Getting In The Mood For Pentecost: Some Thoughts On The Gift Of Interpretation

Paul's letters make embarrassingly clear that all was anything but well a lot of the time in some of his congregations. To his frequent dismay, power struggles often trumped sacrificial actions, posturing overwhelmed humility, and a worn-out legalism kept drowning out his message that all things were becoming new. As if all of this were not enough, God's own Spirit may have been making matters even worse, by sending to Paul's people a whole range of spiritual gifts that they promptly misused to stir up even more trouble among the faithful.

From his own account at least, one gift of the Spirit proved especially divisive, the gift of "tongues." Admittedly, it is hard to know just what Paul did and did not have in mind when he wrote on the subject. Sometimes, he referred to tongue-speaking as unintelligible sounds; at other times his references were to a language, but one whose meaning is either unknown by anyone, or known only to angels. His big point, though, seems clear enough: speaking in tongues can convey what God wants his people to understand, but if and only if what is spoken is subjected to interpretation, by those with the gift, also from the Spirit, to do so.

The problem, though, is that Paul did not tell us how someone with the gift of interpretation is to go about taking allegedly divinely inspired utterances that no one but the utterer understands initially and then transforming them into a message from God for all, including the tongue-speaker. And his not doing so leaves us with a number of questions to puzzle over. For instance, is the interpretation of something said in tongues directly inspired by God's Spirit in the same way that the tongue-speaking itself is said to be, or does the interpreter have both the freedom and responsibility to bring the meaning to light on his or her own terms? Paul, wisely it seems to me, seemed to think the latter.

But following him on this point leads to another question: if a particular act of interpretation, even if divinely inspired, is also a human and not merely a divine act, how do those of us who listen to it attain any kind of certainty that the interpretation really does say what God intended the tongue-speaking to say in the first place? Or: how can we know for sure that the interpreter is not merely substituting his or her own ideas for God's original ones? Do we need still another interpreter to help us sort out the work of the first one? And what about the tongue-speaker himself or herself? Must he or she concur with a particular interpretation for the rest of us to accept that interpretation as the right one? Given the very great difference that Paul seems to have had in mind between tongue-speaking and the interpretation of it, I even wonder whether a tongue-speaker could ever be in a position to understand, much less assess, anyone's interpretation of what he or she had just said.

What especially interests me about the gift of interpretation is the wide range of similarities there seem to be between its exercise on tongue-speaking and the interpretation of all kinds of other human expressions of meaning. It is as if God is continuing to bestow the gift of interpretation, in ways beyond mere human comprehending to be sure, but upon very human seekers after meaning and truth in and beyond the Bible everywhere. Could it be that the gift of interpretation is a gift that makes it possible for people in every generation to trust that throughout all of human experience, the most fundamental truth of all, the truth of saving grace, is always accessible?

Not long ago, I meandered through a stunning exhibition of paintings by a Mexican Surrealist painter, Enrique Chaverria. My knowledge of Jungian archetypes, incomplete to be sure, helped me to get at least some of his meaning, in a few of his paintings at least, but without input from the exhibit's director and without scanning quite a lot of literature about Echavarria, what I would have ended up with would have been my own eisegesis (reading-into, rather than reading-out-of) of what the painter was trying to say. And I would have missed out on the altogether more exciting process of discovering meaning alongside of other very human creatures like myself. Interpretation, whether of tongues, or of our dreams, our Bibles, and even of our preacher's most God-inspired sermons --- is in the final analysis a communal venture, and that is what makes it so interesting.