"only son of his mother, and she was a widow..."

[MariaChristi]

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

There are some phrases in the today’s Gospel that reminded me of Jesus’ love for Mary:

Jesus journeyed to a city called Nain,
and his disciples and a large crowd accompanied him.
As he drew near to the gate of the city,
a man who had died was being carried out,
the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.
A large crowd from the city was with her.
When the Lord saw her,
he was moved with pity for her and said to her,
“Do not weep.”
He stepped forward and touched the coffin;
at this the bearers halted,
and he said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!”
The dead man sat up and began to speak,
and Jesus gave him to his mother.
Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, crying out
“A great prophet has arisen in our midst, “
and “God has visited his people.”
This report about him spread through the whole of Judea
and in all the surrounding region.

Jesus is moved with pity at the sight of this bereaved mother, who was a widow – was He also mindful of His own death to come and how His Mother Mary also a widow would suffer? Jesus was the only son of His Mother, and she too was a widow. It seems to me, as God His Heart held that sorrow and was moved to resurrect this widow’s Son as a sign of His Love and His Power. How tender are the words: “Jesus gave him to his mother”! Jesus knew He would rise from the dead and Mary would see Him alive after the terrible death He would suffer on Calvary.

It also can give us all hope that when we die, Jesus will give us to our Mother Mary in heaven.

 

[Tim_D]

I think that you are impressing your own emotions upon the text. The fact that the woman was a widow and that he was her only son meant that he was the one who would provide a means of living for her. Without him, she would have probably been homeless and without any means of support and would either have had to beg for her subsistence or slowly died. That is the reason that Jesus had pity on the woman.

 

[Gertabelle]

I think that you are impressing your own emotions upon the text. The fact that the woman was a widow and that he was her only son meant that he was the one who would provide a means of living for her. Without him, she would have probably been homeless and without any means of support and would either have had to beg for her subsistence or slowly died. That is the reason that Jesus had pity on the woman.

The beautiful thing about the scriptures is that we bring our own lives and our own experiences, our own loves and fears, etc., to the reading of them. This is a Good Thing.

Rather than disagreeing with someone else’s experience of the scriptures, I think we should ask ourselves, “what is God saying to me through this passage?”

I went on a privately directed silent retreat at a Jesuit retreat house last fall, and the Ignatian “method” of reading portions of the Bible opened up the scriptures in a deeply personal and powerful way, thanks be to God!

So how does this gospel passage speak to YOUR heart?

 

[Rbaker]

I think that you are impressing your own emotions upon the text. The fact that the woman was a widow and that he was her only son meant that he was the one who would provide a means of living for her. Without him, she would have probably been homeless and without any means of support and would either have had to beg for her subsistence or slowly died. That is the reason that Jesus had pity on the woman.

Exactly what the priest at our parish said today

 

[Tim_D]

Rather than disagreeing with someone else’s experience of the scriptures, I think we should ask ourselves, “what is God saying to me through this passage?”

Which is more important? Truly understanding the text or imposing our own “feel good” interpretation of things?

 

[Tim_D]

So how does this gospel passage speak to YOUR heart?

The passage speaks to me exactly what the text relates; that Jesus took pity on the woman because she would have probably died a pitiful death without her son. Am I missing something?

 

[Gertabelle]

Which is more important? Truly understanding the text or imposing our own “feel good” interpretation of things?

I would reply with my own question: Which is more important – having an intellectual understanding of the scriptures, or allowing the scriptures to penetrate our hearts and change our lives?

…

Or perhaps both of us have set up false dichotomies?

MariaChristi shared a personal reflection of how today’s gospel impacted her heart. And you have taken it upon yourself to tell her that her experience of God’s Word working in her heart is fundamentally wrong? You clearly have not seen her other posts if you think she doesn’t understand the historical context of the passage. But God granted her the grace to be touched more deeply than staying at the level of historical context.

And so I ask again, how does this passage speak to your HEART, not just your mind? How does it impact how you act as Christ in the world, how you serve Christ in the world? How does this scripture passage demonstrate God’s love for YOU?

Reading scripture is not supposed to be nothing more than an intellectual exercise! As a Catholic, I am supposed to use both faith and reason as I read and reflect upon God’s Word.

