So that we may understand

Sacred Scripture is the foundation of Christian life and the Christian Credo. Scripture is the first and primary source from which Christian faith and experience flow. In Scripture, we find the revelations of God and his plan of salvation for man and all men of good will, through the history of the people of the Old Testament, especially in the mission of the prophets, and lastly and perfectly, (Cf. Heb 1:1) through Jesus of Nazareth—his deeds and his words.

The entire history of the people of the Old Testament, especially the lives and proclamations of the prophets, the lives of the early Christians and their communities, but especially the very life of Jesus of Nazareth, became—through his authenticity and consistency, through his authority, that is, through the manifestation of the divine in the deeply human, (Cf. DV 2)—the space where God reveals himself and his will for all mankind.

For centuries, the importance, foundation, and centrality that Sacred Scripture must have in the life of the Church, in general, and in the life of each Christian, in particular, were neglected and forgotten. And, during twenty centuries, other voices, other words, other documents, other announcements, other exhortations, other notions of life became, perhaps, more important than the written Word of God. Sometimes, they were in tune with the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, but many other times, these have been bodies of teaching and/or doctrinal concepts that have contradicted how God manifests and communicates in the Bible.

That is why—six decades ago—the meeting of all Catholic bishops of the world at the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council invited all believers in Christ to return—beyond the doctrinal tangle woven for twenty centuries—to the source of our Christian Credo, i.e., God's revelations contained in Sacred Scripture, especially to what the God of the Old Testament and our Creator and Father reveals, through the life of Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, also, the most recent popes and most important doctrinal documents of the Church have focused on providing the central place that Sacred Scripture deserves in the life of Christianity, seeking to raise awareness of the identity, the life, and the work of each disciple of Christ, in each community of faith.

Thus, in the Apostolic Letter issued “Motu proprio,” entitled APERUIT ILLIS and given in Rome on September 30, 2019, Pope Francis institutes the THIRD SUNDAY of ORDINARY TIME of the Catholic Liturgy as THE SUNDAY OF THE WORD OF GOD. This year, this day will fall on January 26.

This new endeavor, this renewed importance that the Church wants to give the centrality of Scripture in the life of the Church and every believer, is recognized by Francis himself in the aforementioned letter when he says: “It is now common for the Christian community to set aside moments to reflect on the great importance of the word of God for everyday living. The various local Churches have undertaken a wealth of initiatives to make the sacred Scripture more accessible to believers, to increase their gratitude for so great a gift, and to help them to strive daily to embody and bear witness to its teachings.” (2)

The Pope wants this celebration for the “study and dissemination” of the Word of God to have—at the same time—an ecumenical character: “This Sunday of the Word of God will thus be a fitting part of that time of the year when we are encouraged to strengthen our bonds with the Jewish people and to pray for Christian unity.”(3) May this be the moment to highlight and recognize the importance of the Word of God in worship in our sister Christian churches. 

We congratulate and applaud Pope Francis’ initiative, which, in line with similar provisions of his predecessors, is encouraging our faith and bringing us closer to the primary source from which our faith, our hope, and our love flow: the Holy Bible.

“Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ” (Commentary on the Book of Isaiah, Prologue: PL 24,17B) - Quoted by Francis in the aforementioned Letter). We applaud, again, this new endeavor because, in the Catholic Church, we regain the centrality of the Word of God in our Christian life, but this calls for education on the part of us all: the agents of evangelization and its recipients. Theological education (exegetical and hermeneutical) is urgently needed so that we learn to read the origins of our faith in biblical texts with the same theological intentions—although from different cultural perspectives—with which they were written. We must synchronize the confessions of our faith with the confessions of faith of the first Christians. We must shape our lives to the life of Christ. We must, in short, give life to the Word of God in our daily lives.

Let us take advantage of this new Catholic ardor for the Word of God. Let us participate in the spaces of study of Sacred Scripture that are offered to us, so that our faith becomes more intelligent, more reasoned, more reasonable and, therefore, more credible. As the apostle Peter urges and encourages us: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.” (1 Pet 3:15)

“All of it was very good”

The history of Judeo-Christian salvation presented in the Bible opens in the book of Genesis in the Old Testament with a marvelous statement: “God looked at what he had done. All of it was very good!” (Gen 1,31). However, the obvious tragedy of evil, the overwhelming evidence of suffering, pain, violence, injustice, iniquity, and death… in the world, experienced in a thousand conflicts that are individual, or in the family, social or international contexts, cause men to ask, since the beginning, about the reasons for this disorder, for the attacks against the original harmony that God gave to his creation.

