Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Neh 8:1-4a, 5-6, 8-10
Second Reading: 1 Cor 12:12-30
Gospel reading: Lk 1:1-4, 4:14-21
As we carry out Christ’s command to evangelize – reinforced by Archbishop Miller at the recent Upper Room conference – we may hear the objection “Where does the Bible say that?”
The answer is that God’s revelation is not confined to the Bible.
Consider what Luke said in the Gospel reading: that he wanted Theophilus to “know the truth” concerning the things about which he had been instructed. In fact, all the New Testament writings were addressed to people who had already received instruction.
For example, Paul warned the Galatians against anyone preaching “a Gospel contrary to that which you received.” He urged Timothy to maintain the doctrine “you have heard from my lips” and the Thessalonians to stand firm in the traditions “you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.”
As a result, the New Testament writers often omitted what they expected their readers to know already. For example, when Matthew said that Jesus taught in Galilee’s synagogues, he did not say what he taught. When Luke said that Jesus told his apostles about God’s kingdom for 40 days after his resurrection, he did not say what he told them.
The New Testament, then, is not a catechism. Seldom do its authors try to prove or even state doctrines. Rather, they clarify, develop, or draw consequences from doctrines their readers already accept.
Accordingly, “the Church does not draw her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Rather, she relies on Sacred Tradition: the “living transmission” of God’s word by the apostles and their successors (as the New Testament itself illustrates).
Sacred Tradition comprises what was “handed on” (in Latin, traditum) by the apostles through preaching, example, and the institutions they established, even before anything was written down (although semantic evidence suggests that the writing began very soon after Jesus’ death). Indeed, the Church decided which writings to include in the Bible by how well they agreed with Sacred Tradition.
(The canon, or catalogue, of the inspired books was not formalized until AD 382, at the Council of Rome.)
Clearly, Jesus wanted to make himself and his teaching known to the whole world for all time. However, he could not rely on a written document – as history shows.
Take the United States as an example. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia claimed that the Court is continually reinterpreting the country’s constitution, and that many of the “rights” the Court has found there for the last 40 to 50 years “clearly did not exist” when it was written.
Instead, Jesus entrusted the interpretation of God’s word, both written and oral, to his apostles and their successors in his Church. He founded his Church on Peter as on a rock and promised that what it bound or loosed on earth would be bound or loosed in heaven. (We call the Church’s Christ-given authority her magisterium, from the Latin magister, meaning “teacher.”)
We should not read the Gospels, then, as a compendium of Jesus’ teaching. How should we read them?
First, we must learn what the evangelists intended to express and did in fact express in the idioms of their time. This is the job, principally, of Scripture scholars, from whose work everyone can profit.
Second, we must pay attention to the content of sacred Scripture as a whole, for the Bible is “a unity by reason of the unity of God’s plan,” however the various books differ.
Third, we must read the Bible “within the living Tradition of the whole Church.” As St. Augustine said, “I would not believe in the Gospel, had not the authority of the Catholic Church already moved me.”
The Catholic faith is not “a religion of the book,” says the Catechism; it is “the religion of the word of God”: a word that is not “written and mute,” but “incarnate and living.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1–16 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 17, “Grace and the Sacraments,” will be available in YouTube form starting Jan. 23.