Author: Santuario de San Antonio Parish

How many of us have copies of the Bible? More importantly, how many of us read these copies of the Bible regularly or even everyday?

A survey conducted by the LifeWay Research some years ago indicated that 80% of Churchgoers do not read the Bible.

The Rasmussen Poll recently did a survey about Bible-reading in the US. According to the poll, 25 % of Evangelical Protestants read the Bible daily, as do 20 % of other Protestants. Only 7 % of Catholics read the Bible daily.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer last week reported, on the basis of the report of Nora Lucero, Secretary General of the Philippine Bible Society, that in the Philippines, a predominantly Catholic country, “the Bible is not only facing stiff competition from romance pocketbooks, horoscopes, feng shui (Chinese geomancy), it also is facing the challenge of the Internet.”

According to another survey, many people spend at least four hours every day using the internet and other forms of modern communication and mass media, including cellphones. A daily prayerful reading of the Scripture may take only at least 15 minutes. What is 15 minutes of prayerful Bible reading everyday, which can help change our lives, compared to four hours of internet, text messaging, phone calls, TV and radio?

Is the Bible or the Sacred Scripture, which we consider as the living Word of God in human words, really important in our lives? I think we can only truly appreciate the value of the Word of God if we appreciate more the value of the human word.

From our day-to-day life experiences, we know the power and the importance of the human word. Words can build up or destroy. We can praise or curse others and these will have different effects on them.

When we make vows, we commit ourselves using words. Persons who are getting married say: “I take you as my wife or husband… I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health until death do us part.” We who are priests or religious also use worded formulas for religious professions and priestly ordinations. These are not just words. These are words that bind. These are words that must express our deep sense of commitment and our integrity to be true to ourselves, to others and to God.

Words also provide possibilities for us to encounter another person. This is what we experience when we read, for example, a letter from another person. The person becomes present in our minds and in our hearts.

Words form, challenge and transform. A child soaked with loving words will most likely grow into a well-adjusted and confident person. When a child always hears that he is good for nothing, he will most likely internalize this and will become truly a good for nothing person.

Those of us who are married, when was the last time you said, “I love you” to your spouse? Those of us who are parents, when was the last time you said, “I love you” to your children? “I love you,” when said with sincerity, right motivations and sentiments, are among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, words in the world. “I am sorry” are another very powerful words. They can melt an indignant heart. o we know how to say, “I am sorry!” to people we sometimes hurt or offend?

If human words are very powerful and important, how much more are God’s words. The Sacred Scripture has four main functions: fundational, sustaining, critical and contact point with God.

What do we mean by the foundational function of the Scripture? If a house is not built on good and solid foundation, it will not last. It will be shaky. It will collapse when it gets subjected to the forces of nature. The life of a person is the same. It has to be built on the solid foundation of the Word of God. If God’s Word is in the mind, the heart and the life of a person, the person will be strong and firmly grounded as he goes through the journey of life. To build one’s life on the Word of God is to build it on God who is Rock.

The Word of God has also a sustaining function. We need to be guided, strengthened, affirmed and assured as we go through life. In the face, for example, of life’s difficulties, the Word of God will remind us that we are not alone. Our God is a God who is with us and who promised to be with us until the end of time. The Scripture is filled with the reassuring and strengthening Word of God.

The Word of God also serves a critical function. The Word of God criticizes and challenges us when we go astray, when we become unfaithful to God and to His ways and teachings, when we neglect others, especially the poor and the needy. The Word of God can warn us of our own destruction if we persist in our wicked ways and continue to live lives that are apart from God. The Word of God can jolt and must disturb us to conversion and to a new and more godly way of living.

Finally, the Scripture is a primary contact point with God in Jesus. We encounter God in and through the Scripture. The Scripture brings God’s presence to us and it brings us to God’s presence.

In the Old Testament, creation came into existence because of God’s words. God said, “Let there be light and there was light.” This is what we mean when we say that God’s words are performative. They make happen what they say. When Jesus tells a sick man, “Be healed,” the man gets healed.

St. John tells us that the Word, referring to the Son of God, became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus is God’s Word who became Incarnate in our midst. God sent His greatest Word of love to us in the Incarnate person of the Son of God.

