RECEIVE WITH MEEKNESS THE IMPLANTED WORD
A Reflection on the Dogmatic Constitution Dei verb
(Second Lenten Sermon 2016
by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM)
Let us continue our reflection on the principal documents of
Vatican II. Of the four “constitutions” that were approved by it, the one on
the Word of God, Dei Verbum, is the only one—along with the one on the
Church, Lumen gentium—to have the qualifier “dogmatic” in its title.
This can be explained by the fact that the Council intended with this text to
reaffirm the dogma of the divine inspiration of Scripture and at the same time
to define its relationship to tradition. In line with my intention to highlight
just the spiritual and uplifting implications in the Council’s texts, I will
limit myself here as well to reflections that aim at personal practice and
meditation.
1
A God who speaks
The biblical God is a God who speaks. “The Mighty One, God the
Lord, speaks. . . . He does not keep silence” (Ps 50:1, 3). God himself repeats
countless times in the Bible, “Hear, O my people, and I will speak” (Ps 50:7).
On this point the Bible presents a very clear contrast with the idols who “have
mouths, but do not speak” (Ps 115:5). God uses words to communicate with human
beings.
But what meaning should we give to such anthropomorphic
expressions as “God said to Adam,” “thus says the Lord,” “the Lord says,” “the
oracle of the Lord,” and other similar statements? We are obviously dealing
with speech that is different than human speech, a speech for the ears of the
heart. God speaks the way he writes! Through the prophet Jeremiah he says, “I
will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts” (Jer
31:33).
God does not have a human mouth and breath: his mouth is the
prophet, and his breath is the Holy Spirit. “You will be my mouth,” he says to
his prophets, or “I will put my words in your mouth.” It has the same meaning
as the famous verse, “Men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pet
1:21). The term “inner locutions,” which indicates direct speech from God to
certain mystic souls, can also be applied, in a qualitatively different and
superior way, to how God speaks to the prophets in the Bible. We cannot exclude
however that in certain cases, as in the baptism and in the transfiguration of
Jesus, there was also an external voice resounding miraculously.
In any case, we are dealing with speech in a real sense; the
creature receives a message that can be translated into human words. God’s
speaking is so vivid and real that a prophet can recall precisely the place and
time in which a certain word “came upon” him: “in the year that King Uzziah
died” (Is 6:1); “in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day
of the month, as I was among the exiles by the river Chebar” (Ez 1:1); “In the
second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, on the first day of the
month” (Hag 1:1).
God’s word is so concrete that it can be said to “fall” on
Israel as if it were a stone: “The Lord has sent a word against Jacob, and it
will [fall] upon Israel” (Is. 9:8). At other times the same concreteness and
physicality is expressed not by the symbol of a stone that strikes but by bread
that is eaten with delight: “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your
words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart” (Jer 15:16; see also Ez
3:1-3).
No human voice can reach human beings to the depth that the word
of God reaches them. It “pierce[s] to the division of soul and spirit, of
joints and marrow, and discern[s] the thoughts and intentions of the heart”
(Heb 4:12). At times God’s speech is like a powerful “thunder” that “breaks the
cedars of Lebanon” (Ps 29:5). At other times it seems like “the sound of a
gentle whisper” (see 1 Kgs 19:12). It knows all the tonalities of human speech.
The discourse on the nature of God’s speech changes radically at
the moment in which we read in Scripture, “The Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14).
With the coming of Christ, God now speaks with a human voice that is audible to
the ears of the body. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard,
which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with
our hands, concerning the word of life . . . we proclaim also to you” (1 Jn
1:1, 3).
The Word was seen and heard! Nevertheless, what was heard was
not the word of man but the word of God because the speaker is not nature but a
person, and the person of Christ is the same divine Person as the Son of God.
In him God no longer speaks through an intermediary, “through the prophets,”
but in a person, because Christ “reflects the glory of God and bears the very
stamp of his nature” (Heb 1:2-3). Indirect discourse in the third person is
replaced by direct discourse in the first person. It is no longer a case of
“thus says the Lord!” or “the oracle of the Lord!” but “I say to you. . . .”
God’s speech, whether mediated by the prophets of the Old
Testament or by the new, direct speech by Christ, after being orally
transmitted was put into writing in the end, so we now have divine
“Scriptures.”
Saint Augustine defines a sacrament as “a visible word” (verbum
visible).[1] We can define the word as “a sacrament that is heard.” In every
sacrament there is a visible sign and an invisible reality, grace. The word
that we read in the Bible is, in itself, only a physical sign like the water in
baptism or the bread in the Eucharist: it is a word in human vocabulary that is
not different than other words. However, once faith and the illumination of the
Holy Spirit enter in, we mysteriously enter into contact through these signs
with the living truth and will of God, and we hear the very voice of Christ.
