6th Sunday Year A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2023

Sixty years ago nearly all the bishops of the world met together in Rome in three ten-week stints over three consecutive years for the Second Vatican Council. Their intention was to bring the Church up-to-date once more since the last Ecumenical Council in 1870. The first topic they tackled was the Scriptures. So much had developed in the field of Scriptural studies since the former Council 90 years earlier. New questions were being asked; new answers kept surfacing. There was need to bring greater clarity into the field once more.

One of the issues troubling many people was whether all the separate seventy books comprising the Catholic Bible should be taken literally. The bishops’ answer was “No”. Those books, the ones coming from the historical experience of the Jewish people and from the proclamations of the prophets, referred to experiences that happened over a protracted period of two thousand years.

The bishops re-affirmed that God had indeed inspired the various authors who wrote them, but the inspiration process was definitely not dictation [as Muslims believe about the Quran]. God inspired their authors’ thinking and intentions, but the authors chose their own words and literary styles, whether poems, records of ancient much-treasured stories, myths, fiction [humourous or otherwise], law codes, and whatever.

It is the task of scholars — skilled linguists, historians, etc. — to try to work out as carefully as possible what kind of literature the each individual biblical author adopted so that current readers might know better how to engage with each book.

It is fascinating to notice how, over the centuries, the Jewish authors, often under the influence of their prophets, grew in their sense of God — from a tribal God “fighting on their side”, often brutally violent and punitive, to a just but still punishing or rewarding God, to a usually [but not always] merciful, forgiving God. As persons and cultures slowly matured across the centuries, their capacity to understand matured. Insights clarified gradually. The Jews did not treat the written insights of their fathers as though permanently frozen in time. What mattered was the direction in which they developed and to what they pointed.

Eventually Jesus himself came among us in his own human nature to reveal, three-dimensionally, the mind and heart of God. It is pertinent to note how Jesus dealt with the Jewish scriptures as he knew them.

Today’s short Gospel passage gives us a good illustration of his approach. As he stressed: nothing “shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved”. Jesus retained a deep respect for what he called “the purpose” contained within the Jewish Law.

He himself exemplified also that continuing need to further complete the Law. He called for an ever-deeper conscientious formation of the relevant moral virtues needed to strengthen people’s resistance to the grossly dangerous temptations leading to transgressions forbidden centuries earlier in the Decalogue: killing, for example, or the deep disdain for women typified in the divorce customs of the time, or the direct disrespect even for God shown in perjury.

Jesus saw himself completing the developments worked by both Law and Prophets. But he also looked to the future. He realised how even his special disciples struggled to comprehend what he was telling them. He also knew that future disciples would have to deal with continually changing cultures.

Just before he died, as we learn from St John’s Gospel, Jesus encouraged the disciples, assuring them not to worry about having to remember everything he was telling them: “I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you now. But when the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth … and tell you of the things to come”.