How to read the bible: Homily for Thursday, December 7, 2023

Beginning with the Church Fathers, there's always been a sense that we have to think carefully about the Scriptures. Because more than anything else, the Bible is about a way of seeing the world. It's about a way of understanding what happens to us, about our relationship with God, about what gives meaning to our lives.

Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.

Today’s first reading from the book of Isaiah describes a world that will exist when God’s kingdom is realized. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are necessary. Jesus prays how remarkable this world is when we accept the way of God.

How to read the bible

It’s interesting when you listen to two groups of people that have radically different views about the Bible. On the one hand, there are Christian fundamentalists who take the Bible literally. Their basic argument is that if God gets it wrong, let’s say in the story of Genesis, then how do we know God didn’t get it wrong in everything else? Therefore, everything must be literally true because God cannot lie.

On the opposite extreme are what I would call the scientific atheists. They notice the same problem. If God gets it wrong on this particular spot, as we observe the universe, there’s limited evidence to suggest that it could have in any way happened as is recounted in the book of Genesis. And they say, well, if God gets it wrong here, then God gets it wrong everywhere. Therefore, there must be no God.

It’s very interesting because both of those extremes identify a problem and they wind up with opposite solutions to the problem. But beginning with the Church Fathers, there’s always been a sense that we have to think carefully about the Scriptures. Because more than anything else, the Bible is about a way of seeing the world. It’s about a way of understanding what happens to us, about our relationship with God, about what gives meaning to our lives.

And if we don’t read the Bible in that way, we can be led astray. The Bible is not really a book. It’s a library of books. We have some very wonderful creation stories, very common for anybody to think about, how did we get here? How did all this beautiful stuff come to be?

There are books that are historical in nature and we can identify even from non-religious sources the history and the historical truth of what is recounted. There is beautiful poetry, which the church from the earliest days saw as the way to pray like Jesus Christ in the Liturgy of the Hours. There is, I would say, a legal code. And I’ve talked to more than one lawyer who says that the legal code laid out in Leviticus and Deuteronomy is actually quite good.

And of course, there are the experiences of Jesus. Now the danger for us, even as Catholics, in seeing the way things are, especially among those scholars who at one time were of this mind, there was a temptation to dismiss and try to find a reason explanation for everything that happened in the Bible. And so there was a tendency to dismiss the miracles of Jesus as being something else.

But the Bible is really about helping us to see where it is that God is active and alive in our world. Now I mention that all really as a preface to what we get in the book of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is painting a picture of the way the world should be.

And much like so many in the Bible, we have to understand the world from a biblical view. That God is active and alive in history. That God does not create evil, but for a better purpose allows it. And that God makes promises, but not only that, God keeps the promises He makes. And so what do we read about this wonderful world?

The book of Isaiah has a privileged place because there are so many instances where it appears to point to the Christ. It appears to point to Jesus who will come to save us. In the book of the prophet Isaiah, the reading that we heard from today, this biblical worldview is evident right at the very beginning. A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse.

Now who was Jesse? David’s father. And so here we get a sense that yes, this was the promise that someone from the house of David, someone from the lineage of David would ultimately be the great King, the Messiah.

We understand that in painting this world, Isaiah identifies the gifts that are necessary to live in this world. And they aren’t the kinds of gifts we would look at to be successful economically or to have a successful job necessarily. I mean, I suppose some of them could be seen as adaptable.

But the gifts to help us in this world, in the way we see it, are these gifts, which should sound familiar. A spirit of wisdom and of understanding. A spirit of counsel and strength. A spirit of knowledge and a fear of the Lord. And delight in the fear of the Lord. If we have those gifts, it becomes much easier to see how it is that Jesus is active in our own lives.

And when we discover that, what Jesus expects of us in terms of how we live and how we treat other people. Christmas is about gifts. But perhaps if we focus more on the most important gifts, we would discover the truest gift given us by God, his Son, Jesus Christ.

rosary on top of opened bible book — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

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