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet writes: “The body of Christ is just as
truly present in the sacrament that we adore [the Eucharist] as the truth of
Christ is in his gospel preaching. In the mystery of the Eucharist the species
that we see are signs, but what is enclosed within them is the very body of
Christ; in Scripture the words we hear are signs, but the thoughts that the
words carry comprise the very truth of the Son of God.”[2]
The sacramentality of the Word of God is revealed in the fact
that at times it works beyond the comprehension of the person who can be
limited and imperfect; it works almost by itself—ex opere operato, just
as we say about the sacraments. In the Church there have been and will be books
that are more edifying than some books in the Bible (we only need to think of The
Imitation of Christ), and yet none of them operates like the most humble of
the inspired books.
I heard someone give this testimony on a television program in
which I was taking part. He was a last-stage alcoholic who could not stop
drinking for more than two hours; his family was on the brink of despair. He
and his wife were invited to a meeting about the word of God. Someone there
read a passage from Scripture. One verse in particular went through him like a
ball of fire and gave him the assurance of being healed. After that, every time
he was tempted to drink, he would run to open the Bible to that verse, and in
rereading the words he felt strength return to him until he was completely
healed. When he tried to share what that well-known verse was, his voice broke
with emotion. It was the verse from the Song of Songs: “Your love is better
than wine” (1:2). Scholars would have turned up their noses at this kind of
application of Scripture but—like the man born blind who said to his critics,
“I only know that I was blind and now I see” (see Jn 9:10ff)—that man could
say, “I was dead and now I have come back to life.”
A similar thing happened to St. Augustine as well. At the height
of his battle for chastity, he heard a voice say, “Tolle, lege!” (“Take
and read!). Having the letters of St. Paul nearby, he opened the book with the
intention of taking the first text he came across as God’s will. It was Romans 13:13ff:
“Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and
drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and
jealousy.” He writes in his Confessions, “No further wished I to read,
nor was there need to do so. Instantly, in truth, at the end of this sentence,
as if before a peaceful light streaming into my heart, all the dark shadows of
doubt fled away.[3]
2
Lectio divina
After these general observations on the word of God, I would
like to concentrate on the word of God as the path to personal sanctification. Dei
verbum says, “The force and power in the word of God is so great that it
stands as the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her
sons, the food of the soul, the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life.”[4]
Starting with Guigo II the Carthusian, different methods and
approaches have been proposed for lectio divina.[5] They have the
disadvantage, however, of having been devised almost always in relation to
monastic and contemplative life and are therefore not well suited to our time
in which the personal reading of the word of God is recommended to all
believers, religious and lay.
Fortunately for us, Scripture itself proposes a method of
reading the Bible that is accessible to everyone. In the Letter of James (Jas
1:18-25) we read a famous text on the word of God. We can extract from it a
plan for lectio divina in three successive steps or stages: receive the
word, meditate on the word, and put the word into practice. Let us reflect on
each of these steps.
1.Receive the Word
The first step is to hear the word: “Receive with meekness,” the
apostle says, “the implanted word” (Jas 1:21). This first step encompasses all
the forms and ways that a Christian comes into contact with the word of God: we
hear the word in the liturgy, in Bible studies, in writings about the Bible,
and—what is irreplaceable—in personal reading of the Bible.
In Dei verbum, we read: the sacred synod also earnestly
and especially urges all the Christian faithful, especially Religious, to learn
by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures the “excellent knowledge of Jesus
Christ” (Phil. 3:8). . . . They should gladly put themselves in touch with the
sacred text itself, whether it be through the liturgy, rich in the divine word,
or through devotional reading, or through instructions suitable for the purpose
and other aids.[6]
In this phase there are two dangers to avoid. The first is to
stop at this initial step and convert a personal reading of the Word of
God into an impersonal reading. This is a very considerable danger
especially in places of academic formation. According to Søren Kierkegaard, a
person who waits to apply the word of God to his life until he has resolved all
the problems connected to the text, the variants, and the divergence of
scholarly opinions, will never reach any conclusion: “God’s word is given in
order that you act upon it, not that you shall practice interpreting obscure
passages.” It is not “the obscure passages” in the Bible that are frightening,
this philosopher said, it is the clear passages![7]
Saint James compares reading the word of God to looking at
oneself in a mirror. The one who limits himself to studying the sources, the
variants, and the literary genres of the Bible and does nothing more is like a
person who spends time looking at the mirror—examining its shape, its
material, its style, its age—without ever looking at himself in the
mirror. The mirror is not fulfilling its proper function for him. Scholarly
criticism of the word of God is indispensable and we can never be grateful
enough to those who spend their lives smoothing out the path for an
ever-increasing understanding of the sacred texts, but scholarship does not by
itself exhaust the meaning of Scripture; it is necessary, but it is not
sufficient.
