SCRIPTURE
|
When you talk about the shortest books of the Bible, the Second Letter of John in the New Testament must be a magnet of attention. 2 John consists of one chapter, which in turn consists of four modest paragraphs. The First Letter of John, by contrast, consists of five chapters; see the preceding post on this stream. My initial reaction to the study of this letter led me to think that this tiny snippet, along with the equally short Third Letter of John, were included in the New Testament Canon primarily because of the identification of the author as the “Apostle John” or one or more of his closest disciples in the writings of early Church sources.
However, the content of these three letters together contributes a considerable amount in the development of the Church and its Tradition. The most recent research I have at my fingertips, To Doan’s introduction to the three letters of John in The Paulist Biblical Commentary [2018], indicates that we still know very little about the authors of the entire library attributed to the Apostle John, including the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation. This did not seem to trouble the early bishops who inserted the Letters of John into the New Testament Canon. The content of the letters themselves treat of the nature of Christ, the errant followers or early heretics, the Antichrist, and the daily morality of a people baptized into the life of God, who is love. 2 John, like its companion pieces, was most likely written in Western Turkey [then marked on maps as Asia Minor] late in the first century. Turkey is a far piece from Jerusalem, which had been leveled by the Romans in 70 A.D., and Rome, where the Christian Church was setting roots, despite intermittent persecutions, to establish a general evangelization to the entire empire. Thus, Turkey, isolated from Roman and Palestinian culture, was significantly influenced by Greek thought. Think for a moment of St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 1:23: “Jews demand signs and Greeks search for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles…” For a moment, let’s concentrate on why Christians were persecuted in their missionary efforts. Roman persecution was easy to understand. Roman emperors were considered gods, and the Christian refusal to venerate the emperors was interpreted as treason and punished accordingly, if not constantly. Jewish persecution, until the fall of Jerusalem, rested upon the idea that to equate the crucified Jesus of Nazareth to the Lord Yahweh, whose very name was forbidden to pronounce—was blasphemy to the ultimate degree. But further to the East, as Christians settled in Greece and Turkey, they encountered the rich world of Greek philosophy, the land of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, whose bodies of work were produced a few centuries before Christ. Aristotle, known simply through Church history as “The Philosopher,” would inspire St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1200’s A.D. to put forward the Catholic structure of thought we still find today in the Catechism and other standard texts. Greek thought from this era is notable for its “metaphysics,” a term which roughly means “that which comes after physics.” Put another way, metaphysics is the science of drawing mental conclusions of reality from what we can see and experience in the material world. In one sense the Greeks opened a gulf between a material world and a world beyond visibility, a principle that reality is composed of matter and spirit. Because of Greek thought, the Church would be able to develop a religious anthropology in what a human being possessed a body and a soul. Without the Greeks, we would still think of a person as a unitary creature whose death was the end of human essence. Two things happened when the early Christians, mostly Jewish converts, began to encounter the Greek world. The Greek questioned how the metaphysical god of total otherness could be identified with the human Jesus of Nazareth. St. Paul’s sermon at the altar of the unknown god [Acts 17:23] tackles this conflict head on, but his Greek hearers replied “we should like to hear you on this some other time,” as polite a brush-off as one finds in the bible. The second challenge faced by Christians in Greek lands was an infiltration of pseudo-Christians who carried misbegotten metaphysical notions about Jesus that, taken together, denied the pillar of salvation possibility: the Incarnation. God, they reasoned, could not become man. 2 John is a letter written by an elder [presbyteros] from another Christian assembly to people he knows well, calling them “the chosen Lady and to her children,” emphasizing the truth that dwells within them, that Christ is one with the eternal Father. He commends the fact that some of the children [members] are walking in the truth. He reminds them of the necessity of loving one another, not as a new teaching, but as something that has been the cornerstone of every teaching they have received. But all is not well. The elder is distressed. In 2 John 1:7 he warns against the antichrist, an apocalyptic figure who will mislead many just before the Second Coming, which evidently was expected soon. But in 2 John 1:9 the elder becomes more specific, and he commands this local church to reject “progressives” from among its membership. Goodbye Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? Perhaps some bishops would favor that today, but, the elder is referring to a brand of Christian teaching which held that the man Jesus Christ would “progress” on to a higher metaphysical plane. Such corrupted teachers could not bring themselves to believe that Jesus could be both God and man, which is the heart of orthodox Christology. An error like this one arises from a belief that matter is evil, and only the metaphysical [or “spiritual”] is good and true. This is a contradiction of the Hebrew accounts of creation, where God looked out over everything he created and saw that it was good. Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si addresses the sacredness of God’s creation in our own time. If matter is evil, then the human Jesus is evil and unworthy of our faith. Unfortunately, denial of Christ’s humanity had a long shelf life. In the days of 2 John such heresy would have multiple names and forms, such as Docetism and Gnosticism. In the fourth century the heresy, under the name of Arianism, would prompt the first Ecumenical Council at Nicaea [325 A.D.], which produced the Nicene Creed we proclaim every Sunday. One reason 2 John is so brief is the elder’s pledge to personally visit this community shortly to elaborate his concern, perhaps to correct in-house error, and to extend the love of his own Christian community to them.
0 Comments
Our first foray into the “little books” of the Bible will take us into the New Testament Epistles of John, of which there are three distinct letters. I can recall as a grad student in the early 1970’s that one of the most hotly debated subjects in our biblical courses and in the scholarly literature of the day involved the identity of the author [more likely, authors] of the five books of the New Testament which carried the name of John—i.e., the Gospel, Revelation, and the three distinct letters. The similarities of thought between the Gospel and the epistles led many—not all-scholars to hypothesize that early Christianity experienced something of a split between followers of Peter and followers of “the beloved disciple.” For centuries “the beloved disciple” was believed to be the Apostle John himself, but Scriptural evidence identifying John the son of Zebedee with the beloved disciple is sketchy at best. John 21:15f seems to attempt to solve some kind of rift between Peter and the beloved disciple, or between their followers.
