Read Scripture as though the Lord is with you

We Catholics have an inferiority complex about the Bible. And well we should. We withdraw from conversation even with 14-year old Methodists who we are sure will outclass us. And when our parish offers an evening Scripture course, most of us decide we have to see “American Idol” or else sort our sock drawers. The church itself is to blame – church meaning all of us the people, not just the Curia in Rome. After the Reformation in the early 16th century, because of quarrels about Scripture serious enough to start wars, our leadership thought it best to take away our Bibles and give us teachers’ manuals called catechisms, written in Q and A format so the teacher would have all the approved answers. We allowed this for several centuries.
But Vatican II, the council from 1962-65, wanted to upgrade our regard for the Scriptures. So it expanded the Mass reading from a one-year cycle to a three-year cycle, theoretically exposing us to three times what we had. The trouble is that, even with better translations and more Bible training in our parishes and schools, we still only hear a fraction of the Bible at Mass. For instance, did you ever hear this passage from Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 17, verses 24-27? “When they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the temple tax approached Peter and said, ‘Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. When he came into the house, before he had time to speak, Jesus asked him, ‘What is your opinion, Simon? From whom do the kings of the earth take tolls or census tax? From their subjects or from foreigners?’ When he said, ‘From foreigners,’ Jesus said to him, ‘Then the subjects are exempt. But that we may not offend them, go to the sea, drop in a hook, and take the first fish that comes up. Open its mouth and you will find a coin worth twice the temple tax. Give that to them for me and for you.'”
Does the church not want us to know that Jesus used miraculous powers to pay his and Peter’s taxes? I had no such help last April 15. This passage does not appear even in the new, expanded readings. Yet I don’t see a conspiracy. If we knew what our young Methodist friends know, that the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) have many characters whom Jesus is consciously imitating, such as Elijah with the miraculous supply of flour or Elisha with the similar supply of oil, it would dawn on us that we could understand Jesus better if we read what he read. No doubt thanks to Mary and Joseph, and perhaps the rabbis at the Nazareth synagogue, Jesus learned the Scriptures and took it upon himself to pattern his ministry on Hebrew heroes.
Try a spirituality I find useful. Read any part of the Bible as though the Lord himself is right there in the same room reading along. We would have the luxury of asking him what he makes even of the difficult texts, as when Joshua, Jesus’s namesake, is ordered by God to wipe out hostile Canaanites right down to the last man, woman, child and head of livestock in some doomed town under the ban. Wouldn’t we hear him explain that his ancestors over a thousand years before were comparatively primitive, needing to justify after the fact the bloodshed of the conquest of the Promised Land? More to the point, wouldn’t we hear him commit to a very different and better kind of ministry, one that espouses non-violence, even if that means he would lay down his very life rather than resort to shedding another’s blood?
I think we can see Jesus using his imagination to parallel himself to these great prophets, or else matching up John the Baptizer, his older cousin, with Elijah. Jesus would be the new Elisha, his understudy. John was the severe ascetic who did not hesitate to tell Roman soldiers publicly not to extort money from people or falsely accuse them. Jesus volunteered to be baptized by John and apparently picked up from him what became his central doctrine: the Kingdom or rule of God, a kingdom that does not allow the powerful to oppress the weak. The Romans found this kind of talk seditious, so they silenced it.
When we Catholics choose to recover our patrimony – after all, we Christians wrote the New Testament – we will be closer to the Word who became flesh.