Devotional: Clobbering the Clobber Texts

Dear God of grace and truth,

Martin Luther once said that Scripture is the cradle in which Christ is laid. Yet we confess that too often we have wielded that cradle like a weapon — swinging sacred words at the very people You came to gather in. Mark 10:42-45 cuts through our pretensions: "You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them. Not so with you." Jesus did not hand us the Bible so we could stand over others with it. He handed us a basin and a towel.

The Lutheran tradition teaches us to read every text through the lens of what "promotes Christ" — was Christum treibet, as Luther put it. When we encounter a difficult passage, the first question is never "How can I use this against someone?" but rather "Where is the gospel here? Where is the One who knelt to wash feet?"

Lord, forgive us for every time we have used Your Word to silence rather than to heal, to exclude rather than to welcome to the Table. Teach us the holy discipline of reading Scripture the way Jesus read it — always bending toward mercy, always reaching for the one pushed to the margins.