Living the Word
How shall we live as disciples of Jesus the Christ? The readings for these winding-down weeks of the year all address that question. These scriptures raise painful inner and outer questions of nonviolence. Many of them deal with gospel economics, the economics of the heart and the economics of the purse. The gospel is neither solely personal nor solely political. It embraces and transforms both—at the cross.
This is our sixth and final "Living the Word." We again alternate Sundays, this time with Jim doing the first, third, fifth, seventh, and ninth, and Shelley the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth.
These reflections actually began with Christmas, the incomprehensible feast celebrating the unbelievable fact: God with us, God loving us (see "Living the Word," November-December 1995).
In September the ordered world of Proverbs and James is read against the cross of Mark’s world.
In the language of "left brain, right brain" constructs, the scriptures for the weeks of August call upon our right-brain gifts. We leave the world of what we can see and touch and document and enter a world of imagination and creativity, a world of poetry and emotion.
We pass from the last vestiges of the wilderness and the prophet of the wilderness, Samuel, to the courtly chronicler and the beginning of the record of the Kings. We had begun such a transition last month with the movement from the swift action and immediacy of Mark to the leisurely contemplation of the meaning of it all in John.
There is a world of human experiences in the scriptures and many ways in which those experiences are shared. Let us be open to them all. This is our Story. These are our spiritual ancestors who are speaking to us. What can we hear from the Hebrew record, from the gospel, from the epistle that will speak to us today so that we can, in our own voice, pass the Story on?
We trace the Story—our story—from its beginnings in the Hebrew scriptures, through its climax in the memories of the early church as reflected in the gospels, and then on to what sense
The scriptures for our meditations come from first and second Samuel, the Psalms, the gospel according to Mark, and Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.
The remaining gospels of eastertide play out Jesus’ farewell discourse in the latter chapters of John.
There is no more brilliant literary surprise, I think, in all of scripture than the shocking cliffhanger abruptness of Mark’s resurrection account.
Prior to Constantine, when the church was outlawed and, with some regularity, systematically persecuted, the reception of members was a rigorous and risky proposition.