Thursday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time
I love writing these reflections. That’s partly because I have a thing for Bibles. Even when I was very young—in junior high—and not going to church (my parents stopped taking us to church when I was in elementary school), I had a Bible and loved it. My grandmother gave it to me. It was one of those red-letter Bibles. I don’t recall the translation. But I remember that its cover was green. I read it. Or tried to read it. But a lot of the time—no, most of the time—I didn’t have a clue what it was trying to tell me.
Since then, I’ve gotten a lot better at reading the Bible. That’s largely because the pastor that Bill and I were extremely fortunate to have at First Baptist in Dayton for years knows the Bible inside and out. He was raised Southern Baptist and started preaching when he was twelve. Now in his seventies, he’s been at it for a while!
And Bill and I have said to one another more times than I could possibly count that we cannot believe how lucky we are to have come into the Catholic Church via Father Satish’s parish! Again, we encounter the Bible by way of someone who really loves it, knows how to read it, and knows how to preach it!
I also love commentaries. And thanks to Bill, I have not one but two! The first one he bought me more than a decade ago. It’s the twelve volume New Interpreters Bible. I love it! It resides in a book case right behind my desk at home. It is always at the ready!
More recently, Bill spoiled me again and bought me several volumes (the commentary is in process and not yet complete) of the Wisdom Commentary published by Liturgical Press. I love that one even more! Not only is it just beautiful, but I have learned so much from it about how to read the Bible and attend to gender. I had to clear out a shelf in that bookcase behind my desk for that one. And it was totally worth it!
So, one of the reasons I love to write these reflections is that they often give me excellent reasons to dig into my commentaries! And today was definitely one of those days! Wow! What are we supposed to make of these texts? What do they mean?
One of my commentaries says, for instance, that Matthew is not talking about a king or a wedding feast. Okay, that helps. That commentary also points out that the story Matthew tells can’t be true. There’s no way the king could have waged war while dinner waited on him. Right! It also doesn’t make any sense that people who were invited at the last minute (off the street, no less) were expected to wear the proper clothes. I agree!
According to my New Interpreters Bible commentary, what Matthew is trying to do is to convey to believers that they shouldn’t be too confident about God’s grace. They have work to do. It’s not enough to simply show up to the Kingdom’s banquet. Okay, I can go with that! We have to do a lot more than that—like love our enemies and take care of the poor and watch out for widows and orphans. But, wow, I could not have come up with that reading myself.
What I am trying to get at in this reflection is that texts like the ones we encounter today remind me that I need to be very humble as I approach the Bible. Commentaries or not, in the end, there’s a lot that the Bible says that escapes me! And that is why I need preachers and teachers and other parishioners and the powerful Catholic intellectual tradition to help me.
I am reminded again of something that Saint Augustine wrote in his book on rhetoric, On Christian Doctrine. It struck me as so crazy wise. When you come across a passage in the Bible and you think it’s telling you something other than that God is love, you’re reading it wrong. Whatever it might mean, it can’t mean that. I find that so helpful, especially in these times when the Bible gets used way too often to say that we need to fear and hate somebody who, by the way, is a child of God and, thus, someone that God actually loves.
Thank God for humbling me today!
- Sue Trollinger