June 8, 2014
Reflection on Lectoring
“For your sake I your God, became your son; I, the Lord,
took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the
earth and beneath the earth.”
The above quote from an anonymous second century homily
is found in the Office of Readings for Holy Saturday. God is talking to Adam and Eve (and by
extension to all of us), calling himself our son, the descendent of our first
human parents, being born in human likeness.
Becoming a real human being in everything but sin.
It is said that with enough data any puzzle can be
solved. Mysteries, on the other hand,
can never be solved. They can only be
believed with the help of faith.
Mysteries, like the Incarnation, are not the source of intellectual
knowledge. They are the source of
wonder.
Perhaps in an age of technology, wonder and mystery (and
anything else that cannot be proven scientifically) seem like the stuff of
fabrication and fantasy. If this is so,
however, the realities of our lives are severely limited, and our faith, that
transcends scientific proof, fails. Scripture too, with its claim to be
divinely inspired, would seem to be a product of someone’s creative imagination.
To be effective in their ministry, lectors must take a
firm hold on the fullness of reality.
They must find the wonder and mystery contained in every Scripture
passage they proclaim. They must
recognize that wonder and mystery can never be exhausted. They must accept their responsibility to go
beyond simple explanations, and explore the wonder and mystery for themselves.
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First Reading - Acts of the Spostles 2:1-11
Miracles and Wonders
There is a great deal of wonder to be found in today’s
first reading. How could an ordinary
group of men stand up in front of strangers from all over the world and keep
them spellbound? The apostles’ audience
included travelers from Egypt and Rome and Mesopotamia, most of whom had little,
if any, prior contact with Jesus - a man who during his ministry never traveled
two hundred miles from the place where he was born.
How could something like this happen? The verse immediately following today’s first
reading says, “They were all astounded
and bewildered.” And later in the
chapter it says that after hearing Peter, “Those
who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand persons were added
that day” (v.41). These things seem
almost miraculous.
Perhaps what happened on Pentecost is miraculous. Perhaps every time the Holy Spirit fills our
hearts and minds, we experience the very real miracle of God’s presence in our
world.
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Second Reading - Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13
Not with Our Eyes Alone
If the first reading causes us to marvel at the mystery
of how God works, the second reading tells us how human beings are able to see
beyond just sensory knowledge. The faith
necessary to see what our eyes alone cannot comes from the Holy Spirit. “No one
can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”
Perhaps it is not uncommon for human beings to reduce
mystery to something more manageable. To
take the miraculous and make it mundane.
That is what the people of Corinth were doing with the gifts and talents
given them by the Holy Spirit. They compared
the gifts they had with the gifts others had.
They took something sacred and made it a profane competition.
Perhaps their behavior reflects an element of human
nature that cries for transformation.
Perhaps it is the kind of transformation that Paul identified when he
says, “For in one Spirit we were all
baptized into one body.” Perhaps it
is a transformation that needs continuous refreshing through the grace of the
Holy Spirit.
© George Fournier 2014