The biblical and Christian interpretation perceives the experience and the cause of evil as “sins” (plural, in the Old Testament) and as “sin” hamartía (Greek, singular, in the New Testament). This latter interpretation, of greater interest to us as Christians, as men and women of the New Testament, consists in a structural posture, a fundamental option of human life that is contrary to our Creator and compassionate and merciful Father, contrary to his will, and in the final analysis, contrary to brotherly love (especially toward the weakest), as revealed by Jesus of Nazareth. We should love in the same way and in the same proportion as God loves us. Thus, if life in God is life in love, sin is life without God, that is, without love, and the terrible manifestations of evil are understood as an absence of God’s love in the life of men and women, his creatures, his children. But, on the other hand, every definitive healing of any experience of evil in the world –-from a Christian viewpoint–- comes from the love of God among men.

In this historical juncture between modernity and post-modernity, people today are searching, without an absolute truth to orient and regulate their life. Human life today is lived out in the moral relativism of half truths, of pocket truths, of a life style that is “yours to choose,” according to which nothing has value or all has equal value in the practical sense that it gives satisfaction here and now; for we live each day without a transcendent vision of history and with the sad perspective of no future. The only thing that matters today is immediate satisfaction and all is valued or justified for that purpose.

In the world of moral relativism, laxity, subjectivism, and sentiments (as opposed to reason), a theological interpretation of evil, universal and objective, has lost its place, since everything is valid today, especially if it is prohibited, as long as it produces pleasure. On the other side we find the postures and behaviors of men and women, more appropriate to modernity, that tends to judge everything as evil, as sin, rigorously, scrupulously and, in the words of Jesus himself, “strain the gnat and swallow the camel”. Lent reminds us that not everything is sinful, although sin exists: the denial of God’s will that requires us to love each other as brothers for the construction of a better society and world than that in which we live and for which all of us are responsible.

“The Lord saw how bad the people on earth were and that everything they thought and planned was evil. ⁶ He was very sorry that he had made them…”(Gen 6,5-6). Lent, the liturgical season with a strong call for conversion (metanoia) is, above all, an important moment to again interpret the world and human history in light of the One upon whom our life depends. Through Christ, with Him and in Him, humanity has a new opportunity and Lent needs to be seen as an appropriate time to look again at our life and that of our neighbors according to God’s desire that we discover his love, yet at the same time, unveils our denial of God’s love and the love of our brothers. A time in which we need to discover our sin: our lying, our uselessness, our deceptions and fears; in reality, our lack of faith which is a lack of confidence in God who has been loving us and calling us eternally to his home, to life in Him.

          The conversion to which the Word of God and the liturgy of the Catholic Church calls us in the season of Lent consists of an awareness of God’s love manifested in our life, in all that we are and have and, with that, the awareness of our sin as a fundamental posture contrary to the basic love of God. Lent is a season for sincere repentance, to conform our life to the life that Jesus proposes for us in his gospel and for an absolute confidence in the forgiving love of the Father.

          All this, contrary to a society that is apparently satisfied, proud, egotistical, with its scientific and technical conquests that instead of leading us to “love one another,” have left us enclosed behind walls, full of the most sophisticated weapons designed to kill, far from life in the original Paradise for which we were created.

Lent is a call to build an ethical and moral society. The “amorality” (life without moral norms) and “immorality” (life that is opposed to moral principles) of so many, traverses these days the highways of the world, opening trenches of violence, blood, death, crisis, wars, divisions, hunger, injustice, iniquity, misery, etc.

The Christian theological system enables believers in Christ to again start something fresh, begin again, trust again in a loving Father, enjoy the embrace of his eternal love. The Sacrament of Reconciliation enables us to experience that the original harmony is still possible, that broken relations with God, with others and with nature can be finally healed and that the goodness of all things that God loved on the first day of creation is also possible today.

I invite you to live intensely this Lenten season of 2014 as a precious space and time which the Catholic liturgy grants us the possibility to seek again among us the lost Paradise that God made when he “saw that all of it was very good”.

The Bible - God Speaks and a People Listen and Answer (Part 1 of 3)

We Christians have as a fountain and source of our faith God’s revelation found in the Holy Scriptures. For Christians, then, the Bible is the fundamental and most important collection of sacred texts, because we believe that they contain the Word of God. In other words, they contain what God has revealed and communicated through history; and in it also we find the answers of some men, (especially the prophets), the answer of a people (Israel), the answer of Jesus of Nazareth, and of the first Christian communities to the saving design of God.

