for August 11
Memorial of St. Clare

This is the Lord’s command: “Son of man, eat what is before you; eat this scroll, then go, speak to the house of Israel.” That’s a rather striking image from our first reading, the Prophet Ezekiel literally eating the parchment on which God’s words are written. The prophet’s life will be consumed by those words. Ezekiel, in fulfillment of that command, will preach eloquently and exhaustively to the people, correcting, admonishing, encouraging—always true to the Lord’s command. 

I was wondering if the slang phrase we sometimes use, “Eat my words,” had any connection with this biblical story. For what it’s worth, according to Goggle, the English phrase means “to have to retract, regret, or feel foolish about what one has previously said.” That’s the exact opposite of what the biblical passage points to. Ezekiel is so identified with God’s word that his voice becomes indistinguishable from God speaking to his people. And Ezekiel never backs down from owning those words—he never apologizes.

One of the many blessings of the Vatican Council is the renewed appreciation in the Catholic Church for the Word of God in Scripture. It is an embarrassing fact that one hundred years ago reading the bible was not a regular part of the Catholic diet—to continue the imagery of Ezekiel. Thankfully, that long fast by Catholics has ended, although the biblical renewal has not yet seeped into every part of popular Catholic culture. But fortunately, when Catholics first started to make their entry on the modern biblical stage in the early 20^th century it was a propitious time in biblical studies. Protestant scholars had already begun to apply modern scholarship and contemporary understandings to the study of the scriptures. And Catholic biblical scholars followed suit. Thus Catholics, for the most part, did not fall into the abyss of biblical fundamentalism or the anti-intellectual prejudices that plague so many Christian sects today. 

Besides adopting the interpretative skills that Protestant scholars had developed, Catholics brought to biblical studies another resource that sometimes we Catholics fail to appreciate. The Catholic community holds onto a finely crafted body of sound doctrines, which technically is called tradition. The bible can easily be distorted in all sorts of ways, but Catholics were guided by their Catholic tradition, the teachings of the Church, which provided them with a kind of inner gyroscope, enabling them to maintain their balance and find the right path through the seeming maze of what others were mistakenly heralding as biblical truths. Catholics, therefore, are not prone to pit the bible and science against one another as competing truths. So, for example, Catholics do not ordinarily lobby school boards to teach creationism alongside evolution. In fact, the Church teaches that tradition and scripture are united as the single source of divine revelation.

If Catholic tradition has enabled Catholics to read the bible more in accord with what the biblical writers intended, the converse is true as well. The bible has challenged some of the distortions that have worked their way into the way the tradition of the Church is popularly presented and understood. For example, our renewed appreciation for what we call the Old Testament has corrected some of the abhorrent anti-Semitism that corrupted Catholic attitudes. No more talk of the “perfidious Jew” in our liturgy now that we are so used to praying the Jewish psalms and being stirred by the preaching of the Jewish prophets and God’s irrevocable promises to the biblical people of the Covenant.

So let us pray that we really do “eat the words of the Scriptures” in the way that Ezekiel did so. The bible should be a steady part of the daily diet of every Christian believer. It is striking that throughout Christendom today, when all Christians gather to honor the Lord’s day on the Sabbath, we are all reading the same words of scripture from a common lectionary. If we all follow the same diet, so to speak, we may find that so many of the divisions that have plagued the larger Christian community will gradually be dissipated and we will finally come to sit at one table as the Lord always intended.
—Walter F. Modrys SJ

Today’s readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.