Sunday of the Word of God

 

Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, was a man of contradictions. He was the drafter of the Declaration of Independence, which boldly proclaims that all men are created equal, with the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

At the same time, he owned hundreds of slaves and fathered several children by one of them.

These are well-known facts. But lately there’s been a lot of interest in another contradictory part of Jefferson’s life: his Christianity.

Jefferson professed to be a Christian but if he was, he was a most remarkable one. He decided to edit the Bible to suit his own beliefs. He literally cut-and-pasted his own Gospel with a razor and glue.

Jefferson’s Bible cuts out all the miracles of Jesus, including his Resurrection, along with any texts that suggest he is God.

But Jefferson’s Jesus is a dead moral teacher. You can’t have a personal relationship with him.

Might some of us be a bit like Thomas Jefferson, cutting and pasting our Bibles to produce a result we can be comfortable with? Or at least not trying to meet the living Lord in its pages?

It’s a good question to ask ourselves today, since it’s the second Sunday of the Word of God, an annual event that Pope Francis instituted last year with Aperuit Illis, a powerful letter to the Church. 

As Catholics, we are truly blessed with sacraments that strengthen and nourish us, but we need to remind ourselves—and not just once a year—that the Word of God also feeds our souls and heals our wounds.

A growing awareness of the importance of Scripture in the life of the Church is one of the many blessings from what’s called the ecumenical movement, the efforts made by Catholics and other Christians to learn from one another in a climate of mutual respect in order to promote Church unity.

This movement began some ninety years ago and has born much fruit since. The restoration of unity among all Christians became “one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council,” (Decree on Ecumenism, n.1) which praised the “love and reverence of Sacred Scripture” shown by our brothers and sisters in other Church communities (n. 21).

Today marks the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Pope Francis points out that “the celebration of the Sunday of the Word of God has ecumenical value, since the Scriptures point out, for those who listen, the path to authentic and firm unity”(Aperuit Illis, n. 3).

As we pray for the unity of Christians, a prayer very close to the heart of Jesus himself, we might also pray in gratitude for the good example of those Protestants who take the Bible so seriously.

Taking the Bible seriously is not an option for any Christian, Protestant or Catholic. In his usual forceful way, Pope Francis says that without a closer relationship with Sacred Scripture “our hearts will remain cold and our eyes shut, struck as we are by so many forms of blindness” (Aperuit Illis, n. 8).

I don’t know about you, but I find those words scary. The Pope isn’t just encouraging us to read Scripture more often, as already Vatican II and his predecessors had done. He is telling us that we desperately need the Bible to see clearly in this darkened world, “struck as we are by so many forms of blindness.”

We are blind without the Bible.

Honestly, stop and listen to his words again: “we need to develop a closer relationship with sacred Scripture; otherwise, our hearts will remain cold and our eyes shut.”

Of course, this isn’t just a negative message, frightening though it is. It is good news, wonderful news: “Christ Jesus is knocking at our door in the words of sacred Scripture,” Pope Francis adds. “If we hear his voice and open the doors of our minds and hearts, then he will enter our lives and remain ever with us”(Aperuit Illis, n. 8).

Brothers and sisters, I was wrong about this pandemic. I lived through the panic of the SARS virus and other scares, so I was confident things would be back to normal in six months. If I’d had any idea how long the crisis would last, or how we would be stopped from gathering for Mass, I would have approached things very differently.

We have focused on making sure the sacraments are as available as we can make them—hearing confessions outside, livestreaming Mass, trying to make it possible for every parishioner to come to church every Sunday when that was allowed, and now distributing Holy Communion outside each week.

There’s sure nothing wrong with those efforts, and I am proud of them.

But if we knew we would be kept away from the Lord’s Table for so long, we might have shifted gears: because in his letter on the Sunday of the Word of God, Pope Francis reminds us of something crucial: Sacred Scripture and the sacraments are inseparable.

Maybe we should have challenged ourselves to make this the year of the Word of God and not just the Sunday of the Word of God. Maybe we should have looked more to the Bible for the nourishment of our souls when we were cut off from Holy Communion.

I don’t know about you, but if someone played one of those word games where you had to complete a phrase beginning with “Bible” I would have called out “Study.” Nothing wrong about studying the Bible, of course, but there’s so much more.

As the Pope says, we need a close relationship to God’s Word. Study is part of that, of course, but only a part. And speaking of relationship—people sometimes ask me, even with some frustration, how they can find the personal relationship with Jesus they hear so much about in our parish.

A big part of the answer, alongside prayer and sacraments, is Scripture. A closer relationship with Scripture means a closer relationship with Jesus.

St. Jerome said as much when he wrote that “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”

And the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “the word of God is living and active.” Read in faith, the Bible is an encounter, a place of meeting with God himself.

The Gospels are, of course, a privileged place to meet Jesus, to come to know him, to accept his invitation to “come and see.” But they are not the only place where our relationship deepens. We meet the Lord throughout the Bible, in his plan for creation revealed in Genesis, in the prophecies of Isaiah and the other great prophets, and especially in the Psalms.

Pope Francis reminds us that in the Book of Nehemiah the Old Testament gives us one of the great stories of an entire community encountering God through his word. When the people of Israel returned to their homeland after their exile, they gathered for the public reading of Scripture. And all the people wept as they discovered their own experience in the sacred text.(Aperuit Illis, n. 4).

When we gather again after the exile the pandemic has imposed on us, I hope our parish community will also hear God’s word in a new and powerful way.

I admit to you that I don’t spend as much time with my Bible as I should. I remember very clearly one young man who told me his motto was “no Bible, no breakfast, no Bible, no bed.” If I lived by that I would be hungry and sleepy. But I’ve never forgotten what he said.

But let me conclude with a personal experience of the Word as living and active, working in my heart and strengthening my relationship to Scripture.

After Communion at Mass last Sunday, the choir sang Psalm 139, one of my favourites.  Of course, it was beautiful, like everything we hear from our blessed choir loft.

But it wasn’t the exquisite music that left me holding back tears. It was the encounter with the inspired words, the encounter with the living Word that opened my eyes and warmed my heart.

Is there a passage from the Bible that’s special to you like that? Not one that gives you moral guidance as much as it connects you to God?

If not, today might be a good day to go looking. The choir will sing Psalm 139 again at Communion time today. It might touch you as it touched me. Or maybe you can look up a passage in your Bible that was once important to you.

You might start to read one of the Gospels—Mark’s, the simplest, or John’s, the richest.

If you’d like me to suggest a few scriptures which might help you find the heart-warming relationship the Pope talks about on his letter, feel free to send me an email and I will reply with a few references.

And the weekly update on the website gives some ideas for both Bible study and lectio divina, prayer with Scripture.

We should all do something on this Sunday of the Word of God. But let’s be guided by these last words from Pope Francis:

“A day devoted to the Bible should not be seen as a yearly event but rather a year-long event, for we urgently need to grow in our knowledge and love of the Scriptures and of the risen Lord, who continues to speak his word and to break bread in the community of believers.”(Aperuit Illis, n. 8).