Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes

by E. Randolph Richards

  The ancients used kairos to refer to the more qualitative aspect of time, when something special happened. This term is used much more often—almost twice as frequently—in the Bible. Sometimes translated “season,” kairos time is when something important happens at just the right time. Paul explains, for example, “when the fullness of the time [kairos] came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law” (Gal 4:4 nasb, emphasis added). God wasn’t waiting for a precise date on the calendar, but for a period in human history in which the conditions were most appropriate. Kairos also can be used to describe a situation or circumstance. In Ephesians 5:15-16, Paul encourages Christians to “Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity [kairos], because the days are evil” (emphasis added).

  What does all this mean for how we Westerners interpret the Bible? In the remainder of this chapter, we suggest the following. First, we Westerners instinctively think in terms of chronos time. When we read a description of or statement about time in the Bible, it goes without being said for us that the author is talking about a linear, discrete, measurable moment in history (chronos). This is problematic, because more often than not the biblical writers are describing kairos, not chronos. We can concentrate so much on chronos that we miss kairos. This confusion can lead us to draw the wrong conclusions from important texts. Second, we think of chronos in a very limited and specific way. So even when a biblical writer is talking about chronos time, we are still prone to misinterpret the writer’s intent.

  Kairos in the Bible

  Understanding kairos can help us make sense of otherwise confusing narratives in Scripture. The Christmas story begins with Jesus’ birth and runs through his toddler years. This isn’t immediately clear in the text. Matthew 1 ends with the birth of Jesus, and the first verse of Matthew 2 introduces the Magi. Considerable time has passed, but the author didn’t worry about checking the clock or calendar. For the purposes of our Christmas pageants, Westerners customarily compress the narrative so that the angels, shepherds and wise men all show up to adore the baby Jesus in the cattle trough. It makes a compelling scene, but it’s not quite right. Why does the biblical story span so much time? What events transpired in the meantime?

  When I (Randy), my wife and two babies moved to a remote part of Indonesia, my wife wanted electricity and running water. She also wanted cabinets (or something) in the kitchen on which to put the dishes so that she didn’t have to stack them on the ground—all reasonable requests! I asked around for a carpenter right away, since I knew that the process of making cabinets would require many steps, including cutting the logs into planks, letting them dry for several weeks and planing the wood. “We don’t do woodworking on this island,” I was told. “The people on the island of Sangihe are the woodworkers.” That complicated things. I had to find someone willing to take a two-day boat ride to this other island. That person would try to find a woodworker willing to come to my area. Of course, I had to pay his costs and the costs for the carpenter to come. A week later, my messenger returned.

  “Where’s the carpenter?” I asked.

  “The carpenter is coming,” he said, exasperated. “You can’t expect him to just drop everything and come now, can you?”

  About a month later, the carpenter showed up with an apprentice. (The next time your cable company says the worker will be there tomorrow between 8 a.m. and noon, don’t complain!) They moved into our carport. Did I expect them to sleep in the rain? Every morning he built a little fire in our carport and cooked breakfast. He and his apprentice would sit there for an hour or two sharpening tools, including the handsaw, one tooth at a time. I don’t remember how many weeks it took him to build cabinets. After he finished my project, various neighbors in the area also arranged for him to do projects for them. After all, a carpenter was in town! Take advantage of the opportunity (kairos). Seize the day (kairos). It may have been a year before all the work dried up and he left for home and family, with pockets full. In the meantime, I was counting the chronos; we hadn’t been able to park in our carport in a long time.

  While this may seem foreign to Westerners, in many parts of the world this is quite normal. And it helps explain why the nativity story spans so much time. When Joseph went to Bethlehem to register, Mary gave birth to Jesus. They needed to wait a few weeks for Mary to recuperate before they traveled back, but it appears Joseph and Mary may have remained in Bethlehem for nearly two years. When the wise men arrived, they went to a house where the toddler Jesus and his parents were living (Mt 2:11). What had Mary and Joseph been doing all this time? Not vacationing. Joseph was probably following work opportunities. He intended to return to Nazareth but was staying while there was work to be found. This was the time (kairos) for work. He would leave when the time was passed. Americans find it hard to leave town for a long weekend. Who will feed the cat? We cannot imagine someone leaving their home for a year or two. But in cultures in which kairos is more important than chronos, this is a common thing to do.

  Understanding the Bible’s preference for kairos has even larger implications. This is particularly true in light of Western fascination with the “end of time.” Because we in the United States fret over time, we figure God does, too. God must be watching his watch, checking the time until the end of time. Many of us were so sure the world was ending in a.d. 2000. We called it Y2K. It was the perfect time to end time. We like round numbers.

