When the Bible Makes You Uncomfortable
Violence, judgment, miracles: they are not three unrelated awkward corners of Scripture that need separate explanations. They are three ways in which the Bible confronts us with the absolute seriousness of God's love.
BIBLE STUDIES
When the Bible Makes You Uncomfortable
Let me tell you something I've noticed in years of ministry. The passages of Scripture that make people squirm are almost always the ones doing the most important work.
Someone reads about God commanding the destruction of a city and wants to close the book. Someone else hits a passage about divine judgment and quietly decides the God of the Old Testament must be a different God entirely from Jesus. A third person reads about the parting of the Red Sea or the feeding of five thousand and wonders privately whether they're supposed to take it literally, or whether admitting doubt makes them a bad Catholic.
These are not fringe concerns. These are the questions sitting in the pews on a Sunday morning, unasked, because nobody has created the space to ask them.
So let's create that space right here.
The Bible is not a problem to be managed. It is a story to be entered.
That's the first thing to say. When we approach Scripture as though it's a public relations document for God — something to be smoothed over, softened, explained away — we've already gone wrong. The Church has never done that. The great theologians, the saints, the Fathers of the Church: they wrestled with the hard passages. They didn't pretend they weren't there.
What the Catholic tradition offers is not a way of avoiding the difficulty. It offers a way of reading it faithfully.
Here are three areas where that faithful reading makes all the difference.
Violence in Scripture: Descriptive, Not Prescriptive
When people encounter the battles, the conquests, the moments of apparently divine-sanctioned destruction in the Old Testament, the temptation is one of two extremes. Either you defend everything uncritically — "God said it, that settles it" — or you reject the whole thing as primitive and barbaric.
The Catholic tradition says: hold on. Read more carefully.
There is a crucial distinction between a text that describes what happened and a text that prescribes what should happen. The Bible is an honest account of a people being slowly, painfully, sometimes stumblingly formed by God across centuries of history. It does not airbrush the violence of the ancient world. It does not pretend that God's people always behaved well, or that every act carried out in God's name was, in fact, carried out according to God's will.
The Catechism is clear that Scripture must be read as a whole, in the light of the Tradition that has received it, and above all in the light of Christ. And when we bring the violence of the Old Testament to the foot of the Cross, something remarkable happens. We see that God's answer to human violence was not more violence. It was self-giving love. The one who could have called down legions of angels chose instead to be silent before Pilate, to carry his cross, to forgive from the wood.
That is the trajectory of the whole story. God is not endorsing the violence of history. God is patiently, across millennia, drawing humanity out of it.
Think of it this way. A brilliant teacher working with a deeply troubled class does not immediately impose a perfect curriculum on the first day. She meets the students where they are. She works with what she has. She moves them, gradually, towards something better. That is what God is doing in salvation history, and the violence in Scripture is, among other things, an honest record of how far there was still to go.
Judgment: Not Cruelty, But Clarity
Divine judgment is perhaps the teaching that makes modern Western Christians most uncomfortable. We have absorbed, almost without noticing, a cultural assumption that a loving God would never judge — that judgment and love are opposites.
But think about that for a moment.
Imagine a world in which there truly were no judgment. A world in which cruelty had no consequences, in which the oppressor was never held to account, in which the suffering of the innocent simply evaporated into indifference. Would that be love? Or would it be the most profound abandonment imaginable?
When Catholics speak of God's judgment, we are not speaking of a temperamental deity lashing out in anger. We are speaking of God naming reality truthfully. We are speaking of a God who takes human choices seriously enough to let them have consequences. We are speaking, above all, of a God who hears the cry of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger — and who does not remain silent.
Judgment is justice. And justice is what love looks like when it encounters suffering.
Moreover — and this is often overlooked — the great Catholic tradition has always held judgment and mercy together, not as contradictions, but as two dimensions of the same divine love. God's judgment is never simply punishment for its own sake. It is always oriented towards restoration, towards the possibility of return. The prophets announce terrible judgment and in almost the same breath announce the promise of new life. Even the Book of Revelation, which can seem to modern eyes like an extended exercise in divine wrath, is fundamentally a vision of the Lamb who was slain taking his rightful throne, and of all things being made new.
Jesus himself holds these two things together with extraordinary precision. "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body," he says. And then: "Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God." The God who judges is the God who notices every sparrow. These are not two different Gods. They are one God, and his name is Love.
Miracles: Signs, Not Magic
Let me be honest about something. In my experience, the question of miracles divides not into believers and sceptics, but into two quite different kinds of believer.
There are those who believe in miracles the way they believe in magic — as interruptions in the normal order, spectacular interventions that prove God is real because something extraordinary has happened. And there are those who have absorbed so much of the scientific worldview that they quietly spiritualise miracles away — the feeding of the five thousand becomes a miracle of sharing, the resurrection becomes a spiritual experience of the disciples, and so on.
The Catholic Church, characteristically, refuses both of those exits.
Miracles are real. The Incarnation is not a metaphor. The Resurrection is not a symbol. The Church has always affirmed that God acts in history, that the natural order is not a closed system, and that the Creator is not imprisoned by his creation.
But miracles are not magic. Magic is power exercised for its own sake, power that impresses, power that compels. The miracles of Jesus are signs — they point beyond themselves to the identity and mission of the one performing them. When Jesus heals the blind man, he is not simply demonstrating an impressive ability. He is revealing that he is the light of the world. When he raises Lazarus, he is not simply reversing a biological process. He is declaring: "I am the resurrection and the life." When he multiplies loaves and fish, he is anticipating the Eucharist, the feeding of the whole world with himself.
Every miracle in the Gospels is a theological statement. Reading them well means asking not just "did this happen?" but "what is this revealing?"
And for Catholics, the answer is always the same: it is revealing Christ. The one in whom all things hold together. The one who is not outside the suffering of the world, looking in, but who has entered it completely, taken it into himself, and carried it through death into life.
What Holds This Together
Here is what I want you to take away from all of this.
Violence, judgment, miracles: they are not three unrelated awkward corners of Scripture that need separate explanations. They are three ways in which the Bible confronts us with the absolute seriousness of God's love.
The violence in Scripture shows us the cost of human sin — what happens when we choose ourselves over God and over each other, and how far God is willing to go to bring us back.
The judgment in Scripture shows us that God's love is not indifferent or sentimental. It is committed, fiercely, to justice and to truth.
The miracles in Scripture show us that this God is not a distant observer. He is the God who heals, who restores, who raises the dead, who can be trusted with everything — including the things that seem most lost.
Read together, through the lens of Christ, they do not give us a God who is frightening or contradictory. They give us a God who is enormous. A God far bigger than our comfort zones, far more committed to our flourishing than we are ourselves, and far more willing to get his hands dirty in the mess of human history than any theology of comfortable distance could ever accommodate.
The Bible is not a problem. It is an invitation into the grandeur of God.
And that, I think, is worth talking about.
Ancient Apostolic Catholic Church
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