The Lord be with you, a reading from the Holy Gospel according to Saint Luke. Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us,
Just as those who are eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the Word have handed them down to us, I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellently awful, so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received. Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit.
and news of him spread throughout the whole region. He taught near synagogues and was praised by old. He came to Nazareth where he had grown on up and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the Sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written.
The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord. Rolling up this role, he handed it back to the attendant.
and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him. He said to them, today, this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing, the gospel of the Lord.
This Sunday we celebrate for the sixth time, a new and important annual feast. The Sunday of the Word of God, to both Francis established to accentuate the importance that sacred scripture is meant to have in the faith, prayer, and lives of believers. He announced it intentionally on September 30th, 2019.
September 30th is the annual liturgical feast of Saint Jerome, the famous translator of the Bible from the Greek in Hebrew and to Latin, then the common language of the people. He did so in 2019, leading up to the 1600th anniversary of Saint Jerome's death and birth into eternal life the following year. As many of you will recall, Saint Jerome is famous for emphasizing. Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.
that unless we're familiar with what Jesus said and did in the gospel, how we fulfilled all the messianic prophecy of the Old Testament and people's hearing, and how the apostles proclaimed him, we don't know him. He said your own learned it that less in the hard way. As a brilliant young student traveling to study from the great masters of his day, he got deathly ill with an influenza that took the life of his fellow students and companions.
He'd been up until then, then a lukewarm Christian, far more passionate about Greco-Roman literature than the faith. During his sickness, he had a dream, or properly a nightmare, which he appeared before Jesus' judgment seat. When he professed to Jesus that he was a Christian, Jesus replied, no, he wasn't. He was a Ciceroanian because he knew far more about Cicero and his writings than he did about Christ and his teaching.
It rocked Jerome to the core. He didn't know Christ because he didn't know the Scripture. After he awoke and recovered, he resolved to pour his mind, heart, and time into the study and diffusion of the Word of God.
In establishing the fees, Pope Francis expressed the desire that Saint Jerome's example of converted zeal would be contagious, that each of us would grow, he said, in religious and intimate familiarity with the sacred scriptures. Appreciate the inexhaustible riches contained in that constant dialogue between the Lord and his people. Experience anew how the risen Lord opens up for us the treasury of his word, enabling us to proclaim its unfathomable riches before the world,
And marked by this decisive relationship with the living Word, grow in love and faithful witness. The theme of today's sixth celebration of the Sunday of the Word of God is from Psalm 119, I hope in your Word. God, through His Word, wants to fill us with hope. The Word of Hope appears about 150 times in Sacred Scripture.
We draw hope from God's revelation which manifests His committed love to us. We place our hope in the fulfillment of all God's promises that we hear and read and allow to take on our own flesh. We see the hope that comes from God's word and from the fulfillment of His promises in today's Liturgy of the Word. In the Gospel, we encounter Jesus preaching in His hometown synagogue
Justice St. Luke tells us in what he calls his orderly sequence that Jesus was doing in all the synagogues of the region of Galilee, leaving the people astonished. He was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah in red from Isaiah 61, the passage describing the work of the eventual Messiah, that he would be filled with the Spirit of the Lord.
Annoying to depreciate the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, freedom to the oppressed, to help the blind see, and to announce a jubilee year. After reading that passage, which expressed the longing of the Jewish people for centuries, Jesus very dramatically handed the scroll back to the hot side, the synagogue attended, and sat down, and everyone's eyes were locked on him.
He gave a shocking, one sentence, homily. Today, this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing. Today, in other words, the Messiah has come and He's speaking to you now. Today, the long-awaited one whom you have been eagerly anticipating for more than a millennium is here. Today, the Word of God that filled you with hope
is now seeing that hope actualize. The words of Isaiah's prophecy were being unveiled before their eyes and decoded within their ears. The Spirit of the Lord would come down upon Jesus in a visible way at his baptism in the Jordan as we celebrated two weeks ago, was still very much upon him.
Jesus was proclaiming to the gospel, the gospel to the poor and lowly, to those who were humble enough to receive it, all throughout Galilee, and making them laughishly rich with the treasure of God's holy revelation. He's restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, vigor to cripple, health to the more abundant, who would soon even be restoring life to the dead.
