I
It was 1954, nine years before Vatican II. I was completely packed to leave for the Carmelite seminary. My dilemma was that I still had a gift of a large bible. Like most Catholics at the time, I had no interest in the bible. However, I had great love and respect for my parish priest who had given it to me. Love for my mentor won out. I reluctantly took the bible.
Over the years, I continued to drag the bible with me until in my final few years I began to use it in my studies. After about a decade of studies and formation, I finally began to develop some appreciation and a little enthusiasm for the bible. Slowly, I was learning that my spirituality was completely devoid of the gift of God’s Word. It was only after the teachings of Vatican II began to seep into my consciousness in my first years as a priest that I began a journey leading to true love for the bible. Now, after fifty-eight years as a priest, I say that not a day goes by that I do not appreciate the bible more. It is a source of wisdom and light and a guide to daily experience.
One of the keys for me on the journey from ignorance and indifference to love and commitment for God’s Word was this. I began to understand the bible as a story that is, indeed, our story.
II
The Chosen People’s Experience of God
I recall a simple gesture in one my classes some time ago. A husband arrived late and gave a short, affectionate kiss to his wife of many years as he sat down next to her. That kiss was quite modest yet expressive of a deep reality. It was not just a display of affection. It carried the weight of their mutual journey for better or worse, in sickness and in health over the decades.
The Bible is like that kiss. It is a story of love between God and his people. It is simple but also extravagant. It mirrors a story of human allegiance, ambivalence and rejection covering centuries.
The creation accounts in Genesis have their own style. They convey a deeply symbolic message. They contain profound insights about the human experience and our historical reality. Their description of the human venture is rooted in three fundamental and deeply connected relationships: with God, neighbor and creation. The Genesis account relates a basic brokenness in these three vital interactions. This is the reality of sin. Our parents set the pattern. We follow it.
We presume to take the place of God at the center of all reality. We refuse to acknowledge the limits of being creatures. While the Bible is the story of salvation, the need for salvation flows from the stories of human rebellion revealed in the first eleven chapters of Genesis.
Pope Francis has a name for this sin placing ourselves at the center in today’s historical experience. He labels it a “practical relativism”: placing ourselvesat the center, giving absolute priority to immediate convenience and all else becomes relative.
This relativism, a powerful and pervasive expression of sin in our day, leads to the exploitation and neglect of others in all manner of ways. People are reduced to objects. Abuse of others, especially economically, racially and sexually, is a natural consequence of this way of thinking. This approach features the invisible forces of the market, human trafficking, organized crime, drug trade, and rampant misuse of the land, air and sea, along with forests and all animal life. All these destructive forces flow from this false vision and denial of human dignity. Another expression of this sin is the “use and throw away” routine of a malignant consumerism. This daily corruption of our environment generates a vast waste that is destroying our ecosystem.
The story of salvation that begins in chapter twelve of Genesis is about the call and promise made to Abraham. The story covers almost two thousand years of the evolution of that promise leading to Jesus whose life concludes this epoch struggle of sin and grace.
In its broadest sweep, the story flows in a time-frame of two thousand years from Abraham to Moses to David. It then moves to the prophets climaxing in Jesus. It is a continual expression of God’s faithfulness and human ambivalence. The story moves from the promise of Abraham becoming the father of a great nation to Moses liberating the people on the way to the Promised Land. The era of David and the kings initiates the idea of hope for God’s final intervention in the person of the Messiah. The enlightenment of the prophets’ message develops and deepens this hope. Along the way, we are gifted with the collective wisdom of the people in many of the other books and stories, especially in the psalms. It also draws us deeper into the mystery of this ever-active, always loving and saving God.
During this entire journey of Abraham’s family who evolve from the twelve tribes into the Chosen People, the hope of the promise advances in spite of the consistent and profound infidelities. Likewise, there is a slow but steady growth in the communal understanding of who God is and what God wants. Many centuries after Abraham, the people came to the deepest truth of all: there is only one God, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.
The entire thrust of the movement of this salvation history leads to Jesus, the Word of God. In Jesus, we have the fullness of God’s revelation. We have the invitation into the Mystery of Love.
III
In the twelfth week of Ordinary Time, there are some exceptional daily readings from the Second Book of Kings. The first event in 721 BC deals with the destruction of the Northern Kingdom. The second, in 587 BC, describes the destruction of the temple and the exile of the Southern Kingdom. To all appearances, God had abandoned his commitment to his Chosen People. There were few darker moments in the entire history of Abraham’s family.
At this most intense interval of despair and hopelessness, God inspired three of the greatest prophets of the Jewish Scriptures to proclaim his presence once again.
Jeremiah was a prophet of doom. He confronted the comfortable and materialistic prosperity that led to negligence of religious practice and self-centeredness in total neglect of their religious heritage. He foretold the chaos that was coming.
Ezekiel shared the same message of Jeremiah but he joined the people in the exile. This led him to change his tone. Caught in the total despair and complete poverty of the life in Babylonia, he switched to a message of profound hope and compassion.
Isiah spoke only a message of consolation and deliverance. His voice rang out in the final and darkest days before the return to Jerusalem. His message of beautiful trust in God is often described as the foreshadowing of the gospel.
While these prophets spoke in the bleakest of times, they spoke in the most decisive of times in Israel’s long search for the true experience of God. The people were stripped down to their most feeble and empty condition. They came to God with truly empty hands.
These prophets had a powerful message of renewed faith in the God of their ancestors. They called for a revitalization the old traditions of seeing God acting in history. They led the fight to return to true worship and the practice of observing the teachings of Moses.
Out of the darkness and desolation of fifty years of the Babylonian banishment, we encounter some of the most profound spiritual teachings of the Jewish Scriptures. Particularly strong is the unrelenting commitment to monotheism. There is no God but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
IV
In the experience of the exile, we have an invitation into our own experience. Our darkest times find us stripped down to our most feeble and dire destiny. We are free to see with a new clarity and power our total dependence on God. In our poverty, we are drawn to a new burst of insight: only God can save us and set us free!
Now the words of the bible, with a lifetime of a tired familiarity, are transformed with a new authority and light to reveal a God who always hears the cry of the poor. In our weakness, we now know this is our cry. God will not forsake us.
Whether it is in the pandemic or a family crisis, a loss of a job or a troubled child, a lifetime of racial or sexual hostility or a continuing surge of a gun-spawned violence, there is hope. The Word of God has spoken. Love will win out. We need to embrace that message in the reality of our darkness and tears.
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