A couple weeks ago, I finished an eight-week home Bible study. Pam and I hosted the thing with about 18 people, and I led it. I made up my own lessons around the theme “Encounters with Jesus,” trying to impart new twists to familiar stories in the Gospels. It was fun preparing the lessons. I would take a passage, and then muse and muse on it, plumbing every word for new possibilities. In particular, I would note the information which was NOT there.

For instance, with the story of Lazarus, I grew up with a certain picture in my mind left by Sunday school teachers: he was a prominent businessman in his town, a very impressive and respected fellow, and Mary and Martha were younger sisters. But really, we don’t know the birth order of these three, or what Lazarus did, or if any of them were married, or how old they were. So I created three scenarios, then divided people into smaller groups to consider how these scenarios changed the story.

In one, I made Lazarus a 21-year-old with muscular distrophy, totally dependent on his two older sisters. In another, he was a 15-year-old good kid who almost, but didn’t quite, make the cut as one of Jesus’ disciples. Meanwhile, Mary had had an affair with Martha’s ex-husband, which is what gave Mary a bad reputation (we always assume she was a prostitute, but all we really know is that she had done something that gave her a bad reputation).

Another week, we looked at Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance to the disciples, and Thomas’s behavior. The passages in the various gospels never say that Jesus still had scars in his hands and feet. He showed the disciples his hands and side, but nothing says he had scars. He could just as easily have been saying, “Look–no marks!” If he did have scars from the nails and spear plunge, wouldn’t he still have had scars from the crown of thorns and from the terrible scourging? It’s interesting to read those passages with the thought that his hands, feet, and side were totally fixed.

Now, along comes my friend Anthony Blair with a post about Esther, an Old Testament heroine who I’ve always felt was not somebody to be admired. You can read his excellent post here. I left a comment taken from Frederick Buechner’s book “Peculiar Treasures,” in which he takes off-beat looks at a slew of Bible characters. It’s one of my all-time favorite books. Buechner notes that the book of Esther “has the distinction of being the only book in the Bible where the name of God isn’t even mentioned. There seems every reason to believe that he considered himself well out of it.” Read Anthony’s post and see if you agree.