Using the eyeball test, that is, reading the Gospel of John and the Letters of John straight through, one can see an affinity between the Gospel and the Letters, though the theory of a separate community is not as strongly embraced today as it was half a century ago. The Biblical scholar Toan Do wrote the commentary on John’s Letters for The Paulist Biblical Commentary [2018] and in his introduction Do writes this: “”A sound explanation is that the Johannine Epistles were composed separately [from the Gospel] and were circulated for both personal and communal reading among the churches.” [PBC, p. 1552] Do puts the date of composition of the Gospel around 95 AD and the letters between 100 and 110 AD. The consensus of scholarship places the composition of these letters in Asia Minor, specifically western Turkey. Whether the Apostle John, or another apostle, or a scribe of John’s finished the Gospel, the Church has always considered the Gospel of Apostolic inspiration, and thus the Epistles as inspired commentaries of the theology of the Gospel. This body of literature places special emphasis upon themes vital to Church identity, the priority of love and the fact that Jesus is fully human as well as fully divine. The two great doctrines around which our tradition is built were coming to fruition and understanding in the Johannine era, i.e., the Incarnation and the Resurrection. Curiously, the harder of the two proved to be the Incarnation. There were wholesale defections or schisms which plagued the early Church, most of them dealing with the mistaken notion that Jesus was a “faux human,” a divinity who only appeared to be a man. In Greek the verb for “to demonstrate” or “to show” is doceo, and eventually the heresy known today as Docetism argues in various ways that those who claimed to have seen Christ in his flesh were viewing a projection, so to speak, rather than a human like us in all things but sin, bound by the limits of space and time. Docetism in its raw form renders Jesus’ crucifixion useless and helpless in the forgiveness of sin on the grounds that the perfect sacrifice on Calvary never really happened. The other heresy which plagued the infant Church along with Docetism was Gnosticism, from the Greek word for “knowledge.” Gnosticism was already in circulation as a philosophy before the birth of Christ, holding that material things are evil and only mystical spiritual realities were true. In its Christian iteration, only “sacred knowledge” shared with the chosen had the power to save. The idea of matter=evil percolated into Catholic thought long after the Johannine era, impacting St. Augustine’s teachings on sexuality four centuries after Christ. As among the last writings of the New Testament in terms of date of composition, the letters of John squared off with the established enemies of the Apostolic Tradition, both from within and outside the Church. The author or authors of these letters thus labored with a two-front challenge: to defend and enforce the holiness of the Church while protecting it from errors of thought and practice. 1 John 1:1-4 bears a striking similarity to the beginning of John’s Gospel, emphasizing the visibility of the Word [God] multiple times and affirming fellowship among fellow believers. In 1 John 1: 5-10, the author speaks of God as light; he equates true Christian faith with a conduct of walking always in light. Verses 6 and 7 speak of the importance of living in light, i.e., believing what the Church believes. To acknowledge one’s sins, in this context sins of disbelief, enables us to enjoy the saving fellowship of the church assembly, the body that has been cleansed by “the blood of his Son, Jesus….” This is a sweep at the Gnostic/Docetic element who spread division in the Church and denied the power of Christ’s blood to save. Many commentators believe that this letter, 1 John, was intended as a teaching statement for the general Christian Church, with the other two letters directed to specific communities. Chapter 2 continues the theme of Christ’s blood [i.e., his full human sacrifice on the cross] as redemptive in saving us from sin and darkness. The author uses language similar to John’s Gospel: “The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments.” As Do explains, Chapter 2 emphasizes the closeness of Jesus to his followers, beginning the section with the invocation, “my children.” The closeness of the church is wounded, in the author’s mind, when even one member sins by deviating from the command of God to love one another. Unlike the Gnostics, the true Christian believer’s fidelity is a commitment to love his neighbor and seek the forgiveness won by Christ in his flesh. There is no “secret key” restricted to a few, and one will be judged by conduct in the here and now, in flesh and bones. The author does use the term “world” with varied nuances. The saving forgiveness of the Father is extended to the whole world, but in Chapter 2 the believer is urged not to “join the world,” which stands in need of forgiveness. The Gospel and Letters share a feeling of the temporary nature of this world; in the Passion narrative of John’s Gospel, Jesus tells Pilate that “my kingdom is not of this world.” The author of the Gospel uses the parallel of day and night as a literary device to make this distinction. Judas leaves the Last Supper “at night” to betray Jesus. The Samaritan woman, by contrast, finds faith at high noon. These Letters carry something of this motif into their teaching. The final three chapters of 1 John speak of a love ethic. Chapter 3 is sobering on this point, calling to mind the murder of Abel by Cain to show the violent excesses resulting where brother hates brother, instead of the other way around. Chapter 4 addresses “the testing of spirits,” an idiom for the ideas and practices of a Christian community. The author provides a rule of thumb in discerning thoughts and deeds: “every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come into the flesh belongs to God.” Chapter 5 repeats and reemphasizes much of what has been said before. We can guess that the author believed these basic themes needed repeating, having seen repeated disunity in the community and constant denial of the power of God to save his children through the blood of Christ. Christian communities at the end of the first century were for the most part small islands of believer struggling not just to preach to the strange worlds around them, but to clarify what it was that kept them united and courageous in the first place. In last week’s “Things Biblical” stream on the Café blog, I touched upon the formation of the Biblical canon [admittedly in broad strokes], specifically how the Church collectively defined the “library” of sacred books containing the entirety of God’s revelation. The formation of the Canon/Scripture was a long and arduous task for both the Jewish and Christian traditions. It may