Ignorance of Scripture is Ignorance of Christ

 

Deacon Dave · Ignorance of Scripture is Ignorance of Christ

Homily for Word of God Sunday, Jan. 21, 2024. The Gospel of St. Mark 1:14-204:12-23. Theme: Ignorance of Scripture is Ignorance of Christ 

 When Pope Francis instituted “Word of God Sunday”, which we are celebrating today, he called our attention to St. Jerome, who was very important in early Christianity. In the 4th century he translated the Bible from its original Hebrew and Greek into the language of the people, but he wasn’t always such a devoted fan of the Bible. As a matter of fact, he was at first only a half-hearted Christian at best. 

 In his early life, Jerome was an academically-gifted but hedonistically-promiscuous college student in Rome. His practice of Catholicism was done mostly out of a sense of guilt particularly after nights of partying. But this began to change after he contracted a life-threatening disease. During his recuperation period he had a dream in which he found himself before the judgment seat of Christ and Heaven was not going to be his destination! Jerome protested that since he was a baptized Christian he ought to be let into Heaven. But Jesus told him that he better think twice about that statement. Christ informed him that simply going through outward religious rituals without them affecting one’s way of life is of little to no value when it comes to one’s eternal destiny! 

 Jesus’ warning shook Jerome out of his spiritual apathy and he experienced what the New Testament calls a “baptism of the Holy Spirit”. This means that he had a personal spiritual revival, a religious re-awakening in his life. Jerome realized that although he was baptized and raised in the Faith he really didn’t know Christ personally. And he concluded that the reason for this was because he didn’t know the Scriptures which is where we get to know about the Lord! From that point on he devoted his life to the study of the Word of God. The most famous quote we have from St. Jerome expresses his conversion experience and goes like this: “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ”. 

 Pope Francis hopes that Word of God Sunday will help us to avoid – or get out of - that same kind of ignorance of Christ. He wants us to realize that the Bible must have a vital place in our lives so that, like St. Jerome, we will come to truly encounter Christ up close and personal. But for this to happen, we have to approach the Sacred Scriptures very differently than we do any other writings. Their uniqueness is that they originate in the mind of God Himself Who inspired the various authors of the Bible to write down what we need to know for our salvation. Unlike ordinary human writings, God’s Word is alive and active and has the power to touch the heart, to heal the soul, to enlighten the mind and to strengthen the will to do good and avoid evil. 

 But how can we know that the Scriptures are truly the inspired Word of God? We can’t simply say that the Bible says so! That’s just an empty circular argument. There is only one sure answer and it’s found in the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus. In other words, the Resurrection confirms everything Christ taught because it proves He was Who He said He was: God come in the flesh. And so, the degree to which we accept the Bible as inspired by God is equal to the degree to which we believe that Jesus Christ is truly risen from the dead as Son of God, Lord and Savior. 

 So the best thing we can do is to investigate the Resurrection because our faith quite literally either rises or falls on this one central truth. And this investigation is quite easy and possible to do because our faith is based on eyewitness testimony and historically reliable documents. But most people never bother to do this. They either just accept the Easter story because they are expected to do so, or they reject it outright because it sounds too impossible to be true. 

 Over a span of 2,000 years there have only been 5 main reactions to the story of an Empty Tomb and a Risen Lord. The first four are objections to the Resurrection and are easily dismissed on grounds of the historical evidence of known facts and they are: that Jesus didn't really die, that His corpse was stolen and not risen, that the earthquake recorded on Good Friday swallowed His body, and that the emotionally distraught disciples were hallucinating a Risen Messiah. But the 5th response is not so easy to dismiss if a person has undertaken a truly open-minded study of the Resurrection and it is this: that the evidence is undeniable and the eye-witness testimony is credible. This leads to just one reasonable conclusion: Jesus Christ is the Son of God, present and active among us today as our Risen Lord and Savior!