Soul
Mirror
Fr.
Tony’s Mid-week Message
March
4, 2015
Those
of you who attend Fr. Morgan Silbaugh’s Bible Study class will recognize his
answer to the oft-heard evangelical claim “the Bible says”: “and what else
does the Bible say?” The great truth behind
this witticism is this: the Bible is a
library, not a book, and in different parts it teaches differing things.
So
how we read it in part reflects who we are.
Though the Psalmist says, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to
my path” (Psalm 119:105), often it is a mirror to our soul. What we see in it tells us what kind of
people we are.
An
example is Jesus and how he used the scriptures of his day. Law, purity, and an urge to be separate from
gentiles were the standard lens through which scripture was read. This is understandable, since there are so
many verses that deal with such things.
But
when Jesus comes upon an obscure passage in the Psalms, he sees other
possibilities. He reads: “I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds. For
every wild animal of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the
air, and all that moves in the field is mine (Psalm 50:9-11). This minor detail and others like it buried
in the Psalms and Isaiah become for Jesus a center point that spins off other
ideas and reflections about God.
Similarly, the prophets’ critique of the priestly system clearly speaks
to him.
Jesus ends up
saying things like, “God counts the sparrows, so how could he not know about
you?” “God cares for the wild flowers and the birds, how could he not care for
you?” “God has compassion and
equanimity, sending the blessing of rain and sunshine on both good and bad
alike.” He ends up thinking that good
and justice are communicable, not impurity.
Do you avoid
reading the Bible because it offends your sensibilities? Or do you read only the “good parts,” or at
least the parts you think are good? Or
do you read it with an open mind, realizing that some parts correct and remedy
other ones, and that the general drift is one toward forgiveness, nonviolence,
kindness and compassion? When you read
it, does it lead you to the loving and compassionate God that Jesus called Abba
or Papa? Does it convince you that
violence is evil, and that justice and compassion are basic requirements for
human life? Or does it lead to you to a
condemning, jealous, vicious, and violent deity, distant and inhuman?
Jesus said, “Your eye is the lamp of your
body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light; but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness” (Luke 11:34; cf.
Matthew 6:22). How someone reads and
experiences scripture often tells us more about that person than it does about
God.
How do you read scripture?
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
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