surprise you that the final binding pronouncement of the New Testament books was not formally proclaimed until the Catholic Council of Trent [1545-1563], though by this time the list of the 27 New Testament books was an accepted fact for about a millennium. Trent also established the Jewish Canon or Old Testament at 45 books for Christian usage; Luther, in translating the bible into German, had omitted several Jewish books a few decades before Trent’s deliberations. Hence the expression “Catholic Bible vs. Protestant Bible.” It is remarkable to stand back and look at the full canon of the Judeo-Christian bible and consider that each work was selected for a reason under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The theological principles underlying the selection process for the New Testament appear to have been [1] Apostolicity, the belief that the sacred authors were faithfully rendering the actual teachings of Jesus as heard and conveyed by the Apostles; [2] doctrinal soundness, or coordination with developing beliefs within the Church, such as the full human nature of Christ; and [2] liturgical usage and circulation, i.e., the texts were commonly used in Eucharistic celebrations and preaching. If you sat down with a piece of paper and listed every book of the Bible you could name, how well would you do? If you could recall 20, you would be close to three-quarters short. The Gospels, of course, capture our attention, as well they should. But our ancestors in faith included 68 other books. Some are long and majestic, others amazingly terse. What I am going to do next is list the books of the Bible by length, specifically the number of chapters in each. [If you see a book you’ve never heard of, click this link to the USCCB Bible site and then click the book for a brief introduction.] 150 Psalms 66 Isaiah 52 Jeremiah 51 Sirach 50 Genesis 48 Ezekiel 42 Job 40 Exodus 34 Deuteronomy 36 Numbers 36 2 Chronicles 31 1 Samuel 31 Proverbs 29 1 Chronicles 27 Leviticus 25 2 Kings 24 2 Samuel 24 Joshua 22 1 Kings 21 Judges 19 Wisdom 16 Judith 16 1 Maccabees 15 2 Maccabees 14 Daniel 14 Hosea 14 Tobit 13 Nehemiah 12 Ecclesiastes 10 Esther 10 Ezra 9 Amos 8 Song of Songs 7 Micah 6 Baruch 5 Lamentations 4 Ruth 4 Joel 4 Jonah 3 Nahum 3 Habakkuk 3 Malachi 3 Zephaniah 2 Haggai 1 Obadiah 28 Matthew 28 Acts of the Apostles 24 Luke 22 Revelation 21 John [Gospel] 16 Letter to Romans 16 1 Letter to Corinthians 13 2 Letter to Corinthians 13 Letter to Hebrews 6 Letter to Galatians 6 Letter to Ephesians 6 1 Letter to Timothy 5 1 Letter to Thessalonians 5 Letter of James 5 1 Letter of Peter 5 1 Letter of John 4 Letter to Philippians 4 Letter to Colossians 4 2 Letter to Timothy 3 2 Letter to Thessalonians 3 Letter to Titus 3 2 Letter of Peter 1 Letter to Philemon 1 2 Letter of John 1 3 Letter of John 1 Letter of Jude It is true that the larger works—for example, the Law Books and the major prophets in the Hebrew Canon, and the Gospels and St. Paul’s Letters in the New Testament canon—tend to lay out the panorama of God’s plan in a majestic sweep. But the smaller texts contribute mightily to the unified message of salvation, and for this reason I propose to spend the next several months looking at the “smallest” texts, those under ten chapters. In no particular order, let me cite the advantages of studying these texts, with their usefulness in grasping the full message of the Bible and introducing new students of the Bible to its styles and ways of teaching. [1] The small texts are easy to handle if you are just starting an adult study on your own. The Prophet Obadiah runs to a mere twenty-one verses. Within that limited framework the reader can see one of the general themes of prophetic preaching, that God’s enemies will be eventually be crushed and that a glorious “day of the Lord” will come set things right. [2] The small texts provide a window into Christian attempts to live faithfully. The three Letters of John reiterate the message of John’s Gospel that the greatest gift of God is love, personified in the person of Jesus Christ. These letters press the point that love of Christians for one another is the highest moral imperative. [3] The small texts give us a taste of how the Church addressed its internal problems, how moral reasoning developed. Paul’s Letter to Philemon discusses a runaway slave named Onesimus. Paul evidently had baptized Onesimus and now found himself in the dilemma of whether to send him back to his owner, another Christian. [4] The small texts can give insight into the development of doctrine and how true belief was separated from error. A major problem for the post-apostolic Church was wholesale belief that Jesus was not truly a man but only appeared to be. Our belief in the Incarnation was solidified by writers such as John, who in his letters refuted Christians who held such beliefs. [5] Some smaller works established balance in the early Church’s theological teaching. In Romans 5 Paul establishes that we are justified only by the direct gift of God, and not by our own works. In the brief Letter of James [2:14ff] the author responds that “if someone says he has faith but does not have works…can that faith save him?” The Church, in its wisdom, retained both works in its repository of faith. [6] Some small works branch into a variety of forms, including satire. Thus it is with Jonah, a psychological profile that speaks volumes of later Israel’s ideas about the role of prophesy and the men who filled it. Some of these works we can cover in one Tuesday’s post. With others we will take the time we need. By my counting, there are 29 biblical works of under ten chapters in the entire bible. My primary source will be The Paulist Biblical Commentary [2018], though I will use other commentaries and cite them with links if your interests take you further. The PBC runs to about 1700 pages and presently costs about $100, give or take. It is not necessary for our purposes here to own one, but if you are involved in ministry, it is not a bad investment, for every book in the Bible is treated in the PBC and you would not have to purchase individual commentaries on each book unless you plan on going on to higher studies…which I hope some of you would. It is hard to believe today, but prior to Vatican II the general pastoral advice regarding lay persons reading the Bible was almost excessively cautionary. Our family Bible held a hallowed if underutilized place in my home as a youth. Catholic Bible publishers then and today provide a middle section of the bible where the owner’s family genealogy and sacramental records could be recorded. I believe our bible also contained our birth certificates. The thinking, I guess, was that important documents could be safely hidden in a book that no one would disturb. [If you remember the movie “Going My Way” [1942], the old pastor Father Fitzgibbons hid his liquor behind his library of President Grant biographies.]
