FRIDAY POTPOURRI: THE RAIN IN SPAINLY IS SPOKEN VERY PLAINLY

Yesterday we had a new student picnic for families that are coming to St. Sebastian Parish School.  I was asked to say a few words and as part of that something similar to this was said, “This is Catholic school and at the center of that is Jesus Christ.  As such it is essential that you bring your kids to Mass on Sunday.”  After I asked a teacher if it seemed too harsh and the teacher responded, “No.  It was plain.  I like plain, clear speaking.”

 

Paragraph 19 is the Church speaking clearly and plainly concerning what she believes about the four Gospels.  She “unhesitatingly affirms” that what they faithfully relay to us what Jesus said and taught concerning our salvation until the day of His ascension.  After His ascension, what is written is true but is a further reflection on what they witnessed, learned, and contemplated in the Holy Spirit.  The purpose of their writing is that we might know truth.

 

This is not mentioned specifically but it points toward the development of the Bible also.  Firstly all these things had to be witnessed.  There are obviously things in Scripture that took place after Jesus ascended.  Hence Jesus did not hand the Church a completed Bible.  The disciples then went about teaching and preaching.  Only then did they write anything down and they were not all together when they wrote.  In fact, it would be centuries before an official Bible took form as the writings are brought together, used, studied, debated, with the Catholic Church, relying on sacred Tradition, declaring a definitive version of the Bible, which remained in place until Martin Luther.

FRIDAY POTPOURRI: TO POST OR NOT TO POST? POST? WHAT IS POST?

We are in a new chapter of Dei Verbum called “The New Testament”.  What follows are some of my thoughts and then a look at paragraph 17.

 

Some events last forever.  Mount Sinai has been remembered and celebrated for millennia but who, other than historians and those who live in Texas, really remembers and celebrates the Alamo?  It is the same thing with writing.  The stories of Shakespeare are still in our cultural memory but how many plays, books, and poems that were once celebrated and predicted to be icons of our culture were never to be heard of again?

 

Shakespearean lines permeate our sub consciousness.  Some lines invoke certain plays everyone knows.  “To be or not be?  That is the question.”  So many of his phrases are so much a part of our everyday language we do not even know we owe Shakespeare for them:

 

Wild goose chase

Too much of a good thing

Mum’s the word

 

(Just to name a few)

 

It is much the same with Scripture.  Certain lines evoke scenes from the life of Christ.  “Truth?  What is truth?”  And our language is so permeated with Biblical references that even those who don’t know Christ use them.  For example:

 

A broken heart

A drop in the bucket

A sign of the times

A thorn in the side

 

The New Testament is a seminal work.  (I bet God is glad I approve.)   It changed everything.  It took culture in an entirely new direction.  Shakespeare named our culture well, Scripture formed it.  For those “with ears to hear” it is the revelation of things once hidden.  It is unveiling of who God is though his life, death, and resurrection, His ascension and sending of His Holy Spirit to complete His work of drawing all people together into unity and pointing them toward their heavenly Father. 

 

This was entirely novel.  Things were revealed that were never known before.  We have the opportunity to know truths that were not able to be known by those before this time nor by those whose hearts are not open to it.  “The writings of the New Testament stand as a perpetual and divine witness to these realities.”

FRIDAY POTPOURRI: WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?

Dei Verbum paragraph 15

 

What other founder of a religion was foretold by prophets?  It is a common theme of stories now, in everything from Star Wars to Game of Thrones, but where historically has it happened?  With Jesus Christ.  (There are some who believe the prophet Mohamed was thusly foretold, but not without controversy.)  The place we look to see Jesus’ birth and reign, of course, is the Old Testament.  It is one of the reasons the Old Testament is so important for us.  Though the writings may contain matters that are “imperfect and provisional” for the Christian, they “never-the-less show us divine and authentic teaching.”  It is like understanding how your parents grew up before they met, married, moved, and had kids.  It explains a lot!  Therefore we are to hold dear these writings with their sublime teachings on God, wisdom, human life, as well as its “wonderful treasury of prayers.”  But so too is the mystery of our redemption hidden.

