Spirit and Scholars

The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary for the fourth day in the Octave of Christmas bring us into a dualistic tension between light and dark, goodness and sin in the passage from the First Letter of John. Friar Jude Winkler and Felix Just, S.J., PhD note that there are theological differences between this letter and the Gospel of John. The latter volume is a spiritual Gospel. It paints images using background details of day and night to indicate the presence of good and evil. The tension in dualistic situations is rooted in our inability to choose one or the other of the options presented. Friar Jude confirms that when we are in Love with Jesus we do not sin yet our looking back at our journey indicates we do sin and the pastoral concern addressed in the First Letter of John is that Jesus saves and forgives in an ongoing continuous way because our nature is to return to our own control of life wherein we find all the opportunity to turn away from Jesus. The Gospel from Matthew shows an example of the prayer of the psalmist for God to “Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt.  Our soul has had more than its fill of the scorn of those who are at ease, of the contempt of the proud.”(Psalm 123.4) Friar Jude tells us that perhaps fifty thousand were murdered by Herod during his reign. The reaction of the powerful and privileged to the message of a “New Jerusalem” is predictably not generous. In the Gospel from Matthew the text cites some passages from the Hebrew Testament to link the exile of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in Egypt to messianic prophesy. Friar Jude points out that some scripture scholars often find these linkages of Matthew to be weakly prophetic. The tears of Rachael at Ramah are from a reference by Jeremiah to the wife of Jacob (grandson of Abraham) who died in giving birth to her last son. The prophet of the exile to Babylon is consoling the deportees with the image of God eventually drying their tears. Often dualism is misused today by spiritual teachers to insist on black and white decisions where they may not be appropriate. The loose use of references to Scripture by Matthew would be difficult today for our literal legalistic preferences but as Friar Jude points out our reflection on the experience of the action of God in our lives is often in the rear view mirror and our associations with meaningful texts is spiritual rather than scholarly.