No priest that I can recall ever recommended reading the Bible straight up. As a rule, the only public Gospel readings one would encounter were those texts selected for Sunday Mass. My copy of a Tridentine Missal from the 1950’s states that after the Gospel “The sermon or instruction to the congregation is given.” Some priests did use the starting point of their sermons as the Gospel text of the day; it was more common to hear instruction on Christian duty, such as the need for Confession, for example. One year in my parish all three priests combined to devote a large portion of the year to a study of the Creed, one line per week. As the years have rolled along, I look back at the “Creed series” with a growing respect, an imaginative way to expand the Catholic mind with an effort to incorporate creedal statements with their biblical origins. That said, pastoral caution over independent reading of the Bible makes more sense when one considers that the cultural gap between middle eastern language, mores, and expression, on the one hand, and the Greek-Roman thought world of western Europe, is huge. Simply arriving at a “mindset of the Bible” for a new reader is a near impossibility when working only with the text. Another point of difference is the blunt literary expression of the Judean and Christian tradition between the time of composition and today’s novice readers; pious ears in Catholic households in my elementary school years did not take easily to the many graphic portrayals of sins, natural catastrophes, war, and wanton violence, though our Christian ancestors were right at home with this depiction of life’s grim realities. And lest I forget, there is a lot of “knowing” and “begetting” in the Hebrew Canon on the Bible [“knowing,” in English translations, is synonymous with sexual intercourse.] But aside from these considerations was the reality that even at the highest levels of Church authority the Bible was poorly understood and even regarded with some suspicion, as the Protestant Reformation adherents referred to themselves as “the people of the book” and had championed the cause of sola scriptura, “by Scripture alone is man saved.” Protestants accused the Catholic Church of spinning off many of its rites and disciplines without enough Biblical basis, or any basis, in the case of indulgences. In popular catechetics of my youth, it was stated in so many words that Protestant worship and practice contented itself with the Bible and sermon while Roman Catholics enjoyed full communion with Christ in reception of the Eucharist. If you are following the Reformation stream here at the Café, you can better appreciate that one of Luther’s major theological missteps was a poor appreciation of the linkage of the Word and the Christianity in the formation of both Bible and Church. What Christians of all stripes seem to forget is that the origins of the New Testament and the Church are intertwined. It was inspired Church thinkers who composed the 27 books of the NT, and later Church leaders who determined which books belonged in the “canon” or collection of sacred revelation deeded sufficient for salvation. Consequently, it is impossible to live by the maxim sola scriptura just as it is impossible to live by the maxim sola ecclesia or “church alone.” A more detailed account of the formation of the New Testament canon is available in such works as The Canon of Scripture [2018 edition] by F.F. Bruce, for the ambitious reader. Other introductions to the Bible will include questions of authorship, intention of the author, and incorporation for each book of the canons as well. The Catholic Church never believed itself independent of the Bible. It believed from earliest times that its holy leaders [many known, some not] received inspiration from God to produce Gospels, letters, history, and apocalyptic [end-of-world] literature that embodied the memory and message from God through his son, Jesus Christ. The written books of the New Testament are the third stage in a developmental process now considered normative in Catholic education. Stage [1] is the actual presence of Jesus upon the earth and the impression memories of his earliest followers of Jesus’ words and deeds. This stage would include the impressions of faith in encounters with the Risen Christ. Stage [2] is the oral preaching of Jesus’ witnesses, first to Jerusalem and Judaea and then to Gentiles. Stage [3] is the composition of written works for circulation to the growing Church, a process that began with Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians in c. 51 A.D. and probably extended into the early part of the second century. The first written Gospel, that of St. Mark, appeared around 70 A.D. The Church through the centuries has employed several means of interpreting the New Testament. One might think the most obvious method is literalism, i.e., simply assuming everything in print is historically accurate and applying it as such. But even a superficial reading of the Gospels would demonstrate the shortcomings of such a method, something observed by the earliest Church fathers. The Gospels frequently report the same events in quite different ways, most notably the infancy narratives [Mark and John have none], and the Passion and Resurrection accounts. Very early on the Church learned to extract the critical story lines and eventual doctrinal truths from the inspired genius of the four authors. The Church utilized analogies from the Hebrew Scripture or Old Testament and applied them to preaching and explaining the meaning of Christ. For a brief summary of these interpretive tools, follow this link to the Oxford Biblical Studies on-line. It is interesting that even before modern biblical studies blossomed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Church art had developed icons and symbols to explain the revelation and teaching thrusts of each Gospel and Evangelist. One of the earliest and greatest works of the Church was sorting out which literature of the day belonged in a “sacred canon” that would come to be known as the New Testament. In many respects this task was thrust upon the Church by the varieties of erroneous or heretical teachers. The most notable danger to the Church was the heretic Marcion, who denied that the entire Hebrew Scripture was divinely inspired. Church fathers thus began to sift the wheat from the chaff, beginning around 180 A.D. The criteria for a book’s inclusion into the New Testament appear to be its fidelity to the teaching of the Apostles, its use in Christian liturgy, and testimony from bishops and elders. What is notable in the establishment of the New Testament Canon is the involvement of the entire Church in cooperating with the Holy Spirit toward the formation of the written corpus of Christian truth. The Bible—both Testaments—are communal books, and the communities who arrange their lives, beliefs, and worship around the sacred books have long traditions of study and experience in penetrating the meanings, studies that continue intensely in our own day. It is important, then, that the Bible be read in the context of its tradition, i.e., its faith community. I am not calling for sectarianism; in 1943 Pope Pius XII opened the doors for Catholic biblical scholars to join their Protestant colleagues in developing more accurate translations of the Bible in multiple languages, utilizing the many fragments of Scripture then available around the world. To read the bible in a solitary stance is to leave the best portions of the divine banquet of revelation on the table. One reads profitably who reads with the guidance of church tradition, history, and scholarship. I would be the first to admit that present day catechetics for youth and adults falls far short of providing the assistance that we need to be offering. At the present time I am reading The Epistles of John by J. Howard Marshall for a Café post in the very near future. In the opening words of 2 John, the sacred author speaks of love as the identifying mark of the true believer. Read cold, the invocation of “love” sounds repetitious. Isn’t love something of a presupposition of the Bible? But Dr. Marshall examines the specialized use of the word “love” across the five New Testament books that carry the name of John, and gradually the word and what it implies takes on a depth and vision that to me, at least, has captured my spiritual imagination and focused my religious experience over the past week. Seeking the Word of God is work, probably more work than we are used to investing. But this should give us pause, too. What is it we have passed off for meeting God until now? _____________________________________ Very shortly the Tuesday Stream of the Café will carry the banner “The Little Tiny Books of the Bible,” those texts like John’s epistles above that are frequently overlooked but which are considered part of the saving canon of sacred books. Also, the Friday Book Club stream of the Café will carry more reviews for those engaged in adult study of the Bible. This weekend marks the Feast of Pentecost, since 1970 designating the concluding day of the Easter Season. The formal end of Eastertide is Second Vespers, or Sunday evening prayer (June 9 this year). The dating of the Solemnity of Pentecost for most of the Church’s history—50 days after Easter—is determined in large part from the calendar of events laid out by St. Luke in his Acts of the Apostles, though not quite with the precision we learned as youths.
