Christ will show himself to us if we keep his word. He remains present
to us through his Spirit and his word. Sacred Scripture, and particularly the
Gospels, play a central part in joining us in mind and heart to Christ.
How should we know Scripture? The thought might come to us that Scripture scholars know the text best and should. therefore be closest to Christ. But the absurdity of this thought becomes immediately apparent. For it is perfectly possible - unfortunately! - for someone to possess a thorough scientific knowledge of Scripture without even being a christian. A lecturer at the university may be able to read the original text in Hebrew or Greek, be familiar with the commentaries and master the contents of the inspired message. Yet he may well lack faith and teach Scripture as someone else might teach the Dammapada of the Buddhists. A good scientific knowledge of Scripture may be a help, but it does not in itself suffice. A totally different kind of knowledge is required.
To bear fruit, the words of Scripture must be received with faith and love and should be internalised. This means that they should become part and parcel of our own thinking. It is obviously not possible for anyone to internalise the whole of Scripture; neither is this necessary. For each individual certain parts of Scripture are more relevant than others. Internalising is greatly aided by a cultivation of such texts. Usually such key elements of the message are best digested by us in the form of ‘images’.
Jesus and the Old Law
To understand what internalising means and how it works, what better example could we find than the one given by Our Lord himself? Although Jesus was the Son of God and as such all-knowing from eternity, he did not choose this omniscience as the foundation of his human thinking. Becoming a man in all respects, except for sin, he wanted to grow in wisdom, to learn and build up his own thought-patterns as all of us do. Jesus received the instruction other children received in his time. He imbibed the culture of his own people. His religious concepts and feelings were nourished, like those of his contemporaries, by the Old Testament. As Jesus matured, he sifted all the information and, in prayer and meditation, worked out the religious constructs we now find in the Gospels.
Allow me to illustrate this process by an example. When Exodus narrates Israel’s lapse from God by the adoration of the golden calf, it mentions that only the tribe - of Levi remained loyal to Yahweh. To stop the idolatry, Moses called on the Levites to punish all those who were guilty, regardless of whether they were relatives or close friends. “The Lord God of Israel commands everyone of you to put on his sword and go through the camp from this gate to the other and kill his brothers, his friends and his neighbours” (Ex 32, 27). They obeyed and received a special blessing: “Today you have consecrated yourselves as priests in the service of the Lord by killing your sons and brothers” (Ex 32, 29). In the litany of blessings over individual tribes, which Moses is said to have spoken before his death, he once more praised the Levites for what they had done.
‘They showed greater loyalty to you than to parents, brothers or children.
They obeyed your commands and were faithful to your covenant.’ (Dt.33,9).
These Old Testament texts made a deep impression on Jesus. In his imagination he must have pictured to himself what a horrible plight the Levites found themselves in. Some of their close relatives had turned away from God and were misleading the people. Loyalty to God demanded that they be ruthless and turn against those closely related to them by family ties. Jesus would also remember the warning in Dt 13, 6-8: “Even your brother or your son or your daughter or the wife you love or your closest friend may secretly encourage you to worship other gods, gods that you and your ancestors never worshipped.... Do not let him persuade you; do not even listen to him. Show him no mercy or pity, and do not protect him!” Jesus would recall Micah's bitter complaint, “In these times sons treat their fathers like fools, daughters oppose their mothers, and young women quarrel with their mothers-in-law; a man's enemies are the members of his own family!” (Mic 7, 6).
I imagine Jesus meditating about these words in Nazareth, allowing them to sink in while strolling around on a Sabbath or while engaged in his carpenter’s job. There were certain aspects of the old tradition that Jesus deliberately discarded. He did not believe his Father would want to restore a priestly order such as that held by the Levites. Neither would he ever dream of killing other persons in punishment for unbelief. But one particular implication of the inspired words, in fact the core of their message, moved him deeply and shaped his future thinking. He would never allow family ties or bonds of friendship to stand in the way of loyalty to his Father! He steeled himself to be, in this regard, as ruthless and unrelenting as the levites had been. The incident in the Temple related in Lk 2. 41-50 may well be an indication that Jesus went through this process when he was about twelve years old. Even at that early age, he had made up his mind to attend first and foremost to his Father’s business.
