Sunday Homily 1-24-10, 3rd Ordinary Time
Readings: Nehemiah 3, 2-10; Psalm 19, Your Words, Lord are Spirit and Life; 1 Corinthians 12, 12-30; Luke 1, 1-4, 4, 14-21
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time – Reading Reflections
Our readings today focus primarily on Readings. Our first Reading from Nehemiah gives us a complete change from the Old Testament reading we have been hearing from for many weeks, namely the time of Exile. For Nehemiah is writing from a time after the Exile. The “Remnant”, as the people who had been scattered were referred to, had come back to Jerusalem. This writing is part of a greater collection of writing composed of 1 and 2 Chronicles and Ezra, whom we hear about in our selection today. This is the only Sunday in the three-year cycle of readings when we hear from Nehemiah, makes you wonder what he did wrong!
The last four books of the Hebrew canon are Ezra, Nehemiah, 1 and 2 Chronicles. In our first reading today, we will hear about Ezra, so it is worth commenting about both Nehemiah and Ezra as they are both the two men most responsible for the reorganization of Jewish life after the Exile. There are good reasons for believing that originally the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah formed the last part of a single literary work that began with 1 and 2 Chronicles. Some authors even regard Ezra himself as having been the anonymous Chronicler. c. 400 B.C. as the time of composition of this work.
Nehemiah was the man of action who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and introduced necessary administrative reforms. Ezra in turn was the great religious reformer who succeeded in establishing the Torah as the constitution of the returned community.
The second reading from Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians continues where we left off last week, addressing issues within the community in Corinth. I have chosen to use the optional shorter version and avoid most of the anatomy lesson.
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time – Homily
It would seem that the topic for today is “Reading the Scriptures”. In our first reading we hear of Ezra reading to the people for hours and hours, think how lucky you all are today with these short reading we have!! In the Gospel, Luke we have the very first verses from Luke’s gospel and then a jump to chapter 4 and a very detailed account of Jesus in his local synagogue in Nazareth. What strikes me as interesting is the detail, almost like stage directions, which Luke gives us of Jesus getting up to read.
And here in
If we start to look at the Bible, we realize that it is the story of a peoples understanding of their relationship with their God, and how that relationship played out over several hundreds of years. With a sense of their uniqueness, they try to answer the most fundamental questions about human life, how did it begin, what is our place in the world. To answer these questions they told stories. Unfortunately up until quite recently we tended to view the stories as historically accurate, and there are some folks who still view them as accurate!!
As Catholics we have a very long tradition of NOT reading the bible, it was viewed as too dangerous! Remember, it was reading and interpreting the Bible was what caused the Reformation. Today, I know of folk who use the Bible to determine their whole code of relationships. “Wives submit to your husbands” came from a society of about two thousand years ago, and yet, in spite of our more liberated view of humans, there are folk who happily live this way.
In 1943, Pope Pius XII published an encyclical “Divino Afflante Spiritu” on Bible Studies. This was really the first time that the Church was officially encouraging Catholics to read the Scriptures again.
So what about us here today? Each Sunday, we gather and get short readings and hopefully some background to those reading so that we may understand the context. But you are probably the most educated Catholics ever to sit and listen to the Scriptures. Remember, when Pius XII was submitting his encyclical, less than 70 years ago, most people could barely read, and had not even completed high school. So their thinking was done for them by the Church. Today, we are invited to read and reflect on the Scriptures ourselves. There is much available by way of help. Even if we use the online edition of the New American Bible, http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/index.shtml there are helpful introductions and not too many footnotes.
If we accept that the Scriptures are inspired by the Spirit, then careful reading and reflection can help us to deepen our relationship with God and allow us to better our relationships with one another.
The Vatican II council issued a document on the Scriptures called “The Constitution on Divine Revelation” and urges us to “learn by frequent reading of the divine scriptures the “excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:8) and that prayer should accompany the reading of sacred scripture, so that God and man may talk together; for “we speak to him when we pray; we hear him when we read the divine sayings”. #25.
So what is to be our take-away for today? “Be careful how you read the scriptures” Take the time to understand who wrote it, why it was written, whom it was written for and what was the culture. Remember, spin-doctors are nothing new.
Sources: New American Bible, http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/index.shtml
Picture 1: Mass begins with Tony
Picture 2: Lilly with her Grand daddy, Buddy
Picture 3: The Donut Shoppe, Ron & Chloe & C.C.
Picture 4: Sacrament of the Sick, Curtis, Barb, & Tony