Many New Testament sources testify that Jesus spent time with the apostles before his ascent into glory. Luke specifies forty days between Easter and the Ascension, but an indeterminate time of prayer and waiting on the part of the apostles alone until the dramatic descent of the Spirit described in Acts 2. The numeral “forty” is a literary idiom for a generic period. Genesis describes the rains of the great flood as “forty days and forty nights;” the wandering of the Hebrews is described as “forty years,” and Jesus’ fast in the desert a similar forty days. And before we go too far into numerical significance, recall that in St. John’s Gospel Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit from the cross as he died, and again on Easter Sunday night over ten apostles—Judas having died and “doubting Thomas” being absent. The observance of Pentecost today and for much of the Church’s history is determined by the date of Easter, which as we know is moveable year to year. Because of the importance of the Passover in the Passion narratives of the Gospels, Christians have generally—with some exceptions—dated Easter to coincide with Passover, which occurs on the first sabbath after the first full moon of spring, i.e., the Hebrew method of reckoning. For Roman Catholics the present liturgical discipline marks the possible dates of Easter from March 22 to April 25. Pentecost can thus be celebrated as late as June 13 in some years; this year’s date is considered a late Pentecost. In the Liturgical reforms of Vatican II, the Church attempted to reinforce the unity of the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecostal feasts. If you read St. John’s Easter narrative carefully, he depicts the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost events as all occurring on Easter Sunday! Hence the strict formal ending of the Easter Season with Pentecostal Vespers. This was not always the case. In fact, until the new missal was released in 1970, the Easter Season extended till Trinity Sunday, a week later. The week between Pentecost and Trinity Sunday was quite busy; the summer “Ember Days” or traditional days of prayer and fasting were observed in the week after Pentecost. If you visit the USCCB Lectionary for the “Extended Vigil Mass of Pentecost” you will get some feeling for the older Saturday Pentecost Vigil from the Tridentine Rite Mass observed prior to 1970. In Philadelphia there is currently an effort to restore the Pentecost Vigil of older times, which does bear some resemblance to the Easter Vigil, but even its promoters admit that there is not much enthusiasm for restoration at the present time. It is my subjective judgment that in the years since the Council there has been a dearth of discussion and healthy catechetics about the influence of the Holy Spirit upon our Church and our sacraments. At the Vigil Mass last night, my pastor observed that the dramatic appearances of the Spirit in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures have tended toward a definition of Spirit experience today as only isolated and dramatic events in the life of the Church and its members. I was catechized in that fashion for my sixth grade Confirmation in 1960, and I remember feeling “let down” after the ceremony; I also had expected Jesus to talk to me after my First Communion, too. From what I see and hear today, the issue of “promise versus product” is just as real today. When I was a pastor in the 1980’s there was a school of thought that later aged-Confirmation was a more effective way of connecting doctrine and experience. The idea went something like this: if your Confirmation candidates were 17 or 18 years old, they were more mature and better equipped to make a conscious choice to embrace their Baptismal experience and a life in the Spirit-filled Church. As the years went on and I immersed myself into psychology, I learned that developmental maturity is not achieved until around the age of 26. And as I am now in my 70’s I look at the world quite differently than I did even at age 50. The fallacy of my thinking in my past is weighing all the eggs in the scale of subjective experience and determination. In 2013 the Seton Hill College theologian Timothy Gabrielli wrote Confirmation: How a Sacrament of God's Grace Became All about Us (2013) in which he addresses the overly subjective approach to sacramental experience at the cost of God’s initiative. Although I had criticized some points of his work, in fact he was kind enough to exchange several letters with me for this blog; this correspondence can be found at the end of my Amazon review (click “comments.”). I should add that I am currently reading Gabrielli’s One in Christ: Virgil Michel, Louis-Marie Chauvet, and Mystical Body Theology (2017), an advanced study of the title “Mystical Body of Christ” applied to the life of the Church and its sacramental life; I will be referring to this this work in future posts. The Feast of Pentecost was called “The Birthday of the Church” in my youth, and no discussion of the Church (technically known as “ecclesiology”) can proceed without addressing the Spirit’s intercommunion with the Church. This past week was another difficult one for the Church in the United States, Poland, and elsewhere. At the very least, one can say that a Church born of the Spirit’s breath has not always impressed many people as a Spirit-filled community (though the sins of some do not negate the virtues of others.) In reflecting upon the Spirit this weekend, it occurred to me that in Luke’s Gospel Jesus, after his baptism, was engaged in intense prayer when the Spirit descended upon him like a dove. Similarly, the Pentecost event occurred after a similar period of intense prayer by the twelve in the upper room. At the very least, there is a core connection between communion with the Spirit and intense prayer. My pastor was correct to speak of communion with the Spirit in the present and future tense, and not simply as a dramatic scenario. And perhaps the key to a true reform of the Church rests upon a spirit of prayer, an atmosphere where, biblically speaking, the Spirit is always to be found. If you were an adult Catholic reader in the 1970’s engaged in college or adult Bible studies, you would have been confronted with considerable scholarly disagreement over the nature and meaning of the “Christmas narratives,” those Biblical accounts of Jesus’ conception, birth, and early childhood. These are biblical texts that “everybody knows” and perhaps as a result the challenges of these accounts are easily overlooked.