FRIDAY POTPOURRI: TO KNOW WHO WE ARE

HAPPY 4^TH of JULY TOMORROW

 

There will be no post tomorrow so Friday’s post is being moved to today.  We move into a new section of Dei Verbum entitled, “The Old Testament” in paragraph 14.

 

There has been several skirmishes over the past few decades about the politically correct way to refer to Scared Scripture before the advent of Christ.  “Old Testament” was seen as divisive and dismissive as in, “What do you do with old newspapers?  Throw them out.”  So also there was introduced the term “common era” and “before the common era” or CE and BCE.  Then there were the titles “Hebrew Scriptures” and “Christian Scriptures.”  All of them have their problems and not being one who likes to exchange problems simply to get a different set of problems, I stick with Old and New.

 

That being said, one of the problems with both “Old” and “Hebrew” is that they can be misleading.  To the uniformed they can make the first part of Sacred Scripture seem irrelevant to Christians, which is, in fact, a heresy.  They are extremely important to the Christian Church.  It is our heritage and through it we understand the New Testament better.

 

Since the fall of Adam and Eve, there had been a steady distancing between God and man.  God had to work hard to breach that gap.  So, as at the parish, when we want to start a new program we often begin with a select group of people on which to build something, God chooses a people and then sets out to form them into His family through which He will eventually capture the world.  These Old Testament Scriptures is God courting humanity (not without difficulties, breakups, reunitings, tears, and joy – the whole 9 yards) until the wedding feast of the Lamb.  If we fully want to understand ourselves, we must know our history for, “whatever was writing in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” (Rom 15:4)

FRIDAY POTPOURRI: FREEZE FRAME

Dei Verbum paragraph 12

 

A mother, seeing her son make an ugly face at one of his friends pulled him aside and said, “Son, I want to tell you a story about a little boy who always made faces like the one you made.  One day his face froze that way and he was looked on as ugly by everybody.  Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?”

 

The little boy thought about it for a moment and said, “Okay, I’ll go play with him for a while if he doesn’t have any friends because of his face.”

 

Writings, stories, and the like are subject to interpretation and occasionally we can divine the wrong message; the author intends one thing, the listener receives another.  (Just ask a priest how often that happens with his homilies.)  Scripture is no less susceptible to this.  Though it is God speaking to us, He is speaking to us through human authors.  If we want to understand what Scripture is really saying we must first determine the medium that the author is using.  The Bible is not a book.  It is a collection of books – a small library containing books on poetry, history, stories, parables, music, and the whole lot.  A parable cannot be read in the same way that a book on history is read.  And sometimes history was recorded in a different (but no less accurate way) than modern history is recorded.

 

That being said, even though the Bible is many books, there must be unity among them.  The message must be consistent from beginning to end.  And interpretation of the Scripture (held firmly in check by Sacred Tradition among Catholics) must be consistent from first century to last.  This is where the Church plays a vital role in interpreting Scripture.  And by “Church” we do not mean three old men in Rome as the common fancy makes it out to be.  Chesterton would refer to it as the democracy of the dead.  It is the understood experience of the faith beginning with Apostles, the early Church Fathers, the lived faith of 2,000 years of Catholics, and how Catholics live the faith around the world.  It will not be the case that Holy Spirit will suddenly tell the pope that it’s now Okay to have same sex marriage or that baptism should only be performed on adults.  That is not the experience of the Church going back 2,000 years.  To be able to do that as many Churches do, would be to say what was truth in 1592 is not true in 2004.  It would be just as logical to say what is true at 2:00PM on Wednesday is not true on Thursday at 6:24AM.  Truth is either truth or it is not.  Modern culture says truth is subjective.  (But then is it truth?)  The Catholic Church holds that truth is always truth and it is universal (or it is not truth.)