Understanding Jesus’ decision, we appreciate better some of his seemingly harsh statements. When someone praised his mother, “How happy is the women who bore you and nursed you !”, Jesus replied, “Rather, how happy are those who hear the word of God and obey it ! ” (Lk 11, 27-28). In other words, loyalty to God is more important than family relationships. Although Jesus loved his mother (Jn 19, 25-27), although he never minimised the duty of respecting one’s parents (Mt 15, 4-6: 19, 19), he saw love of God as a higher duty.
We know that a number of his relatives, called “the brothers of Jesus”, started operating as a recognisable group during Jesus’ public life. Some are known by name: James, Joseph, Simon and Judas (Mt 13, 55). When Jesus moved to Capernaum, they too set up headquarters there (Jn 2. 12). Probably they were hoping that Jesus would develop into the kind of militarist messiah the Galileans were praying for. But Jesus did not yield to their pressures. He refused to accompany them to Jerusalem (Jn 7, 1-5j. He clashed with them when he visited his home town Nazareth (Lk 4, 16-30). He denied any direct association with them. When somebody told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, and they want to speak with you, Jesus answered that he only accepted as his relatives those who do the will of his Father. “Whoever does what my Father in heaven wants him to do, is my brother, my sister and my mother” (Mt 12, 46-50).
Jesus demanded an equally strict attitude of his disciples. He said to a certain person. ‘Follow me’. When that man asked permission first to go back and bury his father, Jesus retorted, “Let the dead bury their own dead, You go and proclaim the kingdom of God!” And to the man who wanted to say goodbye to his family, Jesus said, “Anyone who starts to plough and then keeps looking back is of no use to the kingdom of God” (Lk 9, 59-62). Following Jesus implies the fundamental readiness to leave “brothers, sisters, father’ mother or children”(Mt 19, 19-29).
At the Last Supper Jesus will say to his disciples, “Peace is what I leave with you; it is my own peace that I give you” (Jn 1 4, 27) . Jesus was to refer then to peace of conscience, to the peace that fills our hearts when we let our lives be ruled by his love. But he was not going to bring peace if by ‘peace’ we mean: lack of opposition. No, his radical demands will cause many people to reject and hate us. Jesus had come to bring the sword of the Levites, the sword of loyalty to God rasher than to one’s family.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the world. No, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I came to set sons against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law; a man’s worst enemies will be the members of his own family.
Whoever loves his father or mother more than me is not fit to be my disciple; whoever loves his son or daughter more then me is not fit to be my disciple.” (Lk 10. 35-37)
Jesus’ thoughts are rooted in the Old Testament texts, but they have outgrown them. What the Old Testament really wanted to imprint, the need for loyalty to God above everything else, had become Jesus’ own. He took this principle and refashioned it so that it could become an integral part of his doctrine and life. It had become so much part of his whole approach that in unexpected circumstances he reacted spontaneously in harmony with it. He quoted it implicitly in many things he thought and said. This is how Jesus had ‘internalised’ this important part of the Old Testament message.
Many other aspects of Jesus’ mental make-up could be analysed in a similar way. We always find that both elements are present: a permeating influence of the inspired word and an entirely original manner in which Jesus understood and realised it. This is, I believe, the pattern according to which we too should internalise the word of Scripture, particularly Jesus’ own word. We should allow the text to speak to us and when a part of the message strikes us as particularly relevant we should work out its implications in detail and integrate it into our whole thinking and living. What counts is not the number of texts we know, but the depth of our adhesion to certain texts and their transforming effect on our lives.
Francis of Assisi modelled his entire life on Jesus’ injunction, “Don’t take anything with you on your journey” (Mk 6, 7). Jesus’ teaching on poverty permeated all his thinking and guided his decisions. We can truly say that Francis ‘internalised’ that part of the Gospel. It became for him the key by which he could open many doors into Jesus’ message. It was his anchor in the Gospels. Francis achieved his greatness by fully responding to this highly individual appeal the Gospel had for him. This is the way internalisation works.