For starters, two evangelists—Mark and John—have no Christmas accounts at all. Since there is general agreement today that Mark’s is the oldest of the Gospels, and John’s the most revered over history, the absence of any infancy narratives in these books is significant. For it raises the questions of why two evangelists did include narratives of Christ’s infancy, and what were their sources. In addition, the two Gospel narratives of Matthew and Luke differ from each other in significant ways. In Matthew’s Gospel, Mary is mute, and all the important divine dealings are laid out to Joseph; Luke, as we know from the “Hail Mary,” reverses the order. Which one has it right? On April 21, 1964, in De historica evangeliorum veritate [On the question of the historical truth of the Bible] the Vatican ruled that biblical scholars can safely depend upon the historical nature of the life of Jesus as presented in sacred scripture, citing the kernel or core of this account as the material in Acts 10: 36-41, which is believed to reflect the earliest apostolic preaching after the Resurrection; the first written Gospel was still at least forty years in the future. This directive from the Pontifical Biblical Commission was not generally known to the public, but in Christian academia the omission of the Infancy Narratives in the Acts account led scholars to wonder if the Vatican was hedging its bets on the historical accuracy of the Gospel infancy narratives. So, a petition was sent to the Biblical Commission for a clarification, and in the tradition of the American court system, the Vatican demurred hearing the question. [The above cited document is only available in Latin.] The Vatican, or any responsible churchman or biblical scholar for that matter, was certainly not denying that Jesus was “born of a woman” as St. Paul would put it. What was at question was the historical basis for details in Matthew and Luke. This nuance was lost on many people as Scripture study became popularized and parish study groups after Vatican II were faced with some of the hard truths of scholarship, specifically that the Catholic faith tradition is not literalist or fundamentalist where the Bible is concerned. Rather, the Bible must be approached from a “big picture” perspective that combines history, culture, linguistics, and the inspired minds of authors who express the Spirit in imaginative and artistic ways. Most of the Bible itself is set in Jewish culture and idiom. There are many Catholics who are uncomfortable with this kind of talk. Scripture becomes more elusive and requires more homework than previously thought. Lifelong expressions of faith acquired in childhood seem more clouded or confused, or even watered down, when serious bible study and preaching is attempted. The late Father Stephen Brown, O.F.M., a member of my order and a gifted Biblical scholar, told me once that he found adult parish bible workshops challenging. “People approach bible scholars like Mary Magdalene on Easter Sunday: “They have taken the Lord away from me and I do not know where they have laid him.” [On a lighter note, two elderly Irish women attended a bible talk where the scholar liberally peppered his talk with the word “Yahweh,” the sacred Jewish name for God. As they left the talk, one woman said that she didn’t understand much of it, “but he said some lovely things about Galway.”] The catechesis we employ in our churches and homes regarding the Infancy Narratives is “harmonization,” which is the way the Church approached all the Gospels centuries ago. Harmonization is the process of taking all the available data and working it into one narrative. Your nativity sets at home are harmonizations: there are little statues of the three kings and camels [described only in Matthew] standing in a stable with farm animals [described only in Luke]. Please don’t start dismantling your beloved sacramental of the Christmas liturgical season in the name of theological correctness. On this subject I side with the philosopher Blaise Pascal that “the heart has reasons that reason knowns nothing about.” But we still have the question of two distinct accounts and their significance. To get to the root of biblical detail, scholarship in the mid-twentieth century had developed multiple tools for scriptural analysis [or criticism, a technical term.] The major insight of the last century was the understanding that each evangelist had his own Christological theology or understanding of the meaning of the Christ, and that the selection of words, phrases, and entire episodes were made in the light of the Gospel writer’s understanding of Jesus of Nazareth. In short, while some aspects of the Christmas stories are not literally accurate, they serve a greater service in understanding what the evangelists Luke and Matthew were attempting to teach. In 1977 [revised 1999] the Catholic American scholar Father Raymond Brown produced The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library). This was and remains the definitive study of the two Christmas narratives. Alas, this work was not published until I was long out of seminary—I read it later during a Christmas assignment in 1977 hearing confessions six hours a day. I had read other works of Father Brown, however, and I was familiar with his methodology, which combines personal faith, rigorous academic excellence, and sensitivity to the needs of the preacher and the hearer. Brown put great faith in the general historical truth of the Gospels. His fidelity to the text was disciplined. By the same token, he was suspicious of reading more into texts than was actually there, a discipline that brought him significant troubles with conservatives when he argued that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth cannot be proved by the Bible per se. The first biography of Father Brown just appeared in September of this year and describes his many struggles with both the progressives and the conservatives of his time. While he put much trust in historical study, Father Brown also employed “redaction criticism,” by which he compared how different biblical authors treated the same subject; their points of separation as useful as their agreements. In approaching the infancy narratives, Father Brown looked closely at Matthew, who begins his Gospel with the genealogy of Christ, tracing his bloodline back to Abraham, the Father of Israel and the Jewish people. In this deeply Jewish atmosphere Matthew portrays Joseph [the Jewish father of the family] as the recipient of divine communication about the nature of Mary’s child. Only Matthew describes the visit of the Three Wise Men, a story that owes much to Isaiah 60: 1-6; one can argue that the inclusion of the Magi in the Gospel is a definition of Jesus’ identity as Messiah. It is he who will restore Jerusalem to its religious glory as the light to all the nations, the “city on the hill.” Later in Matthew’s narrative