Thursday of Easter Week

“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,

that everything written about me in the law of Moses

and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.”

To know Jesus we must know the Old Testament. More than a working knowledge of chapter and verse, we should live in the Old Testament. It is our chapel library, written and collected over a thousand year period, in different places and languages, and addressed to people in cities, villages and desert hovels.

We have never lost touch with the Old Testament, especially in our liturgical prayer. When Peter and John stopped to heal the crippled man, as we heard in yesterday’s first reading, they were on their way into the temple, to recite the evening prayers with their Jewish people. Eventually the new Christian Way would split from the Jewish way of life, but we brought the scriptures with us.

In the seminary, as I struggled to discern my own vocation, I discovered to my surprise that I loved the breviary. Even when we recited it in Latin and I had, after four years of studying Latin, little grasp of the language, I enjoyed the at-home feeling of the psalms.

Since the mid 1970’s when the revised Liturgy of the Hours was published, many lay folks enjoy the prayers as well. Some parishes gather before or after their daily Mass, forgoing the rosary, to celebrate the Hours. Some people connect by telephone or Internet to worship God together.

The liturgy of the church consists of the Mass, the sacraments and the Hours; and the Hours are the most accessible. Although the bishop is ­normally the presider at every liturgy, since he cannot often make it, the priest presides over the Mass. But anyone can preside over the Hours in the absence of the bishop, even when you’re alone.

But you’re never alone when you pray the psalms. These are prayers for all time and every nation. If they were written two or three thousand years ago, they belong to people who will live a thousand years from now, and they will be just as precious to them as they are to us today.

Christians are “People of the Book.” The scriptures are our home. We open the Library during our liturgies that we might feed upon them; they flow into our homes that we might drink from them. As we become more and more at home in the Old Testament, we understand Jesus all the better, for he is the fulfillment of every word. 

During this Easter season, enjoy!