Living and Effective

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082525.cfm

I love this quote from St. Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians: "For our Gospel did not come to you in word alone". Truth be told, the true Gospel never comes in word alone. It is always accompanied by a life that attempts to put it into practice, put flesh upon it. Jesus after all was the Word Incarnate. He was made flesh to live amongst us, not to be captured and quantified in ink and paper.

When we read the scriptures, it is so important, that we think of them more as a movie script than a textbook. We have to be able to see the characters, see their human faults and failings, because they all had them. They are not fictitious characters, but real people in real relationship with a real God. We learn about our relationship with Him by seeing our faults and failings (and an occasional triumph) within their story.

As with nearly everything that we experience in life, we stand on the shoulders of those who come before us, and at the same time, share the same experiences of the nature and the senses and life and love and the relationship. We look at Scripture and should be able to see these common threads to give us confidence that Scripture speaks not only to us, but OF us. It is telling our story, or at least part of it.

Jesus, through the scriptures, and through the life He led here on earth, passed down to us by the Apostles and their successors (we call them bishops) shows us our common faults and failings so that we might know that we need Him, and that He is 100% willing to give us all that we need to overcome our shortcomings. When we recognize in Scripture that Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Racheal, Moses, David, Martha, Mary and Lazarus, Peter, James, John, Thomas all seem to be stumbling and fumbling in the same ways that we do, we can see that God can rescue us as He did them. Because He has done it so consistently and faithfully, we can have a 'blessed assurance'.

This doesn't mean that we just throw our hands up and say 'oh well, we're human, we're going to muck it up'. Jesus calls us beyond that to strive for the perfection of heaven. This striving is the life that accompanies the 'good news'. St. Paul goes on to say: "You know what sort of people we were among you for your sake." They were people trying to live the Gospel, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of others, so that these others might come to believe in the Word of God, a Word that is living and effective.