As you were claiming liberty to those in the bondage of sin, to his merciful forgiveness, who was letting those who were pressed by the devil go free through exorcisms. In all of this, he was proclaiming a year acceptable to the Lord, a jubilee year, a reset fund that God wanted the Jews to press every 50 years to re-establish their bonds with him and through charity with each other. All of the aspects of this messianic prophecy
In all of the other prophecies, Jesus was bringing to life in their midst. Jesus wants continuously to fulfill sacred scripture in our hearing before our eyes, in our minds, our life. He wants us to experience the completion of the hope placed in his words.
He wants to preach the good news to us and desires that we be sufficiently poor in spirit to receive it as it deserves to be received, recognizing how desperately we need that gift. He has come to set us free from captivity and oppression, especially to our slavery, to addictions, sins, and our own will.
He has come to help us recognize our blind spots and recover our sight so that we might first see him in prayer in the sacraments and then learn how to see everything in his life. He wants to proclaim not just a year acceptable to the Lord, not just one jubilee, like the jubilee of hope, one month old, but a lifetime and eternally pleasing to God and joyful to us. He wants to engage us in a daily, consequential conversation of love and life that will have no final chapter.
planting the seed of the Word of God within us and helping us to bear great fruit, letting his Word become fulfilled in and through us. The same Jesus who entered his hometown synagogue on the Sabbath enters today this monastery in the Bronx. He speaks to us live as the gospel is read
That's what sacrosanctum chilium taught us in the second lesson of the office of readings today. That when the scriptures are proclaimed, it is Jesus speaking live to his people. That's why we stand at the gospel because the greatest dignity of all time is entering. He comes to teach us, to heal us, to console us, to be with us, to strengthen us and to send us out literally or intentionally.
But for that transformation to occur, we must first accept him, let his word enter, take on our flesh, and dwell within us. He wants us to receive him his word on good soil and beer, abundant fruit. He wants us to respond, not like the majority of Nazarene's, as we'll see next week, who went from astonishment to questions to doubts to homicidal rage
but rather he wants us to respond as Miriam Nazareth did, saying, let it be done to me according to your word. He wants to help us realize that his words are spirit and life, that he speaks the words of eternal life, that as we prayed in the song, his teaching is perfect, refreshing, trustworthy, wise, right, joyful, enlightening, pure, enduring,
true and just. We see how to receive the word of God, a right, how to respond to it, and how to rejoice in it is the fulfillment of the deepest longings for which God has made us hold in today's first reading. It's one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament because it describes a real Lexio Divina, the way God himself gave us the steps
The setting was after the exile. When rummaging through the ruins of the temple, they found the book of the law of Moses with the Jews called the Torah. They rediscovered with incredible joy and gratitude God's holy word. They didn't have it for seven decades. They had to remember it as best they could. During their seven decades in Babylon, the exile
had recognized that they had been brought into captivity, ultimately because they had failed to live by God's word. They were determined not only not to let that happen again, but to make up for 70 years of lost time. Ezra, the scribe and priest, brought the book of the law before the men, women, and children old enough to understand, basically five and above. Proceeded to read from the Torah from dawn to midday,
basically six or seven hours, and all the people listened attentively. When we opened the scroll, all the people stood out of reverence. As we're blessed and thank God for His word, all raised their hands high and answered, amine, amine, that Hebrew verd that means to uphold, showing that they were intending to build their whole life on what they were hearing.
After that, they knelt and bowed before the Lord, who was speaking to them as His holy word was being proclaimed. We find in this passage, as the great mind of Cardinal John Francesco Rivasi preached to Pope Benedict right before he renounced the papacy to the members of his quarry in the retreat of 2013.
We find here seven great stars to guide us in our whole approach to the Word of God, seven ways that show us how we are to pray what we hear, to assimilate what God speaks, and really to ruminate in a way that can nourish us this extraordinary meal. What are the seven steps? The first is
reading. Ezra in the Scribes read plainly from God's word in discrete passages like points of meditation. The word read in Hebrew means to proclaim. Since reading Sacred Scripture was always done aloud, you probably remember from the confessions of St. Augustine how astonished he was when he watched St. Ambrose read Sacred Scripture silently. That wasn't done.