God’s Word does not only communicate a message about Jesus. God’s Word makes present the very person of Jesus Christ. In fact, God’s Word is Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is God’s definitive loving Word to us.

St. Jerome, who translated the Septuagint or Greek Bible to the Latin Vulgate and who is considered the father of Biblical studies, said, “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Jesus Christ.” The Scripture, especially the Gospels, is our primary way of knowing Jesus. And knowing here does not only mean intellectual knowing. It means encountering Jesus and having a personal relationship with Him. Together with the Eucharist, the Real Presence of Jesus, the scripture gets a primary place through which we encounter the Lord.

In the Gospel today we see Jesus as a man of the Scriptures. In beginning his public ministry of proclaiming the Kingdom of God, he opens the sacred scroll of the prophet Isaiah and reads the passage that talks about God’s loving offer of total salvation and liberation for humanity and creation. God’s offer of total salvation is now taking place in the person, words and ministry of Jesus Christ.

In the first reading from the prophet Nehemiah, after experiencing captivity in Babylon, the Jews listen to Ezra as he reads and explains the Word of God. Through the preaching of the prophet Ezra, the people realize their infidelity to their covenant with God and are led to conversion.

The Holy Father talks about the Year of Faith as “a summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the one Savior of the World.” Faith is not only about the beliefs that we need to believe in; it is, first of all, believing in and having a deep and personal relationship with God and following in his footsteps.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his document Verbum Domine (The Word of the Lord), highlights the centrality of Jesus in the life of the members of the Church and the role of the Scripture in having a personal relationship with Him. He writes: “With the Synod Fathers I express
my heartfelt hope for the flowering of “a new season of greater love for sacred Scripture on the part of every member of the People of God, so that their prayerful and faith-filled reading of the Bible will, with time, deepen their personal relationship with Jesus.” The
Holy Father clearly reasserts that the Scripture leads us to a deeper relationship with Jesus.

The logic is very clear. If Jesus Christ is the center of our Christian faith and if the Scripture is indispensable to knowing, loving and following Jesus Christ, then, as Christians, we must really take the Scripture seriously in order to grow in our
relationship with Jesus and in our Christian faith, to be truly transformed by him unto his likeness and to be instruments of transformation according to the Kingdom values.

As Christians, we are asked to be readers, hearers, doers and sharers of the Word of God. The Holy Father, in the same Verbum Domine document, states: “only those who first place themselves in an attitude of listening to the word can go on to become its heralds” (VD 51).

We end with the words of one of the first followers of St. Francis Assisi who also became a saint. St. Giles of Assisi said, “The Word of God is not in the person who preaches it or listens to it but in the one who lives it.” We should become what we prayerfully read.
May we truly become living Bibles in the world for we might be the only Bibles that other people may read in their lifetimes. As St. Francis said, “Preach the Gospel at all times and you must, use words.”

About Fr. Robert and his reflections

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus of the Church, who ended his papal or petrine ministry on February 28, has been called the Pope of the basics.

During his papacy, Pope Benedict invited and challenged the faithful to return to the fundamentals of our Christian faith. This challenge has been expressed, for example, in his writing of papal encyclicals and letters on the theological virtues of faith, hope and love and in the completion of his three-volume work on Jesus of Nazareth.

St. Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians, tells us that three things will last forever — faith, hope, and love–and the greatest of these is love.

Shortly after his assumption of the papal ministry after the death of Blessed John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI issued in 2005 the papal encyclical Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”). That God is love is the most fundamental and basic reality that we must all truly embrace. God is love and this God loves us in an unconditional and boundless way. This God of love also challenges us to live lives of love.

In 2007, the Holy Father wrote another encyclical on the theological virtue of hope. The title of the document on hope is Spe Salve, which means “Saved in Hope.” In it he asserted that our hope, given to us by God, is key to our Christianity. In fact, for Pope Benedict, the great hope we all long for can only be God, “who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain.”
On October 11, 2011, to commence the Year of Faith, Pope Benedict issued the Apostolic Letter entitled Porta Fidei or “The Door of Faith” to challenge us to embark on “the need to rediscover the journey of faith so as to shed ever clearer light on the joy and renewed enthusiasm of the encounter with Christ.” (#2, #3).

