Tag: Scripture

It all begins with Jesus. To discover Catholicism — that is, what we believe — one must discover him. But how? So common is the mere idea of Jesus that even in post-faith cultures almost everyone has at least some faint notion of him. Consider the innumerable portrayals of Jesus in art, literature and film. Yet, how is Jesus discovered as the object of belief and worship for billions of people, and not just the cultural artifact?

One can, of course, discern philosophically the God of Jesus Christ. St. Paul hinted at it, that God was evident even to pagans by the witness of nature through “invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity” (Rom 1:19-20). Later, St. Thomas Aquinas talked about knowing God via both nature and grace. Belief in Jesus, God’s Son, comes by way of the latter, by “another science, inspired by God,” he said, “beyond the philosophical disciplines” (Summa Theologiae 1.1).

Ultimately, of course, philosophy seeks theology as nature seeks grace. What we can know of God by our own lights isn’t all we’re created to know, which is the tense, restless miracle of our nature. We are created to know and love God, but we can’t do it on our own. Hence, we are always searching.

Which is why all that we believe about Jesus, we believe God himself revealed. In the end, God finds us more than we find him. Which also, if what we ultimately say about Jesus is true, is the only possible way: that an eternal, immaterial, and invisible God would have to reveal himself, render himself findable, doing so in a way we can bear it. The fathers of the Church, like St. Athanasius, said we could only begin to comprehend God from understandable paradeigmata and eikonas, paradigms and images, because, of course, we’re finite creatures and God is an infinite Creator (Against the Arians 2.32). After all, we are, St. Augustine said, talking about divine wisdom and human beings (The Trinity 1.23). Only God can make himself fully known.

That’s why we need Scripture. Just as God, in Jesus, was seen in human flesh, the Second Vatican Council taught, so too the words of God must be expressed in human words in order to be understood (Dei Verbum, No. 13). Again, because without God’s own accessible revelation, we’d be able only to demonstrate God’s existence by cause and effect, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, a philosophically described Deity “which everyone names God” (Summa Theologiae 2.2-3).

Yet the preceding philosophy, though quite important, doesn’t, acutely matter. What matters is what it suggests, that Catholic belief in Jesus is, to use a Pauline phrase, in “accordance with scripture” (1 Cor 15:3-4). Now, what Paul meant by this phrase is that the proper way to understand Jesus is to understand him biblically, particularly within the web of meaning provided by Hebrew Scriptures.

Such is how Jesus explained himself. Beginning with “Moses and all the prophets,” Luke wrote, “he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the scriptures” (Lk 24:27). For example, in Acts Peter talked about Jesus in light of Dt 18:15. Jesus, Peter claimed, was the foretold prophet-like-Moses whom everyone was to follow (Acts 2:22-23). Jesus is presented in Mosaic terms repeatedly in the Gospels. In John’s Gospel, Jesus even said, “if you had believed Moses, you would have believed me” (Jn 5:46). This is what we initially mean by saying that what we believe about Jesus is “according to scripture.” Yet Christians also take this phrase to apply to all canonical writings. And so, to encounter Jesus most authentically is to encounter him in the literature of the New Testament too.

Hence, what we believe begins with Scripture. To explore Catholicism, one must explore Scripture. Which shouldn’t be frightening. Sometimes we scare ourselves off reading the Bible, thinking it only for scholars or priests. But that’s not true. The Bible is for everyone. All we need do is begin reading the Bible like any other book. It really is that simple. Perhaps read it together with a few friends, or read the scriptures the Church is reading day by day or Sunday by Sunday in its liturgies. The goal in reading the Bible is not to become a scholar or some expert. Rather, it’s simply to know the story, to allow oneself to get swept up by the narrative as with any good book. It’s just that reading this story can give way to a mystical experience, an encounter, a relationship. When reading Scripture — and especially reading and encountering Scripture within Church’s liturgy or within prayer — something different from ordinary reading happens.

What happens is we find another. Or, better, we’re found by another. That is, to put it plainly, we encounter Christ; he encounters us. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov the monk Zosima illustrates the simplicity and the mystery of this reality. All a priest needs to do, Zosima says, is “open the Book” and read it to his people. There is “no need for him to spout wisdom, to give himself airs.” He need only read plainly to them the stories of Scripture. That will be enough. In the end, Zosima says, the heart will “understand everything!” It really is that simple. And it’s with the Bible — your own copy, on your shelf or in your nightstand — that anyone can begin to explore the Catholic faith.

At the end of his apostolic exhortation on the word of God in the life and mission of the Church, Pope Benedict XVI talked about “a new hearing of God’s word” (“Verbum Domini,” No. 122). That, really, is the best way to begin — or, for some, to begin again. Because what we Catholics believe begins with Scripture and the scriptural Christ. All we believe — our theology, our dogma — is rooted biblically. So, if you want to know Jesus, if you want to know what we believe, begin there, the Bible. Seek Jesus there. For as St. Jerome famously said at the beginning of his “Commentary on Isaiah,” “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” And so, immerse yourself in Scripture. Because there is no such thing as Catholicism without it.

Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and author of “The Crisis of Bad Preaching” (Ave Maria Press, $17.95) and other books. Read more from the series here.