It was always read out loud. Read also means translate in this context, because many of the Post-Exilic Jews were at best rusty in Hebrew. Points to the connection between reading and proclaiming, making it intelligible to the minds and lives of those hearing. The first step in our approach to the word of God is to let God speak.
like the young Samuel. Speak, Lord, your servants. Listen. Second aspect is interpreting or explaining the word God. As the scribes read, they helped the people to grasp some of the applications. We know that there are many meanings to God's word. The catechism describes three different types of spiritual meaning. One linked to Jesus, the allegorical or typological sense.
and other to ourselves and our responsive faith, the moral sense, and the third to heaven in our vocation to be saying the anagogical sense. When we ponder and proclaim the word of God, when we listen to and read it, this aspect of explaining it is crucial if we're ever going to reach the third stage, which is understanding the word of God. This means far more than an intellectual grasp of the material.
But the Hebrew word means that it's knowledge at the level of one's entire personality and that it impacts our whole being. Saint Jerome translated this Hebrew word to understand as suffering. Sapiensia, we get from this, which is normally understood as wisdom, but its literal translation is to taste
When we understand the word of God, we taste it. It delights us, becomes part of us as we become what we eat. Although it was Ezekiel experienced and later St. John in Revelation when God had them eat the scroll of the word of God, sometimes this digestion of God's word can seem bitter because it leads to the crucifixion of our old way of being, but it's ultimately sweet.
These three stages were all basically the first movement of the Word of God. As we seek to grasp that the level of our existence, what God is saying to us, what He wants to fulfill, not just in our Hebrews, vestries, as the Vulgate says, in your ears, but in your heart, in every cell. It's like the Liturgy, the Word, when God's Word is proclaimed through the reading, and then interpreted and helped to be comprehended in the homily.
The next four stages involve our response to what's been announced, explained and comprehended. The fourth stage is listening to or literally obeyed the word of God. Nehemiah tells us all the people listen attentively to the book of the law. Listening is far more than just hearing what is read. The Jewish people are basically formed out of command to listen. The famous Shema
They pray each day. Reminds them of Moses' words, hero Israel that the Lord your God is Lord alone. To listen needs something different than merely absorbing the words through our ears. So we're just a form of auditory reading. Rather in Hebrew there's no distinction between hearing and obeying. It's exactly the same word.
to listen to the Word of God, is to listen to it as a word to be done, as an imperative once understood. In Latin, we keep this connection between hearing, al-Direi, and ob- al-Direi, which means a listening so attentive that we're hanging, living off every word that comes from God's mouth. St. James calls us not to be merely idle listeners, but doers of the Word.
We're called to say like Mary was praised by Jesus for hearing the word of God and doing it. Let it be done to me according to your word. To be a member of Jesus' family, the Lord said elsewhere, we must do the will of His Father in heaven. This is the type of attentive listening, type of obedience to the word that's being described here. Listening in order to act. The fifth stage is converting.
Do not be sad, do not weep that people are told. Because they're all weeping as they heard the words of the law. Just like you were throughout the religious word, right? St. James says that the word of God is like a mirror. And when they looked at the mirror of God's word, they saw who they were supposed to be and who they in fact were and it brought them to tears.
They bowed down and prostrated themselves before the Lord with faces to the ground. Likewise, the Word of God is meant to bring us to conversion, to change our ways, so that we may conform ourselves to what God is telling us through His Word, supposed to change our life in 30, 60, or 100 ways over the course of time, not just a minor course direction, but a very, very, very new life.
The ultimate goal of the Church is proclaiming the word of God as the Second Vatican Council taught in its decree for priests is conversion and holiness. That's the fifth stage. The sixth is responding to the word of God with acts of charity. The text tells us that all the people raised their hands high saying, amen, amen, and immediately began to do what?
to allot portions of food and drink to those who didn't have it, because they understood the words that had been expounded to them. The real impact of the word of God is that it's supposed to help us to love others as God has loved us. The conversion it brings about is meant to help us turn to God and give them our whole mind, heart, soul, and strength and to love our neighbor to that same level of self-giving. Here in the word of God,
change our life and make it more loving, otherwise we're not listening the right way. That's what we see happen to the Jews when they understood the words of the Lord. It spurred them to charity. That's what happened in the life of St. Mary Ann Koch, a fellow New Yorker born in Germany who grew up in Utica, whose feast the church celebrated on Thursday, leading her to enter the sisters of St. Francis in order to teach and care for the sick.