When reading Scripture, we should not try to cover everything. Rather, we should pay special attention to those texts that seem to have meaning for us personally. We should make a treasury of such texts in the sense that we frequently think about them, and that we study them with preference. When we face Christ in our periods of silence and meditation it wi1l be particu larly f rom these texts that we begin our prayerful reflection. We should make the message of these texts penetrate the marrow of our bones. We should reformulate them in our own words and translate them into action. In this way we can make the inspired Word our own, with the same intensity and freedom displayed by Jesus.
As the mind is our highest faculty, we might be tempted to think that concepts, ideas and thoughts are the strongest ingredients of our inner personality. Psychology has shown that this is not the case. It is impossible for man to think in purely rational terms. We always employ visual images as well, and respond with our emotions. In fact, symbols and images prove to be our most powerful means of clarifying thought and building up personality.
The image of ‘territory’ is common to animals as well as man. We think of it as a place belonging to us with well-defined boundaries (the territorial imperative). We need the image not only for such every-day, physical notions as ‘home’, ‘neighbour’, and so on, but also when describing more abstract realities. The ‘image’ of territorial rights is implicit in notions such as the freedom of religion (my religious beliefs are within my territory), juridical competence (what are the limits of his territory ?) and medical specialisations (only certain diseases are within my territory). When we say it is difficult for people to be saved ‘outside the Church’. we are considering the community of the faithful as a territory with clear boundaries. We should also notice that the image of territory evokes an emotional response; in one’s own territory one feels at home, one is safe and happy. It helps clarity of thinking to recogmse such images explicitly.
One way of internalising Scripture is by adopting some of its images. Again, we find some good examples in the life of Christ. Take, for instance, the Old Testament custom of having a year of ‘release’ every seventh year. The Law of Moses prescribed that every seventh year was to be considered a holy year, a year of the Lord. At the beginning of this year, fellow-citizens who had been forced to sell themselves as slaves had to be set free and all debts cancelled (Dt 15, 1-18). This holy year of God, when slaves and poor people were released, became in the Isaian prophecies an image of the future messianic liberation:
“The sovereign Lord has filled me with his Spirit.
He has chosen me and sent me
to bring good news to the poor,
to heal the broken-hearted,
to announce release to captives
and freedom to those in prison.” (Is 61.1.)
It was an image Jesus took to with all his heart. When he preached in Nazareth it was this passage he selected to express his own task (Lk 4,16-21). Jesus saw himself as heralding this year of release, the new era when salvation would be brought to all captives of sin and evil.
Jesus had worked out some consequences of this image. The year of release obliged all men to forgive one another’s debts. This would be a constant theme of his preaching. Because God has granted a general release, we too should cancel all mutual debts. The parable of the unforgiving servant is based on this conviction (Mt 18, 21-35). Jesus builds it into the Our Father as an essential element of our relationship to God (Mt 6,12-1 5; Mk 1 1, 25). We shouId notice particularly that when speaking of forgiving our neighbours’ sins, Jesus calls them ‘debts’, thereby deliberately harking back to the image of remitting debts during the year of release.
It was not the wealthy who rejoiced when the year of release came round, but the poor. It was good news especially for underdogs and slaves. With this in mind Jesus can say, “Happy are you poor; the kingdom of God is yours!” (Lk 6, 20). It makes Jesus go out of his way to meet tax-collectors and other public sinners. “I have not come to call respectable people, but outcasts” (Mt 9,13). The kingdom of God is biased towards those who are most in need “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine respectable people who do not need to repent” (Lk 14, 7).
In all this we have again an example of how Jesus internalised the inspired message of the Old Testament. He took the image of the year of release as a guiding principle to rule his own ideas on the kingdom of his Father. We may be sure that long before starting his public life, Jesus had absorbed this image in continuous reflection and prayer. Perhaps, with a good amount of poetic licence, we might reconstruct Jesus’ thoughts in this way:
“What a joy, what happiness there must have been among the slaves and the very poor when the year of release was announced! There must have been great rejoicing and dancing when messengers would travel through the length and breadth of the land, proclaiming that the year of the Lord had started ?
