Who we’re really worshipping
Sometimes it seems like people are reading from different Bibles.
I don’t mean different translations.
Depending on who it is, listening to what they say about the Bible. And the way they talk about what it means. It’s more like they’re reading radically different books.
It’s always made me uneasy. Still does. But I never understood what was going on until I was studying to become a deacon.
When one of my instructors started explaining all of the different ways that people read the Bible. Going over my notes after class, it occurred to me that (except for the ones designed to reduce the Bible to dreary academic trivia) all of them were really just different ways of doing one of two things.
Either they were a way for me to impose my ideas onto the Bible.
To make the Bible say what I wanted. So I could pretend that God agreed with me.
Or they were a way for me to get God’s ideas out of the Bible.
For God to cut through the clutter and speak to my heart. Even if it isn’t what I wanted to hear.
Especially if it isn’t what I wanted to hear.
This is what the debate in today’s Gospel speaks to.
Do we accept the truth from the words of God? Even if it’s not what we want? So that we can gain the eternal, even if it comes at a price in this present?
Or do we try to pretend that it means something else? So we can get what we want in this passing moment? At the price of losing the eternal?
If we’re honest, we already know the answer to this one. We just don’t want to admit it.
Because it threatens our feeble and increasingly desperate efforts to pretend that we’ve got this.
It grates against our unspoken sense of entitlement. That God owes us something for being the wonderful people that we are.
And it lays bare who we’re really worshipping.
“They measure God by themselves, and not themselves by God.” – St. John of the Cross
Today’s Readings