and I'll submit Lee to respond to St. Gaming to Molokai's plea for help to go to Hawaii and teach care for the lepers. That's the impact it made in life of St. Anthony of the desert whose feast we celebrated nine days ago. When he heard those words, go sell all the jab and give the money to the poor. He will be rich in heaven. Went, sold all that he had, gave the money to his poor, and became way richer. It's what happened in life of St. Trees of Calcutta.
What you heard the Lord speaking to her on a train to Darjeeling, to quench his infinite thirst, to become his light, to care for him and to distress in the sky of the force of the poor. The same thing is supposed to happen in us, that hearing the word of God is meant to transform us to learn how to proclaim it above all in body language. Indeed's of love.
And we're going much longer because it's dawn to midday. No, there's one last day. Seventh and last stage is celebrating the Word of God. There was a great feast. Go eat rich foods and drink sweet drinks, they were told, for today is holy to our Lord. Do not be sad in this day for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength.
The Word of God is meant to fill us with joy and lead us to celebrate that joy with others, shearing our joy, our food, our drink, our lives with others. Rejoicing is supposed to be our rock as believers, is meant to flow from the total transformation the Word of God does in us. The precepts of the Lord give joy to the heart
as we proclaim in today's response. There's obviously an allusion to the Eucharistic feast here. When having heard the word of God, we eat the most unbelievable food ever and drink the choices beverage of all time. The liturgy of the word is interconnected with and leads to the liturgy of the Eucharist. The liturgy of the Eucharist is meant to lead to the liturgy of light. It's supposed to lead to an overflowing, loving, joyful communion.
as we do this in memory of Christ and seek to give ourselves and our life to save others and lift them up. We hope in God's Word, which is meant to lead us to conversion, holiness, charity, and joy. No matter what part of the mystical body of Christ we are,
Whether to you, St. Paul's metaphor from today's passage to the grandkids, where a footer, a hand, an eye, or an ear, whether we've been given the charism of apostles, prophets, teachers, miracle workers, priests, or Dominican nuns, all of us in Jesus' mystical body are called to help each other hear the word. Look with love on God and others. Use our feet to go to them and our hands to care for them. The Bible is not a dead document but a living word.
The word of God is not principally a book or a series of books, but a person, an incarnate word, and we encounter through the Bible sacred words. He's the one who has come into this chapel like he entered the synagogue of Nazareth. He's the one whose words are spirit and life. He's the one who every single day through the liturgy, the hours and through the liturgy of the Eucharist, the Phil scripture in our hearing.
And he's the one who, through that fulfillment, seeks to bring us to the fullest of life. We remember what Pope Benedict told us in 2010 in his exhortation, a word of God and a life in the mission of the Church, that Jesus' words are not just informative, but per-formative. They change us, and they change all of reality.
When he said, let there be light, there was. When he said, quiet to demons, they shut their demonic tracts. When he calmed the storm, there was immediately tranquility on the sea. And today, Jesus speaks for us the same performative words he did in the Upper Room on Holy Thursday, saying over simple bread and wine to a priest through whom he's acting, this is my body. And this is the chalice of my blood. The power of his words totally changed.
bread and wine into God. This is the fulfillment of the hope of God's word found in the tree of life in Genesis. In the sacrifice of Abel, the sacrifice of Melchizedek, the sacrifice of Isaac, the sacrifice of the Passover land. It's the fulfillment of the manna in the desert, of the multiplication loaves and fish, and of so many other foretellings in which God had stoked the appetite of his people for the perfection of their own.
Let us receive the double fulfillment of these words in our hearing. And let that perfect, refreshing, trustworthy, right, joyful, enlightening, pure, enduring, true, just, and life-giving word enter in, change us, and through us change the world. Rejoicing in the gift of
The Word and the Word made flesh is our strength. And that's what we celebrate today on Sunday of the Word of God within the jubilee of our hope. Because these words are today fulfilled. Praise be Jesus Christ.