Need to get to mass now – they tend to notice when the organist shows up late!

 

[Tim_D]

I would reply with my own question: Which is more important – having an intellectual understanding of the scriptures, or allowing the scriptures to penetrate our hearts and change our lives?

I guess we can say that if one doesn’t have an intellectual understanding of the scriptures, then everything that follows is all for nought.

There is a reason why we say, at every Mass, "I believe in God…I believe in Jesus Christ…I believe in the Holy Spirit." Without an intellectual foundation our faith is simply built on emotion. One may get an emotional thrill by reading things into the text that isn’t there but it doesn’t do anything in our understanding of the faith. Better to practice the faith as it is read and taught then to come up with our own ideas that give us warm and fuzzy feelings.

 

[RPRPsych]

I think that you are impressing your own emotions upon the text. The fact that the woman was a widow and that he was her only son meant that he was the one who would provide a means of living for her. Without him, she would have probably been homeless and without any means of support and would either have had to beg for her subsistence or slowly died. That is the reason that Jesus had pity on the woman.

That is a literal reading. But as we Catholics know, Scripture has four senses. MariaChristi’s post is an example of the “allegorical” sense. Nicely done.

 

[Vivat_Christus]

Beautiful post, MariaChristi

 

[cjb_914]

I guess we can say that if one doesn’t have an intellectual understanding of the scriptures, then everything that follows is all for nought.

There is a reason why we say, at every Mass, "I believe in God…I believe in Jesus Christ…I believe in the Holy Spirit." Without an intellectual foundation our faith is simply built on emotion. One may get an emotional thrill by reading things into the text that isn’t there but it doesn’t do anything in our understanding of the faith. Better to practice the faith as it is read and taught then to come up with our own ideas that give us warm and fuzzy feelings.

I don’t believe that’s quite what he was saying. He wasn’t saying emotions ought to be our impetus for religion, but rather he was saying our emotions don’t have to be ruthlessly squelched. Reason isn’t intended to be a straight jacket. There is mystery that is completely impossible for us to grasp, sometimes when we tread where reason cannot take us all we have is a warm and fuzzy feeling, and this particular one is actually well reasoned as far as we can understand the dual nature of Christ.

 

[Gertabelle]

I guess we can say that if one doesn’t have an intellectual understanding of the scriptures, then everything that follows is all for nought.

There is a reason why we say, at every Mass, "I believe in God…I believe in Jesus Christ…I believe in the Holy Spirit." Without an intellectual foundation our faith is simply built on emotion. ** One may get an emotional thrill by reading things into the text that isn’t there but it doesn’t do anything in our understanding of the faith. Better to practice the faith as it is read and taught then to come up with our own ideas that give us warm and fuzzy feelings.**

I’m not sure I’m understanding you.

Are you suggesting that the only correct way to read the scriptures is in their literal, historical context?

Are you suggesting that the Church has defined a single interpretation of each and every scripture passage?

Are you suggesting that delving into the scriptures from our own personal experiences is wrong?

Please forgive me if I am not understanding what you are saying. But any and all of those positions would be completely wrong for a Catholic to hold.

If there were only one way message in each and every scripture passage, there would be no point in ever going back to read the scriptures! “I already know the message here, I’m done.” And there would be no point whatsoever in monastics praying the same 150 Psalms every week, year after year, decade after decade!

And the Church does not have a single, magesterium-approved understanding of each and every verse and story in the Bible beyond which Catholics are not allowed to dwell. Yes, there are Church teachings contained within some scriptures that we must accept – Peter is “the rock” = Peter is the first Pope.

But accepting these teachings does not preclude us from examining the stories for hidden gems, messages not only to the Church at large, but to each one of us as individuals.

St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits during the time of the counter-reformation, encouraged his followers to use their imaginations in contemplating the scriptures:

*Prayer using the imagination is a pillar of the Ignatian spiritual tradition. In its most common form, you take a passage from scripture, usually one of the gospels, and immerse yourself in it imaginatively using all the senses. You feel the heat of the day, smell the livestock and clouds of dust on the road, listen to Jesus’ words, watch his actions. It’s a way to engage the gospel personally, with all of our faculties. *

See more at: ignatianspirituality.com/3428/ignatian-contemplation#sthash.BUQIvEbm.dpuf

And if you were to delve into the scripture commentaries written by a variety of Fathers of the Church and Doctors of the Church, you would see that they certainly and most readily applied their own experiences of life and made connections with what they read!

