‘The word of Christ dwells among you.’ This quotation, from St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (Col 3:16), is the theme of this year’s Sunday of the Word of God, which we celebrate today. St Paul tells us that, rather than just sitting back and listening to the readings at Mass, we should take them into our heart and fully live out the message of Christ. In today’s Second Reading, St Paul tells the Corinthians that God sent him (Paul) to preach the Gospel (1 Cor 1:17).
Paul, like Matthew in today’s Gospel, often quoted the Old Testament. On the road to Emmaus, Jesus taught Cleopas and his companion how all the Old Testament wrote of how the Christ had to suffer and die (Lk 24:27). This led to St Augustine writing ‘all of the Divine Scripture that was written before the Lord’s coming was written to announce that coming’ (Instructing Beginners in Faith, 5.8) and his famous statement a couple of sentences later, ‘in the Old Testament is concealed the New, and in the New Testament is revealed the Old.’
This tells us that we should know the Scriptures. At the start of his commentary on Isaiah, St Jerome said that ‘ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.’ As Christians, we should know Christ, therefore we should know the Scriptures, both the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Today’s Gospel is an example of how Matthew revealed the meaning of the Old Testament in the New. He realized that Jesus was the great light prophesied by Isaiah, as we heard in our First Reading. The New Testament writers expected their readers to know the Old Testament. We should also know the Scriptures. A good way to start is to try reading a chapter of the Old Testament and a chapter of the New Testament every day.
Dom Bede Grey OSB
