the power of context

My 1000-day battle rival blogged something interesting about me: http://josesfromhalifax.blogspot.com/2011/12/man-among-men.html

I am quite encouraged by the title, but I am compelled to explain the situation in case people think I am too scandalous. I was born and raised in Guatemala, though both my parents are Chinese. In Latin American culture, the salutations are very physical. Girls will say hi or say farewell with a kiss on the cheek, no matter if she just has met this person. Meanwhile handshakes are performed between guys. Obviously this is very outrageous for Chinese people, because the way to say hi or farewell in Chinese culture is to like take a step back and raise the hand to make a signal of hi or goodbye (which looks the same).

So regarding the blog post, we were just saying farewell in the context of the Latin American culture (since the girl went for an exchange to Uruguay). Nothing scandalous here if you know the context.

This is actually a great illustration for interpreting some texts from the bible. A lot of times, we tend to read certain passages and get fond of certain verses that we can relate to, and I do that quite a bit. But there were cases when I was taking bible verses out of context, which is dangerous because I can interpret the bible incorrectly. For example:

"'Meaningless! Meaningless!' 
   says the Teacher. 
'Utterly meaningless! 
   Everything is meaningless.'" - Ecclesiastes 1:2

I used to go to quote that as an excuse to skip tutorials, because seriously 99.99% of our tutorials were useless. (By the way, I was jokingly quoting that verse). If we take this verse as it is, then we can say that everything we do is meaningless, therefore I have an excuse to not do well in school, to not work hard and just spend the entire day playing video games. But that's not the case! We need to learn about the context of the entire chapter 1 (and the entire book) so that we can understand the author's intent.

Another cool thing about context is that it helps us uncover a greater meaning of the a passage. Let's look at  the Parable of the Lost Son in Luke 15:11-32. This passage is very familiar, we are often identified with the younger son because we naturally run away from God. For the longest time, I focused on debating who the older son is (whether is refer to the Jews or not), but then I realized that this passage is not really about either sons, but about the father's compassion.

Verse 20 is very key because it says that the father ran towards his son. Normally, this is not a big deal, as we can say that the father indeed is compassionate and misses his son, so it is quite normal for him to run. But if we dig into the Jewish culture, men do not run, like they do not run because it is considered shameful because in the way they are dressed. So here, the father didn't care whether running was shameful, but went out of his way to kiss his son. And in similar manner, our God who is almighty, powerful, indescribable, glorious, and awesome, has gone out of His way to save mere sinners like us. And this understanding makes me see how much more gracious and compassionate our God is!