Take as a prime example, the Our Father. I read an amazing commentary written by St Augustine last fall – it was part of the Office of Readings for that part of the Church year. St Francis also wrote a beautiful and profound reflection on the same prayer. But the two Saints do not say the exact same things about the prayer. So which one is right and which one is wrong?

Answer: they’re both theologically sound and worthy of our consideration.

As Catholics, we are encouraged to read the Bible as a private devotion. We need to use our minds AND our hearts as we do this. If we notice similarities, as MariaChristi did, we ought not to throw them out as historical inaccuracy! Her reflection is a beautiful one and considers the humanity of our dear Lord and His love for His mother. This is not over-the-top, touchy-feely sentimentality. This is a sound reflection on what the Church teaches about Jesus, that He is fully divine and fully human.

 

[LaetenturCaeli]

One may get an emotional thrill by reading things into the text that isn’t there but it doesn’t do anything in our understanding of the faith.

Our homily today was given by a newly ordained Dominican Friar. I assure you, the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. is by no means fluffy or overly emotional in their formation of priests. I am positive that their courses on homiletics and biblical exegesis are intellectually very sound, and they are most certainly very orthodox.

… and his whole homily was incredibly close to the OP of this thread.

This isn’t about “emotional thrills.” This is about treating Holy Scripture as an inspired text through which the Holy Spirit can instruct us, today, right where we are sitting.

The fact that this text is prefiguring the Passion of Our Lord is by no means an emotional conclusion.

 

[MariaChristi]

I think that you are impressing your own emotions upon the text. The fact that the woman was a widow and that he was her only son meant that he was the one who would provide a means of living for her. Without him, she would have probably been homeless and without any means of support and would either have had to beg for her subsistence or slowly died. That is the reason that Jesus had pity on the woman.

Dear Tim_D,

Thanks for your reply. You heard in the Gospel, that “Jesus had pity on the woman” and that is absolutely true. However, every word of Scripture is important. God reveals in His Word what He wants us to hear, and so St. Luke in His Gospel narrative includes the words “only son of his mother and she was a widow” because God wanted those words to impress our minds and our hearts.

Pope Benedict XVI in 2008, speaking to the Synod on the The Word of God in the World Today, said:

…We are always in search of the Word of God. It is not just present in us. If we stop at the letter of the Word, we have not necessarily understood the Word of God. There is the danger that we only see the human words and fail to find within the true actor, the Holy Spirit. We do not find the Word in words.
St. Augustine, in this context, reminds us of the scribes and Pharisees consulted by Herod when the Magi arrived. Herod wanted to know where the Savior of the world would be born. They knew it, and gave him the correct answer; Bethlehem. They were great experts, who knew everything. And yet, they did not see reality, they did not recognize the Savior.
St. Augustine says - they showed the way for others, but they themselves did not move. This is a great danger,too, in our reading of Scripture: we stop at the words, human words from the past, a history of the past, and we do not discover the present in the past, the Holy Spirit which speaks to us today in words from the past.
And so we fail to enter into the interior movement of the Word, which hides in human words and opens the divine words. That is why there is always need for ‘considering with care’. We should be in search of the Word within words.
Therefore, exegesis, the true reading of Sacred Scripture, is not simply a literary phenomenon, it is not limited to reading the text. It is the movement of my own existence. It is moving towards the Word of God in human words.
Only by conforming to the mystery of God, to the Lord who is the Word, can we enter into the Word, only then can we truly find the Word of God in human words.

Emotions are given to us that we may be “moved” in the depths of our souls. Human persons are not merely intellectual but we are mind, soul and spirit which are beautiful when they are conformed to God’s Will as we see in Jesus’ human nature assumed by His Divine Person and in Mary’s purely human nature which grew in holiness all her life on this earth.

 

[Gertabelle]

Dear Tim_D,

Thanks for your reply. You heard in the Gospel, that “Jesus had pity on the woman” and that is absolutely true. However, every word of Scripture is important. God reveals in His Word what He wants us to hear, and so St. Luke in His Gospel narrative includes the words “only son of his mother and she was a widow” because God wanted those words to impress our minds and our hearts.

