Monday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos
Missionary to USA, especialy NOLA

Lectionary: 461

I am amazed that you are so quickly forsaking the one who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel (not that there is another). But there are some who are disturbing you and wish to pervert the Gospel of Christ.

Saint Paul's Letter to the Galatians is one of his earliest epistles; chronologically, the third document of the New Testament. Already we hear the Church's concern that the Gospel should not be misunderstood.  Not anyone's interpretation is correct; only the interpretation which is directed by the Holy Spirit and pronounced by a duly anointed (authorized) representative of the Church. 

This is the foundation of infallibility. No one knows who Jesus is, and no one understands what Jesus did except his inspired Church. Historians are certainly welcome to their opinions about the man. They can describe his time and place; they can suggest what a typical man of that place and time might have looked like. They can track his teachings and their originality. (Much of what he taught had been taught by others.) They study his impact on history. 

Their conclusions may be fascinating but, without the inspired guidance of the Church, they are not trustworthy. There is no Gospel beyond the Gospels. In other words, no one should add to the Gospel their opinions about what Jesus meant to say, or might have said, or should have said. 

In Saint Paul's time and in every age and place, there are people who, hearing the Gospel, reinterpret it to fit their own preconceived ideas. It took almost four hundred years for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity to emerge because it fit no one's ideas about God. It was neither Jewish nor Greek. Jewish philosophy insisted there is only one God. Greek philosophy could not conceive of God born of woman. 

But the Gospels and other widely-accepted Christian documents -- which were not yet compiled into a single "new testament" -- plus the liturgical and catechetical traditions, were already comfortable with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. They sang of, and spoke of, these beliefs with complete confidence. The bishops at Nicea and Constantinople had only to point to the traditions and say, "This is what we believe!" When some eggheads tried to explain how Jesus could not be God and human, the bishops at Chalcedon defined the doctrine of the Incarnation. Those definitions fit the Bible, liturgical prayers, and tradition teachings like a key in its lock. 

Cardinal Ratzinger, before he was elected and took the throne name of Pope Benedict XVI, suggested that we should be careful how we use the number three when we speak of God. Numbers and mathematics are handy human constructs; but they cannot define the mystery of God. True, we speak of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; and the Fathers created a handy neologism -- Trinity -- but we should be careful when we speak of three persons in one God. 

One fellow told me his theory: that the three persons of God might have a disagreement and so one must be outvoted by the two. "No! Dear Lord save us from such nonsense! If that's where your thinking takes you, stop thinking!" 

Saint Paul encountered similar foolish attempts to make sense of the gospel. After he left the region of Galatia other Christian missionaries went there and taught their own misconceptions, ideas which reduced Jesus to little more than a misunderstood Jewish prophet. They discouraged the Galatians from the worship of Jesus and persuaded them to be circumcised and become proper Jews. 

Paul would not hear of it! Gentiles who believe in Jesus should not become Jews. If they do so, they will completely misunderstand the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They will not be saved from their sins! They will not know the Holy Spirit. They will not belong to his body, the Church. 

Two thousand years later the Catholic Church still proclaims the True Religion to a world that would reinterpret Jesus to fit their preconceptions. We must beg the Holy Spirit first to guide our prayers, and then to guide our thoughts, words, and deeds; and to make us true disciples of the Lord.