A Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 22:19-23  Romans 11:33-36  Matthew 16:13-20

There is something about Esther—the biblical text originally composed in Hebrew, I mean. God does not appear in it. Never even mentioned, unless you are reading the Catholic and Orthodox versions, which follow the ancient Septuagint and contain passages composed in Greek in addition to those in Hebrew. Even there, however, God plays no role in the story’s plot.

Seems odd, though, does it not? For the word of God not to mention God, not even in the third person? Yet this is the phrase we Christians employ, “the word of God.”

So what do Christians mean when they call the sacred Scriptures “the word of God”? Many fundamentalists preface most everything by intoning, “the Bible says…” as though one could pick up the book and read it as if it were a very long letter composed for us that morning by God. 

But this is an extraordinarily new way of speaking about Scripture. Even the word “Bible” did not come into common usage until after the invention of the printing press, when the whole of sacred Scripture could be presented in a single volume.

If all the books of the Bible are meant to be read as one long letter from God, something of an instruction manual, it is odd that God so often describes himself in the third person. Why do we read in the first chapter, the first verse of Genesis, these words?

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…

If this is a letter from God, one free of any ambiguity about who is writing to us, why do we not read, “In the beginning, when I created the heavens and the earth?”

And then we come to the Book of Esther, where God does not even mention himself in the third person. Did God write such a long letter that he forgot its point? And should God not be able to arrive at his point faster than he does? Did he lose track of what he was saying?

Should we really be clutching Bibles to our chests, insisting that God has personally written us the nicest long letter? And if God did do this, why is this not obvious to everyone who reads it? And why are only two or three Christians needed to produce such radically different readings of the same letter?

Insisting that the Bible was the word of God—standing above and apart from the church—was supposed to settle divisions among Christians. So why is the very notion so self-contradictory?

Because God did not choose to come among us as a book. He chose to become a human being like us. Strictly speaking, the Bible is a divinely inspired, and therefore authoritative, witness to the word of God, who is Jesus the Christ. A human being, like the rest of us, is located in time and space, even if in his divinity he is not limited to time and space.

In Isaiah, God says of Eliakim,

I will place the key of the House of David on Eliakim’s shoulder;
when he opens, no one shall shut,
when he shuts, no one shall open.
I will fix him like a peg in a sure spot (22:22-23)

If God is writing a long letter, choosing to come right at us by means of his own missive, why is the Bible chock full of countless men and women who have been chosen by God to be mediators between him and us? 

And if, in the fullness of time, as we read, Christ—God in the flesh—stands before us, why does he direct our attention to Peter and invest his person, his office, with powers that rightly belong to God?

Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. 
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my
heavenly Father. 
And so I say to you, you are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church,
and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. 
I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. 
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;
and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Mt 16:17-19).

Why all these people, all these mediators? Because, as paradoxical as it is at first glance, God tells us, “I will not give my glory to another” (Is 42:8).

If God is the mystery at the core of reality, our origin and destiny—in short, our creator—then God is not going to come to us as anything less than we are. If God enters communion with us, he must do so by way of our humanity itself, not its products. Individuals can declare for themselves the meaning of a text; only a universal consensus—spanning time and space—can speak for the Catholic Church. 

God did not become a book. God became human. And for millennia both before and after the life of the Christ, God chooses to encounter us in the mystery of our humanity, in countless men and women whom we call the church and, before that, the people of God. 

What a mess God has made! We cannot find God without looking to each other, without listening and learning. But what is the alternative? You and your book? But how do you ever know, as you read your book, however many times you read it, that you have escaped your own self? That God has really found you, summoned you out of yourself? If God is looking for you, he is not going to find you in something less than yourself, in a book you interpret. 

No, God is going to come at you in your own humanity, in the Word made flesh and in the community to which he said, “Whoever listens to you listens to me” (Lk 10:16).

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.