Content note: This reflection references biblical passages that include violence, abuse and disturbing imagery. Some readers — particularly those with personal experience of trauma — may find these texts difficult. Please read with care.
What do we do with the Bible’s most disturbing texts?
The violent conquest narratives of Joshua. The psalmist praying for the heads of his enemies’ babies to be dashed against the rocks (Psalm 137). The unnamed woman in Judges 19 whose violent death and abuse is used as a political message. Jesus telling his followers to hate their families (Luke 14). The harsh apocalyptic imagery of Revelation.
These are not the passages most of us reach for when we need comfort.
For as much as the Word of God brings me hope and steadiness, there are parts of Scripture I am tempted to avoid. When I read the passages above, it can be difficult to find anything that resembles grace or love. You might even call them passages of horror. They’re horrific enough in themselves — and sometimes the ways they’ve been used to cause harm throughout history has made them even more so.
And yet, the Bible does not hide them from us. They remain there, woven into the same canon that gives us the Good Shepherd and the God who will wipe every tear from our eyes. Which raises the question: what are we meant to do with them?
This Lent, I’ve been wondering whether our instinct to turn away from these texts mirrors our temptation to rush past the harder seasons of faith altogether. Lent is a long, slow walk. It begins with ashes pressed onto our foreheads, reminding us of our mortality. Over 40 days, we linger with the reality of suffering – our own and Christ’s – before we allow ourselves the joy of Easter morning.
Perhaps learning to lament, protest and wrestle with Scripture’s most troubling passages requires a similar patience.
If we can learn to walk slowly through forty days of mortality, confession, and shadow, perhaps we can learn to do the same with the Scriptures that trouble us.
Lent teaches us that not everything meaningful arrives wrapped in comfort. It is a season that asks us to resist shortcuts — to stay with what unsettles us rather than racing toward relief. If we can learn to walk slowly through forty days of mortality, confession, and shadow, perhaps we can learn to do the same with the Scriptures that trouble us. Instead of asking how quickly we can resolve them, we might begin by asking what they reveal about the world as it is — and about the God who refuses to sanitize it.
It’s easy to wonder why the Bible includes so many of these horror passages. Presumably, if God had wanted to leave us with a book that had nothing but happy stories about kind people doing nice things to each other, that could be what the Bible looks like. We could have a book full of moral exemplars that give us clear guidance about how to live life. But that’s not the book we have.
The troubling story of Uzzah
One of the stories that’s always troubled me the most has been that of poor Uzzah, the priest who was accompanying the ark on its procession into Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6:6-11). The ark is being pulled on a cart by a team of oxen and starts to wobble, so Uzzah reaches up to steady it so it won’t hit the ground. At worst, it was a careless act, but it was clearly done with good intentions. Nonetheless, as a reward for his care for the ark, God struck him dead.
I want to think of a God that’s kind and loving, who metes out grace and mercy along with justice. But there’s nothing in this passage that feels merciful or just, simply arbitrary. At the same time, it makes me reflect on how the standards I want to hold God to are my own standards of grace.
Instead of asking how quickly we can resolve troubling Bible passages, we might ask what they reveal about the world as it is — and about the God who refuses to sanitize it.
Clearly, there are many passages where God is kind and loving. There are also places where God seems to act arbitrarily or irrationally. A God that didn’t do those things, a God who was bound by my own ideas of morality, would be a much smaller God than the one presented to us in the Bible. That’s part of what it means to recognize life in all its unpleasantness, in all of its messiness. Sometimes, God doesn’t make sense. And that does not end the moral conversation; it begins it.
And I think that’s part of the answer. The Bible is wise enough to include all of life, to include as much as our faith ancestors knew about human experience and what it means to relate to God. That means it has to include everything: the good, the bad, the comforting, the troubling. It’s all there, because it’s all part of our world, and part of our relationship with the divine. If the Bible had made the decision to leave out the unpleasant parts of life, we’d know it was false. Like Job arguing with his three friends, we’d know that this theology didn’t match up with our own experience of the world.
What Lent teaches us about difficult Scripture
When we spend time with the passages that make us uncomfortable, we develop our skill in listening, even if it means listening to our own stories which may lead us to step back and name the text’s harm. As we engage them, we might be surprised by ideas that emerge. It might be that these passages can help us push back against the settled ideas about God that have calcified over the years, opening up new ways for us to understand the divine. Or it might be that they can spur us to reflect on how we can struggle against injustice in our own lives. But often, these uncomfortable passages can challenge us in a way that our tried-and-true favorites can’t — which can lead to some surprising gifts.
If we truly believe that the Bible is God’s Word to us, that includes all of it — maybe even, especially, the parts that make us the most uncomfortable.
The Christian journey through Lent asks us to spend some time with Christ’s journey to the cross, and with the thought of our own mortality. While we may be tempted to jump ahead to the joy of Easter, we know the walk with Lent’s shadows is important. In the same way, we should consider spending time with some of the parts of the Bible we’ve discounted or ignored over the years. If we truly believe that the Bible is God’s Word to us, that includes all of it — maybe even, especially, the parts that make us the most uncomfortable.