But I think, the most important manifestation of this challenge to return to the basics is the Pope Benedict’s emphasis on the centrality of Jesus Christ in our Christian faith and lives. Indeed, Jesus Christ is the center of our Christian faith. There is no Christianity, no Christian faith and there are no Christians without Christ.

The call to turn and return to Christ has reverberated in his writings, admonitions, speeches and addresses. The Pope’s magnificent three books on Jesus of Nazareth can only be understood in this light.

One of my favorite messages of Pope Benedict XVI on Jesus was addressed to young people gathered at the 22nd World Youth Day on Palm Sunday, 1 April 2007. But this message, I believe, does not only apply to young people; it applies to everyone of us. The Holy Father said: “If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life.”

In the document Porta Fidei the Holy Father wrote, “The Year of Faith is a summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord. In the mystery of his death and resurrection, God has revealed in its fullness the Love that saves and calls us to conversion of life through the forgiveness of sins (cf. Acts 5:31). (#6)

During this Year of faith, Pope Benedict XVI is asking us “to keep our gaze fixed upon Jesus Christ, the “pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb 12:2): in him, all the anguish and all the longing of the human heart finds fulfillment… The Holy Father has also prayed that this Year of Faith may make our relationship with Christ the Lord increasingly firm.”

The summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord is also what we hear in the Gospel reading today and in a special way during this Season of Lent. Turn and return to the Lord and you will live. Turn and return to the Lord and He will heal us and bind up our wounds. Turn and return to the Lord and He will renew us, our lives, our relationships, our families, our communities, our Church and our world.

In the Gospel passage on this Third Sunday of Lent, Jesus underscores the urgency and importance of conversion and repentance for all.

Two tragic incidents are mentioned in the gospel: the murder of Galileans by Pilate and the killing of 18 people due to the fall of the tower of Siloam. The first incident was due to Pilate’s willful action; the second was entirely by accident. What connects the two different tragedies is the common notion of punishment for sins. The Israelites believe that disaster comes as punishment for sin, a notion found especially in the blessings and warnings of Deuteronomy 28-30 and that appears in John 9:2.

Jesus does not dispute or affirm the connection between sin and disaster. In life, sometimes tragedies happen because of the personal faults of those who suffer or the faults of other people. But this is not always the case. We know that there are so many people who are innocent but who suffer.

What Jesus declares is that those who died were not more sinful than other Galileans or other Jerusalemites. Then he issues the warning, “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”

Aside from the fact that the two tragic events are interpreted by the people as punishment for sins, they are also incidents that happened quite suddenly with total devastation. Without warning, the Galileans were overcome by the power of Pilate. Without warning, the tower collapsed on the 18 people. These two groups of people never had a chance to repent. They were caught by surprise by the suddenness of the tragedies.

In this light, we find not only the importance of repentance or conversion but also its urgency. Repentance cannot be delayed or postponed as death may come at any time. Death, as we know from other passages, is described as a thief in the night that comes when you least expect it.

Thus, repentance must be embraced as an ongoing attitude and practice towards one’s life. Repentance can never just be an occasional or a seasonal act. Scott Hahn says that Jesus calls us today to “repentance” – not a one-time change of heart, but an ongoing, daily transformation of our lives.

It is in this light that we must say that Lent is more than just a season. Lent which promotes repentance, conversion and return to the Lord must be embraced as a way of life. We are given the special season of Lent so that we can more and more imbibe the penitential spirit that must characterize ever minute of our lives.

There is a story about a king who had to put down the rebellion of some of his subjects. After the battle died down, the king put up a candle in the doorway of the castle where he had his temporary headquarters. He lit the candle and announced to all who had rebelled against him that those who surrendered and took the oath of loyalty while the candle was burning would be spared. The king offered mercy and forgiveness only for the life of the candle.

God does the same; the candle is our life span.

This story of the king and the candle is like the parable of the fig tree in the gospel today. In life, we are given many chances to repent and to start anew, but these chances are not limitless as everyone’s life has an end. God’s love is limitless but it is we who are limited. Indeed, the call to repentance is Now! Not tomorrow or the day after for it may never happen if we do not take the opportunity.

About Fr. Robert and his reflections