The other danger is fundamentalism, taking everything in the
Bible literally without any hermeneutical mediation. These two excesses,
hypercriticism and fundamentalism, are only seemingly opposite since both share
in common the defect of stopping at the letter and ignoring the Spirit.
With the parable of the sower and the seed (see Lk 8:5-15),
Jesus offers assistance for each of us to discover our condition regarding
receiving the word of God. He distinguishes four kinds of soil: the path’s
soil, the rocky soil, the soil with thorns, and good soil. He then explains
what the different types of soil symbolize: the path represents those in whom
the words of God are not even implanted; the rocky soil represents those who
are superficial and inconstant, who hear the word with joy but do not give the
word a chance to take root; the soil with thorns represents those who let
themselves be overwhelmed by the preoccupations and pleasures of life; the good
soil represents those who hear the word and bear fruit through perseverance.
In reading this, we could be tempted to skip hurriedly over the
first three categories, expecting to end up in the fourth category, which,
despite all our limitations, we think depicts us. In reality—and here is the
surprise—the good soil represents those who easily recognize themselves in each
of the first three categories! They are the people who humbly recognize how
many times they have listened in a distracted way, how many times they have
been inconsistent about intentions they formed in hearing a word from the
gospel, how many times they have let themselves be overwhelmed by activism and
worldly preoccupations. These are the ones who, without knowing it, are
becoming the truly good soil. May the Lord grant that we too be counted in that
number!
Concerning the duty of receiving the words of God and of not
letting any of them fall to the ground empty, let us listen to the exhortation
that Origen, one of the greatest lovers of the word of God, gave to the Christians
of his time: “You who are accustomed to take part in divine mysteries know,
when you receive the body of the Lord, how to protect it with all caution and
veneration lest any small part fall from it, lest anything of the consecrated
gift be lost. For you believe, and correctly, that you are answerable if
anything falls from there by neglect. But if you are so careful to preserve his
body, and rightly so, how do you think that there is less guilt to have
neglected God’s word than to have neglected his body?”[8]
2.Contemplate the Word
The second step suggested by St. James consists in “fixing our
gaze” on the word, in placing ourselves before that mirror for a long time, in
short, in meditation and contemplation of the word. The Fathers used images of
chewing and ruminating to describe this. Guigo II wrote, “Reading, as it were,
puts food whole into your mouth, meditation chews it and breaks it up.”[9] According to
St. Augustine, “When we listen [to God’s word], we are like the clean animal
eating, and when later we call to mind what we heard, . . . we are like the
animal ruminating.”[10]
People who look at themselves in the mirror of the word learn to
understand “how things are”; they learn to know themselves and discover their
dissimilarity to the image of God and the image of Christ. Jesus says, “I do
not seek my own glory” (Jn 8:50): here is a mirror before you, and suddenly you
see how far you are from Jesus if you are seeking your own glory. “Blessed are
the poor in spirit”: here is a mirror once again before you, and you suddenly
discover you are full of attachments and superfluous things, and above all full
of yourself. “Love is patient . . .” and you realize how impatient you are, how
envious, how concerned with yourself. More than “searching the Scriptures” (see
Jn 5:39), the issue is letting Scripture search you. The Letter of Hebrews
says,
For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any
two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and
marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him
no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with
whom we have to do. (Heb 4:12-13).
In the mirror of the word, fortunately, we do not see only
ourselves and our shortcomings; first of all we see God’s face, or better, we
see God’s heart. St. Gregory the Great says, “What is sacred Scripture but a
kind of epistle of almighty God to his creature? . . . Learn the heart of God
in the word of God.”[11] Jesus’ saying, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth
speaks” (Matt 12:34), is also true of God. God has spoken to us in Scripture of
what fills his heart, namely, love. All the Scriptures were written with the
goal that human beings would understand how much God loves them and in learning
this might become enkindled with love for him.[12] The Jubilee
Year of Mercy is a magnificent occasion to reread all of Scripture from this
perspective as the history of God’s mercy.
