Your Faith Has Saved You: Some thoughts about reading the Scriptures in a personal manner

Brothers and sisters in Christ—

    We had this same Gospel reading a few weeks ago, but today we find more than enough that is new in the reading to meditate on. The last line of the reading is particularly interesting. The Lord tells the leper, who had been healed, "Go, your faith has saved you." It is more accurate to translate, "Go, the faith that is yours has saved you," but this is awkward, so we do not translate it this way typically. However, we should be cognizant of the difference. It is not merely by some abstract faith that we are saved. It is not sufficient that we simply profess faith in Christ, as if, as long as we do that, we can sit at home, without the Church, without the sacraments, without prayer, without the comprehensive practice of religion. No, on the contrary, the faith (the Catholic Faith) has saved us, and is saving us. When the Lord tells the man in the Gospel that his faith had saved him, He did not mean that the man never had to think about his salvation ever again. He did not mean that it was impossible for the man to contract the disease of leprosy again. No, He meant that the faith (faith in Christ) had saved the man right then, at that moment.

    Salvation is a story, a history, not a one-time event. If we were to believe that salvation was an event, once for all, we would be incapable of understanding the Holy Scriptures. The Scriptures are a continuous series of falls into sin, and redemptions from sin through God's love. Again and again, God's people fall away from God. God then punishes His people to correct them, and bring them back to the right way. The people turn to God. God heals them and receives them back into His friendship. Progressively, in the course of all these episodes, the people's knowledge of the ways of God deepens, so that the next fall is of a different nature, or in a matter less grave.

    The experience of being saved by our faith is learning to live the history of salvation as our personal history. It is learning to read the Scriptures as if they are about God's dealings with us. The infidelities that are denounced there are our infidelities. The punishments that are described there are our chastisements, which are intended by God to gently bring us back to our relationship with God. When we read the Scriptures, God wants us to understand that we are His chosen one. Each and every one of us is His beloved, whom He desires to bring to Himself.

    The fathers have told us that ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ. But ignorance of the Scriptures is also ignorance of our relationship to God. We should try to read the Scriptures in this kind of personal way, which will lead us to pray about the text. We are used to reading for information. We should not