“Bible” is a Greek word which means “collection of books”. It contains 73 different books. Some of these books are very old and were written by different authors whom we call “sacred authors” or “hagiographers”; and in a socio-cultural context very different from ours. Therefore, for the “intelligent” reading, study and living of the Sacred Scripture, it is necessary:

• To know the structure of the Bible.
• To know certain fundamental biblical elements of hermeneutics (interpretation).
• To know the context of the text: that is, to know the people of the Old Testament as well as the space/time when the historical revelation occurred and, therefore, God’s progressive revelation until the time of Jesus of Nazareth, where Christianity emerges.

For all of this, theology, and more specifically biblical theology, has the help of science and methods such as exegesis, hermeneutics, archeology, paleontology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, semiology, etc.

The Languages of the Bible: Originally, the biblical books were written in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.

The Bible’s Literary Styles: We call “literary styles” to the diverse forms and ways of oral and written expressions utilized by the authors in a specific place and time. In the Bible we find, especially, eight great and different literary styles: historiography, the law, the prophets, lyrics, wisdom writings, apocalyptic writings, Gospels and letters.

The Old Testament: contains 46 books which refer to the history of the people of Israel; starting with Abraham (around the year 1,850 B.C.) until Jesus of Nazareth and the birth of the first Christian communities. They are divided in four groups, according to the predominant literary style of each:

The Pentateuch:

		Abbr.	Number of Chapters
1	Genesis	Gn	50
2	Exodus	Ex	40
3	Leviticus	Lv	27
4	Numbers	Nu	36
5	Deuteronomy	Dt	34

The Historical or Narrative Books:

6	Joshua	Js	24
7	Judges	Jg	21
8	1 Samuel	1 S	31
9	2 Samuel	2 S	24
10	1 Kings	1 K	22
11	2 Kings	2 K	25
12	1 Chronicles	1 Ch	29
13	2 Chronicles	2 Ch	36
14	Ezra	Ezra	10
15	Nehemiah	Ne	13
16	Ruth	Ru	4
17	Tobit	Tb	14
18	Judith	Jdt	16
19	Esther	Es	10
20	1 Maccabees	1 Mac	16
21	2 Maccabees	2 Mac	15

The Prophetic Books:

22	Isaiah	Is	66
23	Jeremiah	Jr	52
24	Lamentations	Lm	5
25	Baruch	Ba	6
26	Ezekiel	Ez	48
27	Daniel	Dn	14
28	Hosea	Ho	14
29	Joel	Jl	4
30	Amos	Am	9
31	Obadiah	Ob	1
32	Jonah	Jon	4
33	Micah	Mic	7
34	Nahum	Nh	3
35	Habakkuk	Hb	3
36	Zephaniah	Zep	3
37	Haggai	Hg	2
38	Zechariah	Zec	14
39	Malachi	Ml	3

The Wisdom Books:

40	Job	Job	42
41	Psalms	Ps	150
42	Proverbs	Pr	31
43	Ecclesiastes	Ec	12
44	Song of Songs	Sgs	8
45	Wisdom of Solomon	Ws	19
46	Sirach (Ecclesiasticus)	Si	51

The New Testament: contains 27 books which refer to the life, ministry, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus; and to the life of the first Christian communities (until approximately the year 110 A.D.), and can be divided, also, in four literary styles.

The Synoptic Gospels:

1	Matthew	Mt	28
2	Mark	Mk	16
3	Luke	Lk	24

The Writings of Paul:

4	Romans	Ro	16
5	1 Corinthians	1 Co	16
6	2 Corinthians	2 Co	13
7	Galatians	Ga	6
8	Ephesians	Eph	6
9	Philippians	Phil	4
10	Colossians	Col	4
11	1 Thessalonians	1 Th	5
12	2 Thessalonians	2 Th	3
13	1 Timothy	1 Ti	6
14	2 Timothy	2 Ti	4
15	Titus	Titus	3
16	Philemon	Phm	1

The Writings of John:

17	Fourth Gospel (John)	Jn	21
18	I John	1 Jn	5
19	II John	2 Jn	1
20	III John	3 Jn	1
21	Revelation	Ap	22

The Catholic Letters:

22	The Acts of the Apostles	Ac	28
23	Hebrews	He	13
24	James	Jas	5
25	1 Peter	1 P	5
26	2 Peter	2 P	3
27	Jude	Jd	1