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By Msgr. Charles Fink
 In this school of love (our life on earth), we have an extraordinary teacher: JESUS CHRIST. In him we see what God is like, what we are meant to be, and what love is. The reason he is the teacher par excellence is that he is what he teaches. He is God incarnate. He is perfectly human. He is love in thought, word, and deed.
We, therefore do ourselves an inestimable service when we get to know him as well as we can. We should be steeped in the gospels, as in the rest of scripture. St. Jerome, never the diplomat, said that “Ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ.” Even if Jerome overstated the case, and that’s a big if, it’s certainly true that knowledge of the scriptures will deepen our knowledge of Christ, and if we want to know him as well as we can, it is to our advantage to read, study, meditate on, and pray with God’s great love letter to humanity, which is what the Bible is.
It’s true that there are many passages in the Bible that seem anything but loving, but we must keep in mind that God was dealing with some awfully wayward children (and still is). He’d have liked them to be good—for their sake not his. Indeed, he’d have liked to enter into a kind of marriage with them, but all they ever seemed to think about was worldly affairs and other lovers. It’s no wonder that in their eyes he often appeared jealous and tyrannical. The real wonder is that God was so in love with them that he didn’t even care that they sometimes painted a pretty unattractive picture of him. It’s part of his humility that God permits his word to be written in the words of imperfect people. Just so long as what is essential gets across to make us the lovers he wants us to be, he doesn’t mind that there is a good bit of chaff amidst the wheat, even in his love letter, the Bible.
And besides, he gives us the Church to guide us in our interpretation of scripture, to make sure we don’t distort his message in anything we really need to know. The Church is another of God’s gifts of love to his children. Like his children of old, however, we too often see tyranny where we should see love.
Monsignor Charles Fink is the Director of Spiritual Formation at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huintington, New York.
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