3.Do the Word
Now we come to the third phase of the path proposed by the
apostle James: “Be doers of the word . . . for a doer that acts, he shall be
blessed in his doing” (Jas 1:22, 25). On the other hand, “If any one is a
hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who observes his natural
face in a mirror; for he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets
what he was like” (Jas 1:23).
Being a “doer of the word” is also what is most on Jesus’ heart:
“My mother and my brethren are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Lk
8:21). Without “doing the word” everything is illusion and building on sand
(see Matt 7:26). People cannot even say that they have understood the word
because, as St. Gregory the Great says, the word of God is truly understood
only when people begin to practice it.[13]
This third step consists, in practice, in obeying the word. The
word of God, under the action of the Spirit, becomes the expression of the
living will of God for me at any given moment. If we listen attentively, we
will realize with surprise that there is not a day that goes by in which—in the
liturgy, in the recitation of a psalm, or at other times—we do not discover a
word about which we are forced to say, “This is for me! This is what I should
do!”
Obedience to the word of God is obedience we can always give.
Obedience to the commands of visible authorities only occurs from time to time;
obedience in a serious matter might only be required three or four times in
one’s whole life. However, obedience to the word of God is something we can do
at every moment. It is an obedience that all can perform, subordinates
and superiors. St. Ignatius of Antioch gave this wonderful advice to one of his
colleagues in the episcopate: “Let nothing be done without your consent, nor do
anything without God’s consent.”[14]
In practical terms, obeying the word of God means following good
inspirations. Our spiritual progress depends in large part on our sensitivity
to good inspirations and our readiness to respond. A word of God has suggested
an idea to you, it has placed on your heart a desire for a good confession, for
a reconciliation, for an act of charity; it invites you to interrupt work for a
moment and address an act of love to God. Do not delay, do not let the
inspiration pass by. “Timeo Iesum transeuntem” (“I’m terrified of Jesus
passing by”), said St. Augustine,”[15] which is like saying, “I am terrified that
his good inspiration is passing by and will not come back.”
Let us conclude with a thought from an ancient Desert Father.[16] Our mind, he
said, is like a mill; the first wheat that is put into it in the morning is
what we continue to grind all day. Let us hurry, therefore, to put the good
wheat of the word of God into this mill the first thing in the morning.
Otherwise, the devil will come and put his tares in it, and for the whole day
our minds will do nothing but grind those tares. The particular word we could
put in the mill of our mind for today is the one that has been chosen for the
Year of Mercy: “Be merciful as your heavenly Father!”
________________________________
Translated from Italian by Marsha Daigle-Williamson
[1] St. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 55-111,
80, 3, vol. 90, trans. John W. Rettig, The Fathers of the Church (Washington,
DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), p. 117.
[2] Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, “Sur la parole de Dieu,” in Oeuvres
oratoires de Bossuet, vol. 3 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1927), p. 627.
[3] S. Augustine, Confessions, VIII, 29, trans. John K. Ryan
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), p. 202.
[4] Dei verbum, n. 21. Quotes from papal documents are taken
from the Vatican website.
[5] See Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks: A Letter on the
Contemplative Life, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Kalamazoo, MI:
Cistercian Publications, 1981).
[6] Dei verbum, n. 25.
[7] Søren Kierkegaard, Self-Examination / Judge Yourself,
ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990), p. 29.
[8] Origen, “Homily 13 on Exodus,” 3, in Homilies on Genesis and
Exodus, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 2010), pp. 380-381.
[9] Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks, 3, p. 68.
[10] Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 46, 1, The
Works of Saint Augustine, Part 3, vol. 16, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. John
E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000), p. 325.
[11] See Gregory the Great, “Letter 31, to Theodorus,” in Epistles
of Gregory the Great, vol. 12, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, trans. James
Barmby, eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p.
156.
[12] See Augustine, First Catechetical Instruction, 1, 8,
vol. 2, Ancient Christian Writers (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 23.
[13] Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Book of the Prophet
Ezekiel, 1, 10, 31, trans. Theodosia Tomkinson, 2nd ed. (Etna, CA: Center
for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2008), pp. 200-201; see also CCL
142, p. 159.
[14] Ignatius of Antioch, “Letter to Polycarp,” 4, 1, in The
Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed.,
ed. and rev. trans. Michael W. Holmes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), p.
265.
[15] Augustine, “Sermon 88,” 13, The Works of Saint Augustine,
Part 3, vol. 3, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle (Brooklyn, NY: New City
Press, 1991), p. 341.
[16] See Abbot Moses in John Cassian, Conferences,
“Conference One,” 18, trans. Colm Luibhéid (Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), p.
52.
