Biblical laments for Sunday of the Word of God

January 26th is “Word of God” Sunday. Pope Francis has designated the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time as “Word of God” Sunday to encourage Catholics to read and better understand the Bible. Its proximity to “Week of Prayer for Christian Unity” also helps to build Catholic-Protestant unity through shared understanding of Sacred Scripture.

Prior to Vatican II, some wags alleged that Catholic Bible reading was so infrequent that the Church must have put the Bible on the Index of Forbidden Books! It was hoped that the Council’s teachings, including on the importance of Word and Sacrament and an entire constitution on Divine Revelation, would remedy that. Post-conciliar liturgical reform sought to reinforce the effort by expanding the Lectionary. The one year cycle of Sunday readings was expanded to three and an additional reading–usually from the Old Testament—was added to the familiar Pauline Epistle and Gospel. Bible study groups emerged in many parishes. There was hope!

Sixty years after the Council, that hope appears somewhat thin. While Catholic Bible reading has improved, it is still not nearly as commonplace as would be suggested by the words of Dei verbum, in which the Council reminds us that

in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them; and 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 (nr 21).

It would be a mistake, however, to stick to 1960’s stereotypes about Catholics and Protestants on Bible reading. While Protestants probably read Scripture more often than Catholics, we should admit that biblical literacy is down generally. Once-upon-a-time commonplace references of biblical origin confuse people. Even “big name” biblical characters–especially from the Old Testament–often evince stares of “who?”

A general lack of biblical literacy

Our culture owes its formative lines to that book. Indeed, one of the justifications for Oklahoma’s 2024 effort to mandate biblical instruction in public schools was because, without familiarity with the Old and New Testament, significant parts of American legal, literary, and cultural heritage are incomprehensible. Whether that argument was sincere or a secular rationalization for restoring the Bible to public schools is not something we’ll tackle here. Suffice it to say, however, that there is growing unfamiliarity with the Bible and certainly not just among Catholics.

I can offer anecdotal evidence. My first teaching job in 1985, as a freshly minted Fordham Ph.D., was instructing undergraduates at St. John’s University in Staten Island, New York. The required course for all freshmen was an introduction to the Bible, 15 weeks from “in the beginning” (Gen. 1:1) to “come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20). I suspected the process couldn’t even begin there without at least some overview of concepts like divine revelation, inspiration, and canonicity as well as the most cursory surveys of biblical geography and history. Even more startingly, I quickly learned I could not assume everybody was familiar with “chapter and verse.”

Wedging even just the high points of both testaments into roughly 40 classroom hours was challenge enough. Making it clear why this mattered to undergraduates – especially at 8 o’clock in the morning and even though many were graduates of Catholic high schools – was even tougher. But we made it work.

That experience taught me the claim that people are unfamiliar with this foundational book of our culture is true. I see that now as I am translating a life of Christ, written in literary style by a foreign author. I frequently need to annotate the text with Scriptural footnotes because I cannot be sure that the modern reader–religious or not–will get the references and allusions the author makes. Those references would have one time been clear to an educated reader. They would have been to this author’s readers in his native language, even when this work appeared in the 1970s. That’s true neither of our times nor society today.

The problem with the “biblical establishment”

But there are other reasons why people have been cowed from reading Scripture. One of them may very well be a certain wing of the “biblical establishment.”

The Rev. James Martin, SJ this week tweeted out a link to reflections by Jesuit Fr. Richard Clifford, the gist of which is that “male and female He created them” (Gen 1:27) has no bearing on contemporary gnosticism’s attempts to abolish men and women. Arguing that the “context” needs to be seen only against the issues of Antiquity, Clifford claims using texts such as Genesis 1:27 in contemporary debates about sex and gender is illegitimate.

Like earlier attempts to suggest that the Bible’s apparent rejection of homosexual activity does not mean the Bible rejects homosexual activity, such biblicists engage in their own version of reducing the ephah and increasing the shekel (Amos 8:5) to accommodate the Zeitgeist.

Yes, Catholics should not and do not engage in “proof-texting”—that is, cherry-picking single biblical passages ripped out of context in order to “prove” something. This is the forte of Fundamentalist Protestants. But it’s also clear–undeniably so–from the very first pages of the Bible throughout that “male and female He created them” is the biblical vision of humanity. Not 31 flavors of gender.

One does violence to Scripture by proof-texting. One also does violence to Scripture by pretending that the broad lines of the Bible are not there.

Genesis 1 presents human creation in God’s image as connected with sexual differentiation. Genesis 2, where the creation of Adam precedes Eve, affirms the same thing in a different way. If “male and female He created them” is “very good,” then the man alone without the woman is “not good” (Gen 2:18)–and that judgment is normative, because it is God, not the man, who declares it “not good.” And how God remedies that state of “not good” is also normative, because God creates a woman, not another man: God gave Adam Eve, not Steve.