Yes, this is what it will be like when the kingdom of my Father is announced. It shall be a kingdom of release, release of man’s sins, total forgiveness on the part of God for all those who humble themselves. There will be great joy and happiness for small people, for those who are ignorant and cannot help themselves. No longer shall there be any inequality or discrimination. Every human being will have the chance of becoming a child of God.”
If this was the way Jesus built up his own self-understanding and doctrine, we should not underestimate the great role of images in our own lives. It is certain that we operate with such images, but it may well be that we have never consciously adverted to them. Recognising the images that motivate us and consciously enriching them with biblical images, is a very powerful way of internalising Scripture. We find this confirmed in the lives of the saints.
The meeting between Jesus and the Samaritan woman exerted a great attraction on Teresa of Avila. It was literally an ‘image’ too in the sense that Teresa kept it alive by having a painting of the incident at hand. The image helped Teresa at different stages of her life to understand her relationship to Christ. In the beginning she was intrigued by the meeting itself (“What a thrill if Jesus would meet me in such a way!”), then her attention was focussed on the water Jesus promised (“Lord, give me such water to drink!”). Later again, she took courage from the Samaritan woman’s apostolate in Sychar ( “If she being a sinner could do so much, there is also hope for me”). Teresa benefited very much from her outspoken preference for this biblical image
.Symeon of Constantinople worked with a different image. He had been struck by the phrase “God is light”. Not only did the concepts of light and darkness put their stamp on many of his theological terms, he was so full of the image that he perceived God’s presence as a form of inner light.
Therese of Lisieux made use of many images, partly based on her own experience, partly derived from Scripture. She was ‘the little flower’ growing in Jesus’ garden. She was the child carried in God’s arms, the ship sailing on God’s ocean, the swallow lifted by the eagle. Therese relished such images and used them with great insight as the pillars and supporting beams of her spiritual edifice.
In the foregoing section I drew attention to the fact that we can never think without somehow involving our emotions. I must admit, however, that there is a real danger of intellectualism for some persons. By natural disposition or by the training they received, they are inclined to think that faith and prayer move mainly in the field of knowledge and the mind. Their approach to meditation may be predominantly notional. They may labour under the impression that prayer means thinking about God or addressing our thoughts to God.
Although thinking is a necessary preparation, union with God comes through love. “Whoever accepts my commandments and obeys them is the one who loves me. My Father will love whoever loves me; I too will love him and reveal myself to him” (Jn 14, 21). Accepting Jesus’ word is not a notional assent: it is a loving acceptance of Jesus himself !
Internalising Scripture involves such a loving response. When Jesus decided to be loyal to his Father as the Levites had been, it was a resolve of his heart. When he evolved the image of the messianic year of release he did so with his heart full of hope and joyful expectation. We can only speak of true internalisation if the message has been anchored in our will and emotions as much as in our intellect.
When we make our regular meditation, as described in the previous chapter, we should make Sacred Scripture the chief source of spiritual input. In doing this, however, we will not be concerned about completing a certain number of verses, but much more about deepening our understanding and love.
It may be that a certain passage has struck us forcibly. We should then not leave it without having exhausted all the riches it can offer, even if it would take us many successive meditations to do so. We might compare the text with other scriptural passages or read up commentaries or articles that enlighten it. If it contains an image that appeals to us, we may spend much time in working it out and accepting it with all our being. We will examine our actual behaviour to see if it corresponds to the implications of the text, and ask God repeatedly to open our hearts so that we may respond fully to his word.
If we spend a considerable amount of time and prayer on such texts, we shall soon have a treasury of favourite passages. We may underline them in our bible or mark them in the margin. They may be the texts we turn to with preference in moments of despondency. They will often provide an easy launching-pad for a deeply personal exchange of love with God.
There are periods when we feel that we are not particularly kindled by any special text and so we break new ground by turning to another passage or reading another book. At all times, however, we should remember that we are in the presence of God and that we have not come to seek profound thoughts or speak beautiful words. Our first duty is to love and serve him with all our heart. So at any time we should give precedence to spontaneous prayers that well up from within us. And we should be quite content to remain in God s presence in loving silence. After all, it is not words that count but the love of the heart.