with the evidence.
I did some Monday morning gap-filling after preaching Sunday’s Gospel on the exchange between the Canaanite woman and Jesus over her demon possessed daughter (Matthew 15:21ff). The surface themes of the narrative are obvious - the woman’s persistent faith in the face of Jesus’ apparent rejection, the undercurrent of ethnic tension between Israelite and the Canaanite, and the universality of God’s grace in Jesus (also picked up in the OT reading from Isaiah and the epistle reading from Romans) that extends beyond the lost sheep of the house of Israel to even the Canaanites and by extension to us.
Here’s how reading in the gaps works with Sunday’s gospel narrative:
And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon.
What was Jesus doing in the region of Tyre and Sidon anyway? Why was He going away from where He was? A little R&R at the coast perhaps? Maybe He was trying to get away from the pesky Pharisees who had come all the way from Jerusalem to bug Him. You just can’t get away from the religious types fast enough.
And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and cried, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely possessed by a demon.” But he did not answer her a word.
“Son of David” is messiah talk, insider talk. Was she trying to pass herself off as an Israelite? Did the woman bring her demon-possessed daughter along with her?
And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying after us.”
She failed to get Jesus’ attention, now she tries to get to Him through His disciples. How long did this go on? Are the disciples irritated because she keeps calling after them or because she’s a Canaanite? Do they think Jesus will approve of their disapproval?
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” To whom is Jesus speaking? Was He looking at the woman or at His disciples when He said that? Thus far, He hadn’t even acknowledged her existence. It appears as though He is responding to His disciples. What if His back is turned to the woman, so she must endure this sentence without even seeing His face? Is this sentence to test the woman’s faith, the disciples’ understanding, or both?
But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.”
She gets into Jesus’ space. No more ignoring her. No more “Son of David” talk, now just a straight up kyrie eleison. Did Jesus take note of her, or does He continue to look away.
And he answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
He seems to speak to her, but not directly. Did Jesus say this to her or to His disciples? If He said it to her, it is a test of her faith’s endurance. Can she withstand being called a dog, what the Israelites called the Canaanites, usually with spitting? Jesus seems to soften the blow a bit by using the diminutive - little dog, puppy dog. Was this intended as a token of tenderness? What if He is speaking to the disciples? Then the sentence reads diffently. Jesus would appear to agree with His bigoted, narrow-minded disciples. They would likely chuckle and say, “That’s right, Rabbi! You’re the Messiah, man! You came to liberate Israel, not those filthy Canaanite dogs and their puppies!” The narrative intensifies considerably if Jesus is talking to His disciples rather than to the woman.
She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
Did she catch the “little dog” as a sign that Jesus would grant her request? Was there any indication at all from Jesus that He would heal her daughter? Or is this, as Luther suggested, a faith that will not take “no” for an answer? If Jesus has not even acknowledged her presence much less her request, this sentence becomes all the more powerful. In the face of Jesus’ stony silence, His ethnic slur, His back turned to her, she holds HIm to His own words as the disciples listen in disbelief!
Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
Only now in the narrative does Jesus address her directly, and He uses an honorific title, the same title He uses with His own mother - O woman! He commends her faith and grants her request immediately. What was the look on Jesus’ face? What look did He give to His disciples? Matthew notes that her daughter was healed immediately, that very hour. Was the little girl standing there there all along? If so, the exchange is all the more poignant.
What was the disciples’ reaction to all of this? You can just imagine the twelve with red-faces, kicking the sand, looking like twelve idiots who just flunked the teacher’s pop quiz. What if Jesus were making an example of her all along, knowing full well what she believed and would do? Yes, her faith was put to the test, no question about that. But read in this way, it was the disciples’ llack of understanding of who Jesus was for the world that was on trial here, and Jesus was simply using her to make an example, an object lesson, for them.
The larger lesson is this: Spend some time in the narrative gaps. We often don’t know the expression on Jesus’ face or the direction of His gaze or the background noise. We tend to assume a stern, pious Jesus - Jesus the boring lecturer, Jesus the moral nannie, Jesus the pulpit tone preacher, Jesus the droning teacher. That would hardly be the way of a decent rabbi. Good teaching calls for lively rhetoric, humor, misdirection, narrative gaps, and playfulness. Good preaching does too. Ken Bailey, who studied the parable style of teaching, notes that Jesus’ parables were wildly outrageous and would have drawn guffaws of laughter and even outrage from HIs hearers.
Reading in the gaps opens us to the possibilities in the text, and we just might be in for a wonderful surprise.
Very interesting. I actually thought a lot about that on my drive home Sunday. I can definitely see the advantage in reading in the gaps. Just out of curiosity, where does the become filling in the gaps? It seems that in your reading, most of the reading-in-the-gaps consists of asking questions about the context of the narrative. I do the same when I read the text (I'm a lawyer, after all, I always want mroe information, more facts!). It seems like the 'higher-criticism' methods take this technique one or more steps too far...
"Higher Criticism," if it can really be called that, attempts to read between the lines to go behind the text to its source and intentionality. Of course, this ultimately becomes a futile argument from silence.
Gap reading is nothing more than making explicit what is implicit in the text, what the author is telling us and not telling us. If we are attentive readers/hearers, we are always filling the gaps with our tentative conclusions and questions as part of the reading/hearing process. Gap reading simply engages the text at its face value and fully examines all the possibilities within the limitations of the text itself.
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