  As we mentioned before, the biblical authors, like many non-Westerners, were less concerned with clock or calendar time (chronos) and more concerned with the appropriateness and fittingness of events (kairos). You might say they were more concerned with timing than with time. Our preoccupation with the chronos of events means that when we read about the “Day of the Lord” in Scripture, we typically envision a literal calendar day, as if the Lord is scheduled to return on a Tuesday morning or something. It will come at the right “time” (kairos not chronos), under the right conditions and in the appropriate season. The day of the Lord will occur when God is ready.

  Let’s look at an example that Jesus used. “Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come’” (Mt 22:1-3).

  We recognize that the would-be guests are making excuses, but why they were making excuses went without being said in Jesus’ day. First, we assume those invited were making personal decisions. (Hopefully, you recognize now a community is involved in this.) Second, we commonly misread this parable because we assume the hot issue in the story is time. We assume the guests don’t come because they don’t have the time. Or perhaps the guests are insulting the king because they won’t take the time to attend, or worse, they feel the banquet is a waste of time. What we are certain went without being said, though, was that the story was somehow connected to time. After all, banquet invitations note the day and time.

  To understand what’s going on here, we need to know a bit about the culture. When folks were invited, it was okay for them to decline the invitation. But these people had accepted the invitation, so preparations were made based upon their attendance.[4] In antiquity, one announced a banquet as happening “soon.” The exact date was always a bit negotiable for several reasons. First, they didn’t have five-day weather forecasts; who knew in advance if the weather would be conducive to banqueting? Second, some supplies had to come from out of town. When supplies were ready, you would let the guests know the banquet was “near.” Finally, one did not kill the fatted calf until the day of the feast. There was no refrigeration. When all the preparations were made, the host looked outside. If the weather looked good, he’d give the order: “Today is the day.” They’d kill the calf, and messengers would go to tell the guests to come. The feast happens on the right day (kairos). Likewise, Jesus tells us the time (kairos) for the kingdom is near (Mk 1:15).r />
  Jesus consistently discouraged his disciples from trying to divine the “day and the hour” (chronos terms) of God’s judgment or Christ’s return. “But about that day or hour no one knows,” Jesus said, “not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mt 24:36). It is possible to be so worried about the time (chronos) for something—such as the return of Christ—that we miss the time (kairos) for something—such as living like citizens of the kingdom of God.

  Chronos in the Bible

  Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five in 1966 as a novelistic retrospective on the bombing of Dresden, Germany, during World War II. It begins like this: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. . . . Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”[5]

  Billy Pilgrim’s unintentional time travel reads at times like the delusions of a shell-shocked soldier trying to cope with a cold world. And at one level, it probably is. One important thing to know about Billy is that he has been abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians are eager to teach Billy the true nature of time. For Earthlings, his captors explain, time is a meaningful sequence in which one event follows the previous and contributes to the next. One can learn from the past and use that knowledge to avoid future catastrophe. The Tralfamadorians know better. As they explain it, they see “all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment and you will find that we are all . . . bugs in amber.”[6] Their books follow this pattern. “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”[7]

  This might all sound like nonsense to you. That’s sort of the point. Billy Pilgrim’s experience, and the frustration it causes both Billy and his readers, illustrates an important assumption and foundation of Western culture. We orient ourselves, make sense of our circumstances and plan for the future based on a particular understanding of time and our relationship to it. Fundamental to Western culture is the assumption, which goes without being said, that without sequence there is no meaning. When a Westerner recounts a major event, stories tend to move in chronological sequence leading to a crescendo. Unlike Tralfamadorian stories, Western stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. The sequence (chronos) is important. When you tell a story all out of sequence, the story quits making sense—or so we Westerners think.

  Not so elsewhere. In the non-Western world, stories often circulate around the event until it coalesces; therefore, orderliness (but not the chronological sequence) is important. I (Randy) was often struck that telling stories for Indonesians is often more like making a soup: some ingredients had a specific timing, but the other elements just needed to be added sometime. I often interrupted a story to ask, “Now, did that happen before or after what you just said?” Since my Indonesian friends liked me, they tolerated my irrelevant questions.

  Because Westerners are so interested in time, we tend to find a lot of significance in the order of events in Scripture. When we study the life of Jesus, we often want a chronology of his ministry. When something occurred matters to us. Thus Western readers have a tendency to import our concern for chronology into Scripture. Unfortunately for us, events in the Bible are not necessarily presented in historical, chronological order. But publishers have helped us out, producing a Chronological Study Bible that “presents the text of the New King James Version in chronological order—the order in which the events actually happened”—not in the order they appear in Scripture. We seem to assume that because the biblical stories are not in chronological order, they are in the wrong order.

