A meditation for the Sunday of the Word of God, 20251
Guest column by Chad Steiner
Associate Teacher
The Emmaus Institute for Biblical Studies
I’ve borrowed for my title the motto of this year’s Sunday of the Word of God, a relatively recent observance instituted in 2019 by our Holy Father, Pope Francis, in his apostolic letter Aperuit Illis (lit. ‘opened to them’) to be celebrated by all the Catholic faithful on each third Sunday in Ordinary Time.2
But Pope Francis isn’t the progenitor of the motto. It began its life at the end of a quill, first expressed by someone else long ago. Its current address is Psalm 119, thought by some to be a psalm of David, though that has been contested. What is less controversial is that the words have been uttered by many of the faithful since.
For us now to join the chorus and say, “I also hope...” is to unite our voices (and our hopes) with the psalmist’s. But what exactly is the psalmist talking about? Here’s what the declaration of hope looks like with a bit more of its own native context:
Psalm 119:72-74 The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces; 73 your hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn your commandments; 74 those who fear you shall see me and rejoice, because I have hoped in your word. [RSV 2nd Catholic Edition, emphasis added]
The ‘law’ mentioned at the beginning of verse 72, and the ‘commandments’ mentioned at the end of verse 73, are words often used in the Scriptures to talk about God’s instruction—i.e., his word—pointing the way for the life of blessing that he wants his people to enjoy in communion with him. The psalmist was not likely aware that in time, his own words would be overtaken and included in and as God’s more expansive word to his people.
The Bible itself, as the sum total of that word in all its stories and poems and songs and letters, and yes, even its genealogies and law codes, is a gift God has vouchsafed for his people in every generation: more precious than our finances (verse 72); spoken to us by the very one who made us (verse 73a); the best desire of our own understanding (verse 73b); transforming us into occasions for others who honor God to rejoice, because they see us placing our hope in that which they already know to be a worthy object, namely, the holy writings (verse 74).
That last point might be unexpected. We’d be forgiven for anticipating that the object of hope recommended by the text of Scripture is Christ himself as the Word of God, with a capital ‘W.’ And of course Jesus is both of these things—our hope, and God’s Word. But that is not what is being recommended in the psalmist’s words here in Psalm 119:74. No, here it is the Scriptures themselves toward which hope is directed.
In a moment of desperation, the then-quite-pagan Augustine learned of this hope poignantly from the mysterious voice which directed him—nearly hopeless as he wept in his garden—to “take and read.” The Bible became in a real sense Augustine’s last hope; the portal of his life-changing—and given his subsequent influence, it is not too dramatic to say world-shaping—encounter with the risen LORD.
In its very nature as divinely breathed-out literature, the Bible calls to us like it did Augustine, “take and read.” Yet in our own day, for a variety of reasons, the call has become faint; increasingly talked over by the shrill insistence of other matters saturating our fast-paced lives. In the Old Testament book of Amos, the prophet alerts us to this foreboding prospect, preaching an alarming warning of a coming famine, “not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD” (Amos 8:11). It could be argued that for many generations, we Catholics in particular—whether aware or not—have been living through just such a famine.
What many Christians call the “Reformation” (c. 1517ff) marks a time when deep wounds were sustained by the people of God, one of the most grievous of which was the tearing asunder of the two greatest gifts by which God shares himself with the world he made: his words (Scripture) and his life (Sacraments). Yet we learn in Deuteronomy that God’s words are life itself, by which God’s people are made able to live long in the land (32:46-47), and in the Psalms that “the law (i.e., the instructing word) of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul” (19:7).
Sadly, at the Reformation, many who left the Church clung desperately to the conviction that they could nonetheless continue to hear and be nourished by the voice of God issuing from the sacred text they held dear, and justified their departure on the basis that they had so heard, even if they were now separated from the sacramental life of the Church. Those who remained united to the Church looked askance at this, choosing—sadly often in reaction—to prioritize the sacramental life over the quest to encounter God in the sacred pages. The tragic result is that for many Catholics, the Church’s most precious literature, the Bible, has become a closed book.
Left unaddressed, wounds can fester, giving rise to additional wounds and requiring more proactive measures to facilitate their healing. One of those additional wounds can be seen in the way alternative modes of reading and understanding Scripture—e.g., as merely religious and largely fanciful mythology—have arisen in the eras following the great wounding. On the heels of the Reformation in the 16th century, the so-called Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries ushered in all manner of new discoveries, including an explosion of knowledge about the past from our newfound capacity for historical inquiry, alongside an explosion of knowledge about the universe and our world’s place within it.
Owing in part to the recent invention of the printing press, the woundedness of the Church was made so highly visible, and new truths about both the ancient world and the modern world were made so readily accessible, that in due time the Bible’s numerous appeals to the miraculous—e.g., that God had made the world through the power of his word (!); that he had condescended to enter it as a man; and that despite suffering a most gruesome death, he had been raised bodily from the dead and thus defeated the greatest enemy to life—were now called into question, and eventually traded away for a set of purely naturalistic explanations clothed in the assured results of scientific method. The formerly exalted status of the biblical text as a witness to the reality and activity of the divine in the life of the world was thus reduced to Israel’s and the Church’s thoughts about a God whose existence no longer formed the ground of rational discourse.
Against the backdrop of this context, our late Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, saw in stark relief the enormity of the challenge this development presented. The Bible has been marginalized by the scientific community, privatized and politicized by our society, and relegated to a quaint but impotent religious artifact on the shelf of the pious, where it spends most of its days closed. It is read at length in the Liturgy of the Church, but heard as if from another room by those who sit in the pews.
In his earlier Erasmus lecture, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis” (January 27, 1988), the younger Cardinal Ratzinger sounded a clarion call for a new approach, one that offers a “criticism of the criticism” in order to offer a more integrated approach to the interpretation of Scripture that does justice to the historical concerns raised by the critics, but is properly formed by the faith of the Church, in order to draw out of Scripture the full meaning of texts that are not merely historically—but also divinely—inspired. Without such an approach, the bible remains a closed book.
In direct response to the late Pope Benedict’s call in Verbum Domini for a greater “biblical apostolate” (§73), and for “specialized institutes for biblical studies [to] be established to ensure that exegetes [i.e., trained interpreters] possess a solid understanding of theology and an appropriate appreciation for the contexts in which they carry out their mission” (§75), the work of the Emmaus Institute for Biblical Studies in Lincoln, Nebraska is to re-open the closed book for the Catholic lay faithful, as well as for the priests who shepherd them who may feel burdened by the weight of the task of drawing out and presenting for those in their care the treasures it contains.
1 Part of this article was previously published in the Emmaus Institute’s Strategic Plan for 2025-2028, which can be found at www.emmausinstitute.net/generation.
2 I’m well aware that a debate persists about the actual author of the apostolic exhortation Aperuit Illis: that is, whether Pope Francis was in fact publishing what was the last original work of the now late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Regardless of the outcome of that discussion, it is uncontroversial that Pope Francis published it, and did so in agreement. It thus stands as an act of leadership on his part.