This binary persists throughout Scripture. Hosea uses it to propose the radical idea that God’s love of Israel is like a bridegroom for his bride, a daring bringing of God intimately close when His transcendence had previously been accentuated. It’s the theme picked up in the Song of Songs. And it’s picked up in Christ’s presentation of Himself as the Bridegroom, the Church as His Bride, and the Kingdom of Heaven like a wedding feast.

Are we to believe all this is a cultural overlay of the dread gender binary that God, in His infinite wisdom, left hidden in previous ages until it was finally revealed by Jesuit sons in the 21^st century? That we should peel all this “accretion” back to invent our own biblical paradigms out of whole cloth? That the Church’s own self-awareness of whom man is, “male and female,” based on that Scriptural trajectory, is just so much a timebound bias waiting for the revelation of the non-binary children of God?

The Lament of the unread Bible

One reason many Catholics (including myself) kept their distance from “Scriptural scholars” was this tendency to see the Bible as some time-bound, desiccated book whose “true” meaning was to be unlocked by a scribal elite parsing grammar coupled with some hermeneutical principle giving warrant for redefining what the Bible “means” (usually in line with elite sensibilities). It’s why so many Catholics found the Scriptural work of a Joseph Ratzinger refreshing, because he insisted that the Bible is “the book of the Church” and needs to be read within the life and practice of the Church, not the strictures of the best of Strong’s Greek grammar and Von Harnack’s interpretative principles.

It’s that “reading the Bible in and with the Church” that should animate our approach to “Sunday of the Word of God” (and the rest of the year with that Word, too).

Do Catholics need a greater relationship to Scripture? Yes. That’s especially true of the Old Testament, which for many Catholics is still terra incognita. (Self-advertisement: follow my Wednesday “Old Testament and Art” series in the National Catholic Register.) But the remedy for that unfamiliarity is not externally-imposed organizational principles that betray the text by ‘translating” it, but an honest encounter with the main lines of the biblical vision of God and man.

Given the less-than-encouraging landscape I’ve just painted, my mind goes to a wonderful essay by the 20th-century Polish writer Roman Brandstaetter, titled “The Lament of the Unread Bible”. Brandstaetter, born and raised in a highly observant Jewish family, made a literary career for himself in Polish Jewish circles in the 1930s before becoming Catholic during World War II. He always insisted, however, that he did not “convert” but that, rather, he found the “fulfillment” of his faith by entering the Church. That perspective informed his later, even more prolific writings as a Christian. The biblical world was central to them, but his vision went both ways: he didn’t so much “proof” the Bible to demonstrate Christian claims as much as to show how Jesus, as an observant Jew of his day, would have both understood and expanded the meaning of Scriptural texts.

“Lament” is written with the Bible as its narrator. It appeared around 1970, just after the Millennium of Polish Christianity was marked in 1966. Among the Millennium’s efforts at spiritual renewal was the promotion of Bible reading with a new translation of the Bible, one many people bought.

The Bible’s Lament begins there. It repeatedly asks the question: “Why did you spend 300 zlotys, put me in your bag, and carry me all the way across town just to put me on a shelf?”

Finding itself stuffed away and forgotten on the top shelf of the reader’s library, the forgotten Bible recalls three instances where it entertained hopes it would be rediscovered. One was rather banal. Its owner had invited some friends over for an evening and the conversation had turned to matters religious. One quoted a Bible verse; others disputed it. For a moment, the forgotten Bible thought it might be pulled out to referee but a cursory scan of the shelves led to an “I don’t know where I put it” and consignment to further years of exile.

The next occasion the Bible hoped it would serve was more serious. Its owner’s child had died and the father was buried in despair about the meaning of life, death, and the suffering of the innocent. The forgotten Bible hoped to offer insight and healing but, to its despair, its owner chose instead to sit in his chair, the blinds drawn, in the dark, succoring his pain, a process he’d continue after he became a widower.

The Lament concludes with its fate. Upon his owner’s death, his heirs come to divide his modest estate, which includes the collection of old books now stacked up on the floor, awaiting their fates. An heir spies the Bible lying there. He picked it up and, dusting it off, shows it to another relative with the remark: “See? Your deceased uncle, Lord shed light on his soul, was a pious man. He had a Bible. Take him as an example!

Let us not be that “pious uncle” who owns a book called “the Bible.” On this “Sunday of the Word of God,” why not start by hunting down that Bible somewhere in the house–maybe on that rarely reached top shelf–bring it down, dust it off, and resolve to become better acquainted?