Together on the Journey: A Weekly Blog from Fr. Andrew Sheldon
On Ash Wednesday, I addressed those gathered and said: “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Lord, to observe a holy Lent by self-examination, penitence, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and by reading and meditating on the word of God.”
In my blog the last number of weeks, I have discussed self-examination and penitence, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. This week, I want to address reading and meditating on the word of God.
I think we all know what it is to read and meditate; reading followed by thinking, analysing, imagining how this could be relevant to my life, and how I can apply what I have learned from this process of reading and meditating.
But what do we mean by the ‘word of God’? In the first place, of course, we mean the Bible. But even here, we need to understand the sense in which the Bible is the word of God. There are those who believe THE BIBLE IS THE WORD OF GOD; that is, they believe that the origin of “Holy” scripture is somehow the result of a series of supernatural events, that God quite literally ‘wrote’ the Bible.
In reality, the sixty-six separate books crammed together in a not-always-logical arrangement came together in very human ways. With all the haggling and bickering you’d expect from a committee, the Catholic Council of Carthage pulled together one of the first official collections in 397 A.D. – more than three hundred years after the time of Jesus. What we call our “Old Testament” consists of thirty-nine books, many of which had multiple authors. The New Testament has twenty-seven books, many of which also have multiple authors or uncertain authorship. The Old Testament is concerned with the Hebrew God, Yahweh, and a history of the early Israelites. The New Testament is the work of early Christians and reflects their beliefs about Jesus.
The composition of the various books began before 1000 B.C.E. and continued for more than a thousand years. Also included was oral material that was repeated from generation to generation, revised over and over again, and then put into written form by various editors. These editors often worked in different locales and in different time periods and with very different socio-economic, philosophical, theological, and spiritual worldviews. They were most certainly unaware of each other and it is unlikely that any of them foresaw their work being included in a “Bible.” Their work was intended for local use.
As a record of various peoples’ experience of God’s faithfulness and human infidelities, the Bible is full of colorful characters, lying, cheating, sex, hate, war, sex, betrayal, murder, sex, letters, poetry, history, sex, great ideas, lousy ideas, and more sex. Read closely, a variety of theological voices is revealed — sometimes harmonious, other times a cacophony of contradiction.
With all this in mind, a biblical scholar concluded that ‘the Bible is not the word of God – but the word of God is in the Bible’. As such, we do not take the Bible literally, but we do take it seriously. In this sense, I certainly adhere to the notion that the Bible then can be understood to be God’s word – God’s word because it encompasses God’s word. For instance, at my ordination to the Priesthood, I was required to say the following: ‘I solemnly declare that I do believe the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the word of God and to contain all things necessary for salvation’. And I do believe that; it is God’s word because it contains God’s word.
It is this, therefore, we are invited to read and meditate on in the season of Lent, and quite frankly any and all seasons. But I would also argue that God’s word is not only to be found in the Bible, that there are other sources upon which we can read and meditate in order to come closer to God. More on that next week.
Have a blessed Lent.
Andrew+