In many Christian homes there is a copy of Holy Scripture. Some received it as a gift at Baptism or at their wedding, others inherited it from their parents or bought it in an hour of searching. And yet many of us open it rarely; and when we do open it, we come to a bewildered halt after a few pages: where do I begin? how am I to understand? what do I do when I do not understand? The deepest question, then, is not how much of Scripture we read, but how we read it.
To this question the Church has answered in the same way for two thousand years: Scripture is read together with Christ and within His Church. It is not merely a text that we study, but the place where God comes out to meet man. And this way of reading is no late theory of theologians — it was shown to us on the very day of the Resurrection, on a road that ran down from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus.
The Road to Emmaus
Saint Luke the Evangelist recounts (Luke 24:13–35) how, on the evening of the day of the Resurrection, two disciples were walking toward Emmaus and talking with each other about all that had taken place in Jerusalem. They knew everything: the arrest, the crucifixion, the tomb found empty that morning, the word of the women that He was alive. They had all the facts — and still they walked in sorrow. “But we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel,” they confess their grief. They knew the events, but they did not understand them.
Then Christ Himself drew near and walked together with them, but something held their eyes, so that they did not recognize Him. He first let them pour out all their perplexity, and then, “beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.” As they drew near the village, the disciples begged Him: “Stay with us, for it is toward evening.” And at the meal, when He had blessed and broken the bread, their eyes were opened and they recognized Him — and in that same instant He vanished from their sight. Only then did they say to one another: “Were not our hearts burning within us while He spoke to us on the way, and while He interpreted the Scriptures to us?” And rising up in that same hour, they returned to Jerusalem, to the other apostles.
In this event we see, as in an icon, everything the Church does whenever she opens the Scriptures. The disciples had the facts, but understanding did not come from within themselves: it was born on the way, while Christ walked beside them and opened the Scriptures to them. From the interpreted word the road rises toward the heart that is kindled, is fulfilled at the breaking of the bread, and returns into the Church — the disciples do not keep their joy to themselves, but rise and carry it into the assembly of the apostles.
And one thing more, which gives this category its name: the verb the Evangelist uses is precisely “to interpret.” On the road to Emmaus, Christ Himself showed us the pattern of all Christian interpretation: the Scriptures are opened in the light of His Person and of His saving work. Every true interpretation is called to walk in the footsteps of this road.
Scripture Lives in the Church
Holy Scripture did not fall from heaven as a finished, bound book. It was born within the people of God: the Holy Spirit spoke through the prophets and the apostles, and the Church received, preserved, and recognized these writings as the word of God. For this reason Scripture cannot be separated from the Church in which it was born, just as a letter cannot be fully understood apart from the family to which it was sent. Saint Peter the Apostle tells us plainly: “no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation” (2 Peter 1:20).
In her services, the Church breathes Scripture. At Vespers the psalms are sung, and on the great feasts readings from the Old Testament are appointed; at the Matins of Sundays and feast days we hear the Gospel, and at the Divine Liturgy the Epistle and the Gospel are read, followed, according to the traditional order, by the sermon — by the interpretation of the word that has been heard. The hymnography of the feasts reads the Old Testament in the light of Christ: the burning bush, the sea parted in two, the furnace of Babylon are shown to us as foreshadowings of the Incarnation and of the Resurrection. Whoever stands attentively at the services receives, without noticing it, the deepest school of scriptural interpretation.
And alongside the services stand the Holy Fathers. They were not scholars first of all, but men who lived the word before they explained it; for this reason their interpretations carry a weight our own opinions do not. Saint John Chrysostom interpreted the Gospels and the epistles of Saint Paul the Apostle; Saint Athanasius the Great showed how the Christian prays with the Psalms; Saint Theophylact of Bulgaria left the Church a clear interpretation of the four Gospels, read to this day. When we open them, we do not look for stray sentences to turn into law, but for the common mind of the Church — that shared thought in which Fathers of different ages and different places confess one and the same faith.
The Five Steps of an Interpretation
How, then, shall we work in the articles of this category? We shall take each text through the same five steps, which any Christian can also use in reading at home.
First we listen to the text. Who speaks, to whom, what happens, which words are repeated. The letter asks to be heard before any search for symbols; we do not leap from the first verse to “what it means for me.”
Then we seek its setting. Who wrote, to whom, in what situation, to what pain or straying it responds. The Epistles above all are not abstract treatises: Saint Paul writes to living communities, with quarrels, with falls, and with questions very much like our own.
We read it in the light of Christ. The heart of the whole of Scripture is Christ: we ask what the passage reveals to us about His Person and His saving work, and how it is bound to the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection. Thus He Himself interpreted the Scriptures on the road to Emmaus, and thus the Church reads them to this day.
We listen to it within the Church. We seek the place of the text in the services, in the feasts, in the hymns, and in the icons, and we listen to the Fathers who interpreted it before us.
And finally we bring it into life. What repentance is born from it, what prayer, what deed. An interpretation that does not touch life remains an exercise of the mind; the true one is known by its fruits — the heart is warmed, prayer is quickened, and one’s neighbor begins to be seen with different eyes.
What This Category Will Contain
With this article we open on OrtodoxWay a new category: Orthodox Biblical Interpretation. We shall begin with the Gospels, and above all with the Gospel of Luke — from the Annunciation and the Nativity of the Lord, through the Beatitudes, the parable of the Good Samaritan and of the Prodigal Son, to the Supper, the Cross, and the road to Emmaus with which we set out today. The question that will guide us at every passage will always be the same: what does it show us about Christ and about the way in which man enters into communion with Him?
We shall then enter the Psalter, the Church’s school of prayer, where we shall interpret the psalms that the services place most often on our lips — before all others, the Fiftieth Psalm of repentance (according to the numbering of the Septuagint, preserved in Orthodoxy). The Acts of the Apostles will then be our bridge to the epistles: we shall see how the Church was born and who the communities were to whom the Holy Apostles wrote, so that their letters may no longer seem to us to have fallen from heaven, without address and without occasion. And in the epistles we shall seek the answer to the question of how life in Christ is lived — in the family, in the community, in trials.
The Heart That Burns
The sign of true reading is not the abundance of knowledge gathered, nor the search for some unusual emotion, but the heart that opens toward God and the life that begins to change. The disciples at Emmaus perhaps did not remember all the prophecies the Lord interpreted to them on the way; but their hearts were kindled, their steps turned back from their road, and their mouths bore witness. Wherever the reading of Scripture gives birth to prayer, to repentance, to love toward one’s neighbor, and to longing for Holy Communion, there Christ walks beside us on the way.
For this reason, the most fitting beginning for this category is not an exhortation to study, but one to reading. This evening, open the Gospel of Luke and read slowly, without haste, chapter 24. Pray briefly beforehand — “Lord, open my eyes, that I may know You in the Scriptures” — and let the word do its work. And if, along the way, your heart begins to warm and your life to change, you will understand that you are not reading alone.