Hearing Echoes. . .

When I was a small boy, my parents used to take us to Echo Lake, near Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. We’d stand on the shore and shout. . .then wait for the echo to come back. Endless fascination. I couldn’t get the same result in our back yard, or at a nearby lake.

I’m still hearing echoes, now when someone reads Scripture on Sunday
mornings. Something in Luke sounds like something from Isaiah; the reader speaks and across time the echo comes back. Brian Estelle’s Echoes of Exodus: Tracing a Biblical Motif (www.ivpacademic.com) probes this phenomenon within the Old Testament—begun during the account of the Exodus in Moses and followed in the Psalms, Isaiah, during the exile and return. Then he shows us how echoes of that paradigmatic event are used in the Gospels, Acts, Paul, Peter, and the Apocalypse to tell the good news of the kingdom.

Richard Hays (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 1989) was an early pioneer in noticing
these echoes—not direct quotations, or even a more obvious allusions to another/earlier part of
the big story of Scripture, but brief glimpses or echoes that resonate for a hearer who knows the
broad sweep of the story. He likens it to watching a play with brief snatches of earlier history
projected on a back screen. You just barely see them, but they trigger a response: “This play is
about something else.” He has a big word for this: metalepsis, meaning that the brief snatch brings
the larger original context with it and the hearer senses/remembers that. For instance, how can
you hear “holy, holy, holy” without remembering Isaiah’s vision, or the hymn and when you sang
it on some memorable occasion? As he begins the book, Estelle interacts with Hays for a few
pages, taking what he’s learned into his kit bag.

As Estelle moves into Luke’s writings, especially the gospel, he focuses on a few passages: Luke
3:2-6 that he calls Luke’s framing discourse—clues Luke gives the hearer about how to
listen—and the “End of Exile,” where he establishes the role of the Exodus in the gospel; Luke 4,
the temptation and the sermon at Nazareth about liberation/exodus; Luke 9, the transfiguration;
Luke 9:51–19:44, Luke’s unique travel narrative, the journey to Jerusalem; and Luke 24, hearing
the Old Testament as a story about Jesus. In each of these he develops the ways in which the
exodus theme emerges. I’ll be consulting this chapter as my local church listens to Luke’s gospel
this summer and fall. Estelle’s writing is academic and demanding, but worth the effort and even
re-reading a section to see more deeply into the biblical text.

Estelle notes that Augustine viewed the complexity of Scripture, all those human authors making
intentional and unintentional allusions and echoes, in the light of the divine author behind the
scenes, composing the various books “like an ineffably gifted artist combining movements into a
sung poem.” At one level, Scripture is more like a symphony than a systematic theology.

—Larry Sibley, guest contributor (husband of Lois, he also moonlights as a teacher and writer).