So what has been said in sketchy fashion about every kind of secular historical interpretation is true above all of interpretation in faith: faithful interpretation of history presumes the people of God as the interpretive community. It is not only about perceiving the church’s own guilt but also about recognizing the deeds of God performed in his people and for the world through his people. Such perception and narration is impossible without an interpretive grasp grounded in faith. It is only possible when believers come together in believing communities, in the church.
But is there not widespread unease at this point, at least? Should not objections be heard? Interpretive understanding, interpretive recognition, interpretive perception, interpretation and more interpretation—is it not a fact that interpretation can also go horribly wrong? Is interpretation not something vague, subjective, irrational, arbitrary, more conjecture than knowledge? The objection is plausible, but it does not do justice to the phenomenon of interpretation because the interpretation of world and history is a fundamental process without which human beings cannot grasp reality at all.
There can be no perception of reality without an interpretive model. More than that: when people open their mouths and do not just put out animalistic sounds such as groaning and growling but use concepts, they are already interpreting their reality. Every language presumes an overarching interpretation of the world and is itself such an interpretation. Those who assign interpretation to the realm of the arbitrary call into question every field of scholarship, including the natural sciences. Still more, they question the value of every human discourse, because whenever we speak and construct sentences we are interpreting the reality that surrounds us.
The same is true of Jesus of Nazareth, and of him above all. He is unthinkable without Israel, the people of God, in whose tradition he lived, and he can therefore be adequately understood only in faith and out of the believing memory of the people of God. An understanding of Jesus demands the foundation that is Israel, that is the church. If we do not hold to the church’s interpretive tradition and seek its genuine realm of experience again and again, then sooner or later the image of Jesus will disintegrate before us. Interpretation of him will become a matter of taste or at least be determined by the momentary horizon of the interpreter. We see this clearly in the many images of Jesus produced in the last several decades, each according to a shifting fashion. They show very little of the Jesus of the gospels but a great deal of the spirit of those who produce them.
So we see Jesus as an opium for the soul and as a political revolutionary. Here he is as the archetype of the unconscious, there a pop star. He appears as the first feminist and as the faithful advocate of bourgeois morality. Jesus is used by those who want to see nothing change in the church, and he is used as a weapon against the church. He is instrumentalized over and over again to confirm people’s own desires and dreams. At present he must above all stand for the legitimation of universal tolerance, which is no longer interested in truth and therefore threatens to slide off into arbitrariness. For example:
The Parable of the Ten Young Women
For many centuries the interpretation of the parable of the ten young women in Matthew 25:1-13 was obvious to Christians: these virgins are supposed to go out to meet the bridegroom and adorn the marriage feast with their lamps. The wise among them had equipped themselves with surplus oil for their lamps, and in their prudence they had acted quite reasonably. One should imitate them. The foolish, on the other hand, fell short of what they were supposed to do. They had not prepared themselves in advance. They had not understood what was at stake. Therefore, they were still looking for oil when the feast was already beginning. In the end they were left standing outside the door.
Today the earlier church’s view of the parable has been utterly reversed by many interpreters and preachers: the foolish young women for whom the door of the house remained closed embody people who are stigmatized, suffering, and humiliated. All sympathy belongs to them. We identify with them. The wise, on the other hand, have become offensive. Why didn’t they share their oil?
In one interpretation of the parable that came to my hands some time ago8 the “I do not know you” spoken by the bridegroom to the foolish virgins is seen as a “wounding reaction” and a “Darwinist mechanism of selection.” And the wise young women in the parable, who could not give away their oil because otherwise the messianic feast of the reign of God would lose its brilliance, are demeaned as unjust, lacking in solidarity, and egoistic about their own salvation. Still more, the concern of the wise for the festival of the reign of God is declared to be “concealed violence” against those who did not prepare themselves for the feast. In other words, those who went out to meet the bridegroom acted inappropriately toward those who were unprepared.
That shears the point off of Jesus’ parable and perverts the whole thing. In the parable of the ten young women the issue is not one of solidarity, readiness to help, or tolerance, but something quite different: the neglected kairos, the hour not seized.
Church history shows how often Christians have failed to recognize their hour. Then a door closed and did not open again so quickly. Jesus had exactly the same experience: the majority of the people of God in his time did not recognize the crucial hour of God’s action. The consequences were horrible. Zealots and fanatics shaped the program for the next decades in Jewish history. Jerusalem was destroyed. It was a historical moment not grasped, one that would have demanded wisdom and the highest degree of readiness from the people of God of that time!
Should Jesus not have spoken of such a danger of failing in his own objective? Should he not have warned against it? The fact that aid and tolerance are important does not exclude the reality that there is a judgment, one that we create for ourselves. Those who are called to follow Jesus cannot remain behind for the sake of others who do not want to go with them. They must go out—precisely so that the new ingathering under the reign of God may come to pass in the world.
There are numerous texts in the gospels that signal a parting of the ways. They have been off-putting to a whole generation of churchgoers and reveal the degree to which many theologians have forgotten the church—or else they unlock what is crucially Christian and call people to discipleship anew. One such text is this parable about the foolish and wise young women. It is like a sharp sword. No one can understand this parable unless she or he thinks of sin in terms of the history of the people of God, its crises, dangers, and decisions.
Romano Guardini once asked, in one of his university sermons: What does that mean, exactly—looking at Jesus? How can I see him? How can I encounter him? And Guardini continues: oddly enough, here we find repeated in almost the same way what was true of the religions’ search for the hidden God: just as there have been many images of God, so also there are many images of Jesus. And as people have sought to take control of God, so also they try to take control of Jesus.9
Therefore, says Guardini, today especially the question becomes as urgent as it can possibly be: who can protect Jesus from us? Who will keep him free of the cunning and violence of our own ego, which does everything to avoid really following Jesus? His answer: the encounter with Jesus must not be left to subjective religious experience; “rather, there is a place assigned for it that is built correctly, in which he can be seen rightly and listened to, and that is the church.”