Pope Benedict XVI in 2008, speaking to the Synod on the The Word of God in the World Today, said:

Emotions are given to us that we may be “moved” in the depths of our souls. Human persons are not merely intellectual but we are mind, soul and spirit which are beautiful when they are conformed to God’s Will as we see in Jesus’ human nature assumed by His Divine Person and in Mary’s purely human nature which grew in holiness all her life on this earth.

Wow. God bless you for sharing all this!

 

[MariaChristi]

Wow. God bless you for sharing all this!

Dear Gertabelle,

Pope Benedict XVI (Pope Emeritus) is “a theologian who studies on his knees!” That definition of a good theologian was given to us in a theology class and I’ve never forgotten it, especially when reading the three volume series by Pope Benedict on Jesus of Nazareth. This quote I posted from Pope Benedict’s address to the Bishops’ Synod needs to be pondered:

…We are always in search of the Word of God. It is not just present in us. If we stop at the letter of the Word, we have not necessarily understood the Word of God. There is the danger that we only see the human words and fail to find within the true actor, the Holy Spirit. We do not find the Word in words.
St. Augustine, in this context, reminds us of the scribes and Pharisees consulted by Herod when the Magi arrived. Herod wanted to know where the Savior of the world would be born. They knew it, and gave him the correct answer; Bethlehem. They were great experts, who knew everything. And yet, they did not see reality, they did not recognize the Savior.
St. Augustine says - they showed the way for others, but they themselves did not move. This is a great danger,too, in our reading of Scripture: we stop at the words, human words from the past, a history of the past, and we do not discover the present in the past, the Holy Spirit which speaks to us today in words from the past.
And so we fail to enter into the interior movement of the Word, which hides in human words and opens the divine words. That is why there is always need for ‘considering with care’. We should be in search of the Word within words.
Therefore, exegesis, the true reading of Sacred Scripture, is not simply a literary phenomenon, it is not limited to reading the text. It is the movement of my own existence. It is moving towards the Word of God in human words.
Only by conforming to the mystery of God, to the Lord who is the Word, can we enter into the Word, only then can we truly find the Word of God in human words.

The literal meaning is only the first step, in hearing and understanding God’s Word. God, by the power of His Holy Spirit, wants us to continue listening to all He reveals about Himself.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Your faithful. Kindle in us the Fire of Your Love.
Mary, Mother of the Church, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, pray for us.
Jesus, Meek and Humble of Heart, we trust in You!

 

[CRATUS]

Debates like these seriously make me reconsider why I joined this website. I guess anything and everything can be disputed. I thought following the Lord was simple. Debates like these come about. I do not think we should interpret scripture as we please. I did not see anything particularly wrong or overthought in her post. Gees.

 

[MariaChristi]

Debates like these seriously make me reconsider why I joined this website. I guess anything and everything can be disputed. I thought following the Lord was simple. Debates like these come about. I do not think we should interpret scripture as we please. I did not see anything particularly wrong or overthought in her post.

Dear CRATUS,

Thanks for your reply. Hopefully, we can simply end this thread here. It was not intended for debate. I agree with you, and certainly Mary our Mother and all the saints have shown us by their lives, following Jesus can be simple. Pope Benedict’s words which I most recently added to this thread help us continue to search prayerfully for God’s meaning in His Word, :

…We are always in search of the Word of God. It is not just present in us. If we stop at the letter of the Word, we have not necessarily understood the Word of God. There is the danger that we only see the human words and fail to find within the true actor, the Holy Spirit. We do not find the Word in words.

Yesterday’s Gospel gave us the Beatitudes, and today’s Gospel continues the Sermon on the Mount. May we listen to Jesus, the Incarnate Word carefully and prayerfully, and by the power of His Holy Spirit, live the Truth we hear:

Jesus said to his disciples:
“You are the salt of the earth.
But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned?
It is no longer good for anything
but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
You are the light of the world.
A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.
Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket;
it is set on a lampstand,
where it gives light to all in the house.
Just so, your light must shine before others,
that they may see your good deeds
and glorify your heavenly Father.” (MT 5:13-16)