Lectionary Discussion Group

Week of Sunday, November 4, 2007, Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost

Isaiah 1:10-20

Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah! What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation-- I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

2 Thessalonians 1:1-5(6-10)11-12

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy,

To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring.

This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, and is intended to make you worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering. [For it is indeed just of God to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to give relief to the afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. These will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, separated from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes to be glorified by his saints and to be marveled at on that day among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.] To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Luke 19:1-10

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today." So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner." Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost."

How to Read The Bible, an Introduction:

This Bible Study is focused first and foremost on reading and understanding Scripture. Everyone should read Scripture,[1] and understand that it is, as Paul said, “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” (2 Tim. 3:16.) However, reading Scripture is hard. It’s not something that you can do well on the go. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t read Scripture any time you can, but it is to say that to really get it takes both openness to God and, sometimes, time and effort.

St. Thomas Aquinas opens his monumental theological treatise Summa Theologiae with the following passage:

Because the teacher of catholic truth should instruct not only the proficient, but also those just beginning to learn, just as the Apostle [i.e., Paul] said in 1 Corinthians 3:1-2: “you were mere infants in Christ, and so I gave you milk, not solid food;” thus it is my intention in this work to give teaching to those just beginning to learn the Christian religion, and hand it down to them in such a way that their understanding may increase from its beginning.[2]

S.T. Prol. So this monumental work, well over two thousand pages in three volumes in my edition, was considered by its author a work for beginners—mother’s milk, not solid food.

So what’s the red meat? What do grown-ups do?

Grown-ups read the Bible. Grown-ups do exegesis.

But before you can delve into exegesis, you need to learn how to just read. The first steps are:

(1) Clear a time when you can focus on it. Schedule it into your day or week or month if you have to.

(2) Say a prayer to clear your mind. Spend a moment meditating. Ask God to send the Holy Spirit to open your heart to what He’s trying to tell you.

(3) Read the passage, out loud if possible, in order to get the feel of the cadence, rhythm, and tone, and try to keep your preconceptions from coloring your reading.

Over the coming weeks we will go over and apply the four traditional methods of Biblical exegesis.

Theological Tidbits:

- All of our readings this week are rich in allusions to other passages, especially in the Old Testament. Isaiah is the first of the Later Prophets, and frequently alludes to the earlier books of the Old Testament. Second Thessalonians was written to the church in Thessalonica, the chief city of Macedonia, an area of northern Greece, and the home of Alexander the Great, and is referenced at length in Acts. The story of Zacchaeas the Tax Collector also requires a familiarity with Old Testament texts to make full sense of.

- Have you ever met someone who made people say, “he prays hard every Sunday, but he cheats people Monday morning”? The prayer is just pro forma; it’s just for show. It’s not lived. This is what Isaiah is getting at here.

- Isaiah, like Amos and Jeremiah, was writing in the period between 722 B.C. and 600 B.C., when the Assyrians were running rampant over the Near East, and they destroyed the Israelite nation, even making war against Egypt.

- Isaiah compares all of Israel to Sodom and Gomorrah, which even in his time were proverbial for having been destroyed for their sins in the story of Lot and his family. (See Gen. Chapts. 18-20).

- Second Thessalonians is one of the first letters Paul wrote, to the first church Paul founded. It was a contentious church, split between Jews and Greeks. When Paul founded it, he touched off rioting between the Jews and the Greeks in the city, and had to beat a hasty retreat. (See Acts 17:1ff.) However, his church took root. Thessalonica remains one of the holiest cities of the Eastern church.

- Zacchaeus is one of our recurring tax collectors!

- In order to fully appreciate Zacchaeus’s generosity, you have to understand the background in the Old Testament:

o Leviticus 6:1-5: Requires that one who has swindles another, he should return his ill-gotten gains, along with 20% on top.

o Exodus 22:1, 4: If a person steals an ox or a sheep, he should pay back five head of cattle for the ox, or four sheep for the sheep. If the animal is found alive in his possession, he must only pay back double.

o 2 Samuel 12:6: If a man takes a lamb, he must repay 4 times over.

- Thus, Zacchaeus, by giving back 4 times as much as he had gotten by fraud, was giving as if he had taken a lamb, not as though he had committed fraud; and giving half of all he had to the poor was entirely above and beyond the call of duty.

- Note here the deeper theological reference. Zacchaeus recognized Jesus for who he was—after all, he climbed into a tree just to see him! One metaphor commonly used for Jesus is that he is the Lamb of God—a full and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world. Zacchaeus, by promising to pay back not just the required full payment plus 20%, but instead that required for killing a lamb, implicitly recognizes that Christ is the Lamb of God, and that by his fraud, he has taken not just from the person he took from, but also from Christ himself.

- Sin is an offense not just against the person we hurt, but against God also.

- Jericho is still a town today, and is one of the oldest cities in the world. It was originally conquered from the Canaanites by Joshua (Josh. Chapt. 6), but even then, it was an ancient city. It is near the Dead Sea, near Sodom and Gomorrah, but was spared their fate. It and Damascus are considered to be the oldest still-inhabited cities in the world.

Questions:

1. What does it mean to ask forgiveness? Is it enough to ask the person we offended against for forgiveness, or is it enough just to ask God for forgiveness? Do you have to ask both? Does it differ with the situation? Does doing penance play a role? Where does penance go—to reparations to the harmed person, or to God?

2. Would you recognize Jesus if you saw him coming? How do you recognize Jesus?

3. Have you ever found yourself in a position where you felt you were doing good works just to offset your bad ones? Where your prayer on Sunday was negated by the works you did all week?

4. If you were in Jeremiah’s position, giving prophetic warnings no one will take, what would you do? Have you found yourself in such a position? What did you do?

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[1] If you’re interested, this is why the first public schools were set up. If you’re illiterate, you can’t read the Bible.

[2] This translation is the author’s own, in consultation with the standard Dominican English translation.