Reflection
I have preached a few homilies in my life, and I have listened to even more than I have given. A general observation I’ve made is that most preachers spend their energy helping people identify with the biblical story. Yet those who truly excel at homiletics go further. They weave the biblical story together with the life and culture of our contemporary world. They gift people with an interpretation that is tangible. To merely retell something that happened two thousand years ago, without bringing it into contact with the present moment, leaves the assembly with history but not with encounter. It seems to me that the goal of our lives is to evangelize, and that means bringing the presence of Christ into today’s life, helping reveal an encounter with God’s divine presence.
The readings and feast of this day dwell on a central theme of the power of scripture and the Word of God being present in our lives. The wonderful scripture teachers I have had over the years all encouraged us to ask deep, challenging questions of the scriptural text. Ask profound questions, not to discredit scripture, but to hear it at a more profound level. Isn’t this precisely what Jesus models for us in today’s Gospel? He takes a text every scribe knew by heart, Psalm 110, and opens it like a door no one had thought to try. “If David calls him Lord, how is he his son?” It is a simple question, but it cracks something open. The crowd heard it with delight, because they recognized they were in the presence of someone who read Scripture from the inside out. Praying and pondering the scriptures is work.
It takes far more effort to ponder the word in my heart than to merely read the black letters on the page in a literal way. And like all things in life, without doing the work, you can’t have the reward.
Our first reading is from Second Timothy. It is an ancient instruction: stay the course. Do not allow the noise of any recent fads or trends to shift your direction. Root yourself in the richness of Scripture, Paul tells Timothy, because it is not merely a human document that this divinely inspired work carries within it the power to teach, to correct, to form, and to equip us for every good work.
The Church gives us a companion to these readings in the feast of St. Boniface. He was a great missionary to the Germanic peoples. He carried Scripture and faith into completely unknown territory, at great personal cost, willing to be persecuted, trusting that the Lord would be with him. He is the type of disciple Paul was writing about.
In this day and age, people are turning to artificial intelligence as a conversation partner for life’s hardest questions. And yet believers have been doing exactly that with Sacred Scripture for millennia. Fur hundreds of generations, scholars and believers have been bringing to the text their questions, uncertainties, doubts, and faith, waiting, praying, and listening for a reply. Scripture has always been the original living dialogue. That is what is so rich and profound about scripture. It is alive, dynamic, and engaging. It is NEVER limiting. I suspect that is one reason that those of us who read these reflections on a daily basis continue to tune in. We know at a very deep level that the word of God is NEVER boring or dull.
Every day we receive the invitation, “Is there something God is saying to us today?”
Yet most importantly, this activity completes the cycle of Easter and Pentecost. We are spirit driven people who see the presence of the resurrected Christ in our lives and bear witness to the reality of the resurrection. That is what it means to live in the resurrection. Isn’t that what the scriptures ask of the Disciples of Jesus?
