GOD’S WORD IN OUR LIFE
Fr. Mervyn Carapiet
When the novelist and poet, Sir Walter Scott, lay dying in 1832, he turned to his friends, who were standing around his bed, and asked for “the book.” Taking that to mean one of his novels, like Waverley or Ivanhoe, they asked, “Which book?” With a mixture of puzzlement and irritation, he shot back, “Which book!? There is only one.” It became obvious he was referring to the Holy Bible. Any man or woman, whose life has been enriched by sublime values, will have encountered their source in the Bible. The riches of the Spirit are there for all of us to discover, contemplate and rejoice over. We need to be aware of this splendid treasure in the Christian community, guard it with love and celebrate it with thankfulness. Besides, we have come to know that what God has revealed in his Word for us is also the power to perform by us in his Son, Jesus, who accomplished it first.
Bible reading allows the various writers of the great Book to speak for themselves. We must hear what they had to say rather than what we would like them to say or what seems to strike a chord within us. So we have first to place a particular bit of the Bible - book, psalm, story, letter - in its original setting in order to see as vividly as possible what, in that far off time, its author would have meant by these words, or this way of putting across his message and ideas. It involves an imaginative journey from our own day and society, with their assumptions and problems, to that of another time and place, in which Jesus lived, or Paul wrote to Christians in Corinth, or Mark first took up the quill to write the story of Jesus as God’s chosen agent for our salvation.
Listening to the Biblical writers on their terms, and not on ours, naturally entails humility and adaptability on our part, because very often what they say will not chime in with our views, but rather challenge our cherished beliefs. It can, initially, also be a puzzle, forcing us to ask, “Now what could this passage mean, and who will give us the word of the enigma, so that I can learn something from this statement or story which seems to belong to another world of ‘long ago and far away’”? In learning, we may well be prompted to move in directions we never planned on, to think new thoughts about God we never imagined before, to see Jesus Christ in a new and, perhaps, disturbing light. This way we disabuse ourselves of the old interpretive myths. In his teaching ministry Jesus was always confronting the people with real life issues of living, suffering and dying, of sin and forgiveness, of people and rulers, of marriage and divorce, of employment and wages, of salvation and rejection, in fact, every dimension of human life that called for a commitment in terms of values. And we have accepted that the way of Jesus is the way to human flourishing and divine life partnership forever. If Jesus has said, “I am the Truth”…and “The truth will make you free,” then certainly the totally moral person is the completely free person – free from addictions, passion and prejudice.
Once written down, the scripture text has, like a new born child, a life of its own,
not entirely dependent on or restricted to what the author originally intended. A text will outlive its human writer, outlive the people for whom it was originally intended, outlive the situation it originally addressed. A text will go on communicating new meanings to new readers in wholly new situations (like present day India), undreamed of by the author who wrote it. The Bible, like love, “is a many splendoured thing”; for while it keeps its historical distance (which we dare not compress lest we fall into fundamentalism), it is rich in possible meanings, always open to profounder perceptions, and applicable to ever changing environments. If the Bible is the expression of how man experienced God in one historical situation, nothing prevents that originary experience from being actualised in our milieu today, and understood in terms of the thought patterns of the 21st century. The commandment to love is not an abstract principle, but a concrete demand, as illustrated in Jesus’ graphic parables, like the Good Samaritan. It is so recognisable, that the hearer/reader becomes a doer in his own context, feeling himself responsible even for what does not pertain to the strictly circumscribed terrain of his professional commitment. When someone has been educated in the Christian tradition, the narrative’s confrontation can often unexpectedly lead to contemporary creative initiatives originally thought impossible.
For instance, in providing a moral basis for medical development, the Bible has given to modern medicine a great deal more that it might now care to acknowledge.
Text and reader are engaged in a critical conversation. The parables of Jesus, for instance, first attract, then fascinate, and then tease the mind, even for a long time, till the hearers/readers might form their own response. Jesus’ parables possess that potential universality which makes peoples of all times find them applicable to their respective situations. Jesus, the master story-teller, knew his stuff so well as to work the deep magic in the human psyche, holding his hearers in thrall, and proving once again that good narrative is self-involving and self-transformative.
Sometimes we look at the characters in a particular story and identify with only some of them, thus missing important parts of the message. For example, the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) has six “dramatic personae”: the man who was mugged, the priest, the Levite, the Samaritan, and the innkeeper. Our knee-jerk reaction is to identify with the good guy – the Samaritan. But we could quite profitably let ourselves move between some or all of the five other characters. Thus, perhaps, the truth will emerge, that, like the priest and the Levite, we walk past people in need. Perhaps, like the brigands, we beat up others - not necessarily physically - and leave them wounded. Or perhaps we most closely resemble the man who was mugged, either because we have been wounded by others or because we are victims of self-inflicted lesions. Or, take the parable of the sheep and the goats in Mathew 25. An honest reading tells us that it is not the case that some of us are sheep and some of us goats, but that all of us are goats, called to be, in the best sense, “sheepish.”
The New Testament tells us that, as sheep, we belong to the Lamb. The Lamb leads the sheep in “the grand manner” that Homer couldn’t dream of. The Book of Revelation brings the Bible story full circle. What began in a garden ends in a city, the New Jerusalem, where the marriage feast of the Lamb will be celebrated with untold magnificence. Here there is light, love and joy. This is the city we are working towards, the city of the nuptials of the Lamb whose fullness we shall all receive.
Morality ultimately reaches up to the bliss of the eternal dwelling where God will be all in all.
How beautiful to have one’s name writ indelible in the Book of the Lamb.
Suggested Prayer for the blessing of Bibles:
Encapsulated in these books is the form of your divine word, O Lord, expressed in the art of man’s lexicon and the articulation of his culture. We invoke your blessing, Lord, upon them, so that when your Word is proclaimed, people may not only hear your message but be healed in the hearing and be in turn empowered to proclaim and reconcile to your everlasting glory. Amen.
Fr. Mervyn Carapiet,
