Delving into Scripture

Though we started along Luke's Jesus-journey to Jerusalem several liturgical months ago, we're still on the road. We've yet to reach our designation: complete dying and rising with Jesus.

As Jesus approaches the "crisis point" of His life and ministry, Luke wants to be certain we're accompanying Him with the right frame of mind. Sunday, he especially reminds us to look at life differently from those who never venture outside their own secure limits, those who never discover the path God has chosen for them (Lk 16: 19-31).

In the Gospel, Jesus warns about the snare wealth can become in our lives. The quest for financial gain leads us to build walls instead of roads, walls which blind us to our responsibilities toward other human beings instead of roads which help us fulfill those responsibilities.

Roadblock

Worried his five surviving brothers will make the same eternal mistake, the rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus back to earth "as a warning to them."

Abraham responds by reminding the tormented individual that such warnings have already been given in Scripture ("Moses and the prophets"). When he insists that his siblings certainly would change if "someone would only go to them from the dead," Abraham sarcastically answers that if they haven't listened to Scripture, "they'll not be convinced even if one should rise from the dead."

Abraham's response seems to be based on Luke's conviction that Scripture (the Hebrew Scriptures!) provide us with the essentials of Jesus' faith. He believes Jesus' (and our own) resurrection is the result of living this biblical faith, not a replacement for it.

What makes Abraham's remark so biting is that, until the Vatican II liturgical reforms of the lectionary were implemented in 1970, we Catholics hadn't heard a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures during a Sunday Eucharist for more than a thousand years!

Some of us might not have noticed the omission. Remember what our grade school teachers taught about Sunday Mass obligation? If we were late for the celebration, we only committed a venial sin as long as we arrived "before the chalice was uncovered." It didn't take long to figure out we could miss the entire Liturgy of the Word for a lifetime and never commit a serious sin! No wonder so many of us are biblically illiterate. What Luke thought essential to faith, we regarded as "extra credit." (I was reminded of this attitude several weeks ago when, as a "visiting presider" in another parish, I spied a woman in the choir loft reach into her purse, pull out a cell phone and make a call during the Scripture readings!)

Virtues

Amos gives us a sample of what those Scripture proclaim (Am 6:1, 4-7). "Woe to the complacent," Amos warns. The prophet saw that our quest for security often leads us to ignore the "collapse" of others around us, the same message Jesus conveys in His story of Lazarus and the rich man.

Last month, on the anniversary of Anne Frank's 1944 arrest, National Public Radio did an in-depth report on the help Christians offered Jews in Nazi-controlled Holland. "I went to 81 homes," one elderly interviewee remembered, "asking families to hide Jews from the Gestapo. Seventy-four told me, "`No!'"

When push comes to shove, unless we know what to look for along life's path, we, like the 74, will probably miss the dying and rising experience in which Jesus' road converges. Maybe we should go back to reading and teaching the book Jesus was reading and teaching as He trod down that road.

(09-24-98)

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