Joseph is later warned by divine message that King Herod is seeking to kill the child. Here Matthew is setting the stage for the real-life events of Jesus’ adult ministry when Jewish leaders seek to kill him and ultimately did. What Matthew has done in his infancy narrative is to provide a template of the public ministry of Jesus described in Acts 10, described earlier. Matthew’s immediate audience is a Christian community made up largely of Jewish converts. When persecution of Christians began in earnest, these converts sought the safety and identity of the religion of their past. Matthew labors to convince them that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, the new Moses, and that there is no going home again in the Thomas Wolfe sense. By now you have guessed that Luke has a different window on the essence of Jesus and his work that profoundly impacts his Christmas narrative, but alas, I am running out of time and space. If you are looking for a short synopsis, easy to digest, of Father Brown’s Christmas scholarship, I recommend An Adult Christ at Christmas: Essays on the Three Biblical Christmas Stories - Matthew 2 and Luke 2 [1978] by Father Brown available on Amazon Prime. The hardcover Birth of the Messiah runs to about 750 pages and would probably explode your Christmas stocking—but probably not your mind. For al least the next two weeks I am directing all posting to the Sunday Stream to discuss the recent Pennsylvania report on clerical child abuse, including its implications for catechetics and Church/parish life. You can jump over to Sunday's stream by clicking here.
NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: AMOS 7: 12-15
FIFTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME [B] USCCB link to all three readings here. Amaziah, priest of Bethel, said to Amos, “Off with you, visionary, flee to the land of Judah! There earn your bread by prophesying, but never again prophesy in Bethel; for it is the king’s sanctuary and a royal temple.” Amos answered Amaziah, “I was no prophet, nor have I belonged to a company of prophets; I was a shepherd and a dresser of sycamores. The LORD took me from following the flock, and said to me, Go, prophesy to my people Israel.” Today we reach back to the earliest days of prophesying in the classical sense, that is, a man called from his established way of living and filled with the Spirit of God to preach a return to the Covenant of Sinai. Father Lawrence Boadt (see home page) estimates that Amos of Tekoa undertook his preaching in roughly 760 B.C., which is over two centuries before Ezekiel, whose words were proclaimed last Sunday. One of the more humorous points in Sunday’s text is Amos’ indignation at being called a prophet, for prophets were a common sight around holy places, men who danced and performed ritual prayers. The key point about prophesy before the “classical era” of prophets is the ritual predictability of temple prophets, “establishment characters” in the religion of the day. I strongly recommend that you look at the Book of Amos in its entirety to get a sense of how far the priestly cult and temple observance. In his opening salvo, Amos gives us a picture of city life around the temple filled with religious profanity, a corrupt judiciary, and a gross disregard of the poor. Little wonder his back goes up when Amaziah tells him to take his prophesying elsewhere. Amos was not a metropolitan man. The text of this book tells us he was a sheepherder and a dresser of sycamores out in the country who was seized by the Spirit to excoriate the sinfulness of Israelite society; the city-country polarity runs throughout much of the Hebrew Scripture. Amos’ preaching crusade demonstrates polemic at its best. He begins by listing the sins of Israel’s neighbors and enemies, a ploy which wins him an eager hearing. Then, at the crest of his diatribe, Amos says, in effect, “let me tell you now about the worst nation on the earth—you!” He lays out an extraordinary catalogue of evildoing coupled with an assault on the blasé attitude of priests and people alike toward fidelity to God and the inevitable punishments down the road. It is now that Amaziah seeks to quiet him and return him to the hinterlands, but Amos retorts that he himself did not seek this dangerous and distasteful ministry; rather, God had seized him from his flock and told him to prophesy in Bethel, the site of this reading. Implied here, of course, is the fact that God is very unhappy with what has been passing as religion, i.e., the house prophets and the priesthood itself. History does not tell us what became of Amos, and it is possible that he was killed or imprisoned. Every commentary on Amos devotes great attention to his message, that Israel’s greatest sin is injustice to the poor and those who cannot buy influence. The Covenant and its attendant worship was intended to instill a pleasing brotherhood in the eyes of God. The absence of such a brotherhood was plain to Amos, as his sermons testify, but it was not plain to the residents of Bethel, busy with drinking and consorting with prostitutes. This theme of Amos would be picked up in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians where, writing about the manner of Eucharistic celebration, Paul expresses anger at the segregation of rich and poor at home celebrations. To eat and drink of the Lord’s Supper with such insensitivity was the equivalent of “eating and drinking a judgment unto one’s self.” NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: EZECHIEL 2: 2-5
FOURTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME [B] USCCB link to all three readings’ As the LORD spoke to me, the spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and I heard the one who was speaking say to me: Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have revolted against me to this very day. Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they to whom I am sending you. But you shall say to them: Thus says the LORD GOD! And whether they heed or resist—for they are a rebellious house-- they shall know that a prophet has been among them. The Jerome Biblical Commentary (1990), in its introduction to the Book of Ezekiel, describes the prophet as a pivotal figure in the history of Israel. Ezekiel grasped the integrity of faith in God’s covenant, pure worship, and observance of the Law, but he recognized that Israel’s life of faith would require acknowledgement of changing times and circumstances. He understands a future where the royal arrangement of Israel’s life might no longer be possible, and that the religion of Israel would (and probably would have to) set roots and live by the essence of God’s Revelation throughout the face of the earth, a reference to what would later be called the diaspora of “scattering.” As it happens, our house expert Father Lawrence Boadt (see welcome page) is the JBC’s commentator on Ezekiel, and he observes that “it