I recently read a post on www.relevantmagazine.com that caught my eye: “Five bible verses that don’t mean what you think”.
Forgive your enemies? No, no, no. It may sound something like, “forgive your enemies”, but what Jesus is really saying is “drop large explosive devices on people who refuse to give you their oil”.
It’s not an uncommon approach. Okay, I exaggerate the one above, but the website does argue that “do not judge, lest you be judged” doesn’t mean “don’t judge, because then you will be judged”, it means, when you judge others, you’re right, but when other people judge you, they are wrong. Now do you get it? Good.
You had to be a member to read the rest. But let me speculate: the story about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven? You might think it means that it’s really hard for someone who loves his possessions to have a genuine sense of spirituality, but what it really means is that you should only love all the possessions that God gave you because he wants you to prosper.
And that verse about the apostles owning “everything in common”? You might think they had some kind of socialist arrangement going there, but you would be wrong. We are quite sure that only the hard-working, entrepreneurial apostles got to have everything.
And what about forgiving the sins of the adulterous woman? Does that mean that we should forgive adultery? You have to read it in context: not if it’s between a same-sex couple. She or he still has to pay.