What does the love and glory Jesus talks about and prays for look like in the disciples, in the Church in the world? Again, the Church’s DNA is found in John 17.

“And I will no longer be in the world, but they are in the world, while I am coming to you” (Jn 17:11). But Jesus is in the world, in Jerusalem. But he is also speaking in such a way and of such things like glory that, in a sense, he is not in the world. Certainly, this is not an academic point, but when Christians act like heaven, then in a certain sense they are not in this world. Paul said our life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). That is, having taken on the life and virtues of a Christian — say, when you forgive though it makes no sense to forgive, love though it makes no sense to love — then, in a sense, you are no longer in the world. In a sense, you are in heaven. Or, better put, heaven breaks into the world through your loving action. It is not escapist; it is transformative. As God said to that beautiful mystic, Gabrielle Bossis, “Let us begin heaven” (He and I, 17 October 1940). Jesus has been glorified in his disciples (Jn 17:10). The world is not merely the world anymore. The world is changed, like heaven.

“Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are” (Jn 17:11). Here we begin to get to the heart of the matter. Jesus will no longer be physically present to his disciples, so he asks the Father to protect them, to keep them in his name, faithful to the way of Jesus. But then he says this: “so that they may be one just as we are.” Remember Jesus said, “The Father and I are one” (Jn 10:30). The Father and Son are one intimately, uniquely — “consubstantially,” as the Nicene Creed puts it — one in essence. The disciples are to be one “just as we are,” Jesus says. What does that mean?

The Greek word John uses for “one” is hēn, which signifies numerical oneness. It does not mean “unity” or “agreement” but “one.” That’s important. You see, it is not that we are called to agree with one another all the time or even to like each other necessarily. The oneness Jesus prayed for was more than unity. It was a real, numerical, essential, you-can-look-at-it-and-touch-it oneness. The Father and the Son share a unity of nature and love. The oneness Jesus desires for his disciples like that, a unity of nature and love. “Accordingly,” St. Thomas Aquinas said, “the Church and people can be preserved if they remain one.” This is not mere sentimental or even moral unity, important though that is. Jesus prays that his disciples “be one just as we are” — hēn. The oneness Jesus prays for is something thicker than ordinary accounts of unity. Ultimately, it’s sacramental, ecclesiastical — one, holy, apostolic.

Speaking personally, this is what began to convert me — hēn. Realizing that Jesus prayed for his disciples to be one, it became impossible for me to believe any longer claims that Christian division was in any way acceptable or good. It is not acceptable, and any thought that it is just is not true to Jesus’s own words, his own prayer, his own vocabulary. That Christian disciples are to be one as the Father and the Son are one, knowing what that oneness means, that certainly did not instantly make me a Roman Catholic. Yet it did shatter my complacent acceptance of Christian division, as if division and denominationalism were simply part of the order of things, something never to question. That is what began to convert me, the realization that my understanding and experience of divided Christianity was nothing like what Jesus actually prayed for. And I further had to accept that if Jesus actually said that — prayed that the disciples “be one just as we are” — then it stands to reason that he gave us the grace and energy to live in that oneness, to achieve it, if we would just let go of our hardened prejudices, question our givens.

“When I was with them I protected them in your name that you gave me, and I guarded them, and none of them was lost except the son of destruction, in order that the scripture might be fulfilled” (Jn 17:12). This, of course, is a mysterious, chilling reference to Judas Iscariot. St. Thomas Aquinas is silent about it. St. Augustine makes vague reference to Psalm 109:8. For me, again personally, I simply read it in haunting contrast to the oneness Jesus is praying for. Clearly, the stakes are high.

“But now I am coming to you. I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy” (Jn 17:13). We see now that glory is also joy. The glory belonging to the Father and the Son, shared among the disciples in oneness: the fruit of that glory and unity is joy. Earlier in the evening, thinking of Jesus’s departure — “Where are you going?” they ask Jesus — the hearts of the disciples were filled with grief (Jn 16:6). Now, because of glory in oneness, real joy is possible, the joy of heaven breaking upon earth. Like Gabriel to Zechariah and Mary, the angels to the shepherds, it is a joy that is heavenly smuggled into a dark world (Lk 1:14; 1:47; 2:10). Now, remember, we are talking about the community of believers, the Church, and the character of that community. It is a community of glory, oneness and also joy.

“I gave them your word, and the world has hated them, because they do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world” (Jn 17:14). The disciples will be hated in the world. Jesus was plain about this earlier in the evening, and here he is plain again (see Jn 16:18-25). As he does with so much of this prayer, St. Augustine, in his “Homilies on the Gospel of John,” reads these words about the world’s hatred prophetically. “They hadn’t yet experienced that in their martyrdoms,” he preached. Having accepted the Gospel, the disciples — just like Jesus — are hated. But again, by accepting the Gospel — again, just like Jesus — they are no longer in the world, for as St. Thomas Aquinas comments succinctly in his “Commentary on John,” “one cannot be joined to God without leaving the world.” And again, we are not talking about escaping from the world or any sort of dualism, but about holiness. That is how the Church is to be in the world — not only is it one, but it is holy too.

Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and author of “The Crisis of Bad Preaching” (Ave Maria Press, $17.95) and other books. Read more from the series here.