Read the Bible with Me!

Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! We've been reading the Bible clear through this year. We've reached the New Testament, so read along with me. But first, let us pray: 

Father,

When the fullness of time had come, you sent your Word in the One who said, “Whoever sees me, sees the Father.” No revelation can surpass this, until Jesus comes again in glory. 

Open my mind today to the gift of life and truth your Word offers me through the Church. By your Holy Spirit, grant me wisdom and strength to put this Word into practice and to become, myself, a presence of Jesus for people who are looking for you.

Jesus, eternal Word and Son of the Father, live in me with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Today's chapters are Acts 26-28 and (because it is Sunday) Psalms 138-139.

The state visit of King Agrippa and his sister Bernice provides the occasion for the third account of the conversion of St Paul. We see that Paul uses his witness as an occasion to invite to new life this couple whose lives scandalized even the pagans. You can practically hear him turn the story in to an exhortation: "I preached the need to repent and turn to God, and to do works giving evidence of repentance." Agrippa's response shows that he got the point, though his use of the derogatory term "Christian" already contains an answer. Yet Paul manages to answer with humor.

Chapter 27 and the beginning of Chapter 28 recount the challenges of the sea voyage to Rome, undertaken when the sailing season was just ending. St Paul wrote to the Corinthians that he had been through three shipwrecks (2 Corinthians 11:25), and had spent a day and a night on the open sea. Luke, compact writer that he is, hints at all of this travail in one episode. The "Feast of the Shipwreck of St Paul" (February 10) is celebrated in Malta, since it was the providential act that brought the Gospel to their land. (It is a public holiday!) 

The Acts of the Apostles ends in a disconcertingly summary way with Paul's arrival in Rome for extended house arrest while awaiting trial. We are left with so many questions for Luke: What happened next? Are we to fill in the blanks with the hints from Paul's letters? Which hints? What about the various traditions concerning his and Peter's martyrdom? Hadn't they already received their martyrs' crowns when you wrote this account for Theophilus? Why didn't you finish the story?! But Luke didn't promise to tell us Paul's story, but the story of the Gospel preached "to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem" (Lk 24:47), and with Paul's arrival in Rome, that was clearly being done.

Images of Paul preaching to Festus and Agrippa and of Paul being met on the road to Rome are from the Basilica of St Paul-outside-the-Walls; by Sister Sergia Ballini, FSP; used with permission.

Psalm 138 is a song of Thanksgiving, and one that surely echoed the prayer in Paul's heart as the Christians of Italy lined the roadways along which he was being led as a prisoner (see Acts 28:15). The Psalmist knows that in the Temple, the earthly replica of God's heavenly dwelling, and in Heaven itself, God is unceasingly praised by the angels, and so the psalm joins in their pure thankfulness, and foresees the day when even the great ones of the earth will acknowledge the greatness of God.

Psalm 139 contemplates God as not as a distant creator, but as the maker of "my inmost being," the God of infinite majesty and infinite nearness. Several of the final verses of Psalm 139 are often deleted from modern versions of the Psalter (they are absent from the current Liturgy of the Hours) because the Psalmist, eager to conform to the Lord's vision in all things, asks the Lord to destroy the wicked and claims to hate them "with fierce hatred" as personal enemies. We don't have to apply these "cursing verses" to human beings in order to pray Psalm 139 completely; we certainly don't have to think of the Lord's "enemies" as persons. How about praying for the strength to fight against whatever in ourselves is opposed to God's Spirit, or whatever addiction or bad habit continually undermines the good that God is building up in our life or our family?

Start reading Acts here and the Psalms here.

For additional background

Now that we're being introduced to Saul of Tarsus, it's time for me to introduce you to my single favorite volume on St Paul. This is the book I would recommend to someone who wanted to read one (only one) book that combined the life and letters of St Paul. Written by the noted Scripture scholar N. T. Wright, this is a flowing narrative that is Scripturally enlightening and historically sound. Paul: A Biography gives the reader a way of following Paul through the Acts of the Apostles and as he writes his letters and makes Paul the person that much more approachable.