  Historically, Western readers have been bothered by what they consider discrepancies in the biblical text regarding chronology. When two biblical books or writers present the same information in a different order, or chronicle the same event but include different details, scholars have been quick to assume that this means one—or both—of the accounts is wrong. They certainly can’t both be right, can they? When we find the same story with a different sequence, such as the three temptations of Jesus in Matthew and in Luke, it unsettles us. Something is wrong. What is more interesting is that we then want to figure out which sequence is “right.” For us, the “correct” sequence is the one that is chronologically accurate.

  But the Gospel writers often composed their stories more like Indonesian storytellers than like Western historians. The chronological sequence is often unimportant. Since Luke uses references to the temple as an organizing theme in his Gospel, for example, the “correct” sequence for Luke is the one that ends where Jesus stood on the pinnacle of the temple and was urged to jump (Lk 4:9). Matthew has every major event in the life of Jesus occur on a mountain. (This sometimes requires referring to a hill as a mountain, as in the Sermon on the Mount.) For Matthew, the “correct” sequence is the one that has the crescendo event on a mountain, where Jesus is taken to a high mountain to view the world’s kingdoms. Either scenario is likely to bother Western readers. Shouldn’t the writers have told the story in the “correct” sequence? I suspect Matthew and Luke would both insist they did. Moreover, they would likely insist the other evangelist did as well. The chronological sequence simply didn’t matter to them in the same way it matters to us.

  Please note, however, that the biblical authors were intentional about the sequence in which they presented events, even if they weren’t preoccupied with historical, chronological order. We Westerners can focus so much on the time (chronology) that we miss the timing (the meaning of the sequence) in a biblical passage.

  Often biblical writers were also teaching us by the sequence of stories. Scholars have long noted the way Mark tells the story of Jesus clearing the temple (Mk 11:15-19).[8] He sandwiches it in the middle of the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree (Mk 11:12-14 and Mk 11:20-25). Mark’s arrangement of the stories indicates that the fig tree story is to tell us how to understand Jesus’ actions in the temple. Like the fig tree, the temple was full of activity but was bearing no fruit. Jesus condemned it as a “den of robbers” as Jeremiah had the previous temple (Jer 7:11).[9]

  Mark likes this storytelling method. He tells us that Jairus comes to request healing for his daughter (Mk 5:22-24). Jesus agrees. On their way to Jairus’s home, Jesus heals a woman who touched the hem of his cloak (Mk 5:25-34). Only after Jairus’s daughter has died does Jesus heal her (Mk 5:35-43). Mark connects these stories in a number of ways. Both the girl and woman are called “daughter.” The girl is twelve years old; the woman has been bleeding for twelve years. Jairus falls to the ground; the woman falls to the ground. Clearly Mark wants us to read the stories together. Most important for our purposes here, Mark’s sequencing of the events connects them. He wants us to interpret them together, compare and contrast the responses to Jesus. We may be inclined to think the story of the bleeding woman is told in the middle of the Jairus story merely because that’s when it happened. In this case, our love for chronology can lead us to miss the kairos of Mark’s point.

  Conclusion

  Much of the Bible’s wisdom literature is concerned with kairos. It is not enough to know a wise saying. Wisdom is knowing when to use it. One is wise when she knows when to answer a fool and when not to (Prov 26:4-5). In this way, kairos can be as—or dare we say, more—important than chronos. When the preacher in Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a “season” for everything, he isn’t talking about a calendar. Discerning the right timing (kairos) is an important part of the Christian life—knowing when to encourage and when to confront, when to celebrate and when to grieve, when to plant and when to harvest.

  How do we become sensitive to the way Scripture is discussing time in a given context? When you run
across a word that indicates time is under discussion (day, hour, season, time, opportunity, etc.), decide whether you think the biblical author has chronos or kairos in mind. (If you have access to a commentary or concordance or online resource, it might help you determine which term or kind of term is being used in the original language.) Take a moment to think through the implications of your decision. How might you interpret the passage differently if the author is describing chronos? What if he is describing kairos?

  Pay close attention to the sequence of events in a biblical passage. We recommend outlining the passage on a piece of notebook paper as you read. What happens first, second, third and so on? Is the main story (i.e., the healing of Jairus’s daughter) “interrupted” by another story (i.e., the healing of the bleeding woman)? If so, indicate that in your outline. Is the author connecting this story with the one before or after by repeating words or themes? Answer these questions: What is the author trying to highlight by ordering the events in this way? How would I misconstrue the meaning of this passage if I interpreted it in historical, chronological order rather than in the order the author presents it?

  Questions to Ponder

  It seems clear to most of us that “time” in Acts 7:17 is kairos. What about Hebrews 4:7? Is this chronos or kairos?

  Jesus speaks of the “time” (kairos) of the harvest (Mt 13:30). The time of the harvest is not a date on a calendar. What does this say about scheduling ministry?