is little wonder that Ezekiel is often considered the Father of Judaism” as we understand Jewish practice today.” (p. 305) 600 B.C. marked a turning point in Israel’s history. Since the kingships of Saul, David, and Solomon, four centuries of kings had governed Israel, none of whom measured up to the cultic memory of the beginnings of the dynasty. A king of Israel was not a deity, but neither was he a figurehead, either. While he exercised what we might call today statecraft, he was also bound by the Covenant Law and responsible for the quality of religious life, though the day-to-day religious leadership fell to the tribe of Levi (the Levites) and the Temple priesthood. The last of the Israelite kings worthy of the name appears to be Josiah (640-609 B.C.) and Father Boadt goes into considerable detail to explain the reforms undertaken by this remarkable king. Josiah called for (1) abolishment of foreign idols; (2) end of the cult of the stars; (3) end of worship of sun and moon; (4) termination of temple prostitution; (5) renewal of the Feast of Passover; (6) suppression of the Cult of Moloch, in which infant sacrifice was offered. Josiah’s reforms, listed in 2 Kings, are very similar to the precepts of Deuteronomy (“second law’) and may have inspired the writing of the fifth book of the Pentateuch. But they also give us a grim picture of Israelite observance by the end of the seventh century B.C. The Encyclopedia Britannica’s biography of Ezekiel indicates that the prophet did not serve under the reign of Josiah, but later, under the reigns of Josiah’s successors who could not resist the advances of Babylon. In 597 B.C. Ezekiel, with other priests, was forcibly removed to Babylon, and several years later, after Israelite revolts, many of his compatriots joined him in what is well known as the Babylonian Captivity. Ezekiel, as a priest, was well respected by his people, but he did not receive his call to prophesy until several years into the captivity. Sunday’s reading describes his call from God received in Babylon, making him the first Spirit-filled prophet to receive his call outside of the confines of the Israelite nation. God announces that he is “sending” Ezekiel to the Israelites—a curious phrasing since Ezekiel was already among Israelites. In this context God speaks as if he hardly knows Israel anymore; there is nothing of “my people” here. The Lord goes on to speak of the Israelites as a rebellious people, and God acknowledges that in their hardness of heart there is a very good chance they might reject Ezekiel’s preaching altogether. Nonetheless, God wants them to know that a prophet has been among them—an intimate presence of God’s spirit and truth—so that they can no longer claim that God has abandoned them. Scholars who have worked with the Book of Ezekiel find two separate strains of thought. The first—Ezekiel’s early years—was a message that Israel’s neglect of its covenant with God was the cause of its current misery. Or, another way, you brought this on yourselves. Implied in this is the argument that no king—Josiah notwithstanding—can carry the full load of moral responsibility, a critical step toward a deeper sense of moral responsibly. As the years passed, and Ezekiel himself aged, his preaching turned toward consolation and hope. His last preaching is estimated to have occurred around 570 B.C., and he died long before King Cyrus of Persia released the Israelites to return home in 539 B.C. This reading is paired with the Gospel narrative of Mark 6 in which the preaching and good works of Jesus in his home town are questioned and rejected by his presumed fellow neighbors in faith. One can imagine a literary parallel between the reception afforded Ezekiel when he tells his people that their misery is their own doing, and Jesus’ acting in the role of herald of the new kingdom to people who presumed they knew him. Interestingly, in Luke’s telling of Mark’s account here, he describes how the people tried to kill Jesus. A prophet is not without honor except…etc. I was not happy with the limited posting I was able to do in June, and I feel like I left a lot of you hanging. One reason for the limited posts is several changes in my circumstances. Back in May I opened a free mental health service in the local Catholic Church here in my town. It is open Fridays all day, and in less than a month the available time slots were full. I am enjoying it very much, but I cannot do anything else on Friday, which eliminates another day I can devote to the Café. I continue to work Mondays at the Catholic Charities Clinic in Eustis, Florida; in fact, I will be driving over in an hour or two.
A second issue is the increasing demand for more reading prior to posting. There are several streams going at the same time which call for more research. Certainly, the Thursday stream on Luther and the Reformation is one; the nature of evil in the Monday Morality stream is another. This year I began commenting on the First Readings on the Sunday Mass, which meant a return to Old Testament studies, a discipline which is not one of my greatest strengths. When I started the Café four years ago, one of my goals was to introduce busy professionals to the best of new religious, catechetical, and theological works. This assumes reading the books first! A third issue is retirement itself. Having turned 70 this year, I am finding that increasingly friends and family need contact and attention. Again, I am very pleased to become more involved in their lives, but this too devours the hours of the day. On the other hand, all the medical advice for seniors speaks of exercise and interpersonal interactions as means of maintaining a sound mind and a good spirit. This is a time of life to cultivate and enrich the relationships I already have, and perhaps engage in new ones. I know a fair amount of people who have outlived their friends and face their final years in an undesired solitude. And, I am beginning to feel older. While I continue to be blessed with good health, I am no longer the young buck who could read till 2 AM. If I stay up that late, I will feel it the next day, like a hangover. When I was on retreat with the Trappists two weeks ago, I talked about all of this with a wise monk who reminded me that the senior population brings an example of transition and serenity, and he gently challenged me to stop running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I have no intention of discontinuing the Café, because aside from the pressures of brewing up new flavors frequently, it is one of the more pleasurable enterprises in my life. Realistically it is probably best to say that the weekly grind of each stream will be tapered back to two weeks instead of weekly. On days when I am on the road, like family reunions, I may post with more spontaneity and less pedantic. Old bloggers don’t die, they just reign it in a bit. |
THINGS BIBLICAL. Archives
March 2024
|