April 22, 2009
|
Breaking Open the Word By James Cavanagh April 26: Third Sunday of Easter Scripture readings: Overview: Christ is the “key” to understanding the Bible. Through his suffering, death and resurrection “God has brought to fulfillment what he had announced beforehand through the mouth of all the prophets” (Acts 3:18). In the first reading Peter explains the significance of the miraculous healing of a man crippled from birth. Addressing the astonished crowds Peter tells them how Jesus—the one they killed but whom God raised to life—is the “holy and righteous one” and “author of life.” Typical of the Easter readings, Peter communicates the central Gospel message, or kerygma. The second reading uses almost exactly the same words to describe Jesus: the righteous one. Having risen from the dead Christ now sits at the right hand of God as our Advocate, applying the benefits of his death to our sins. Christians are not perfect but “whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him.” In this week’s Gospel, the risen Christ appears suddenly to the disciples in the upper room. After convincing them that he wasn’t a ghost, he unlocks the Scriptures for them, explaining how everything written about him “in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms” had to be fulfilled. Key verse: “Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (Lk 24:45). “Catechism of the Catholic Church”: “The Christian faith is not a ‘religion of the book.’ Christianity is the religion of the ‘Word’ of God, a word which is ‘not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living.’ If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, open our minds to understand the Scriptures” (No. 108). Pope Benedict XVI: “Let us never forget that ‘when the sacred Scriptures are read in the Church, God himself speaks to his people, and Christ, present in his own word, proclaims the Gospel.’ If it is to be properly understood, the word of God must be listened to and accepted in a spirit of communion with the Church and with a clear awareness of its unity with the sacrament of the Eucharist. Indeed, the word which we proclaim and accept is the Word made flesh (cf. Jn 1:14); it is inseparably linked to Christ’s person and the sacramental mode of his continued presence in our midst. Christ does not speak in the past, but in the present, even as he is present in the liturgical action” (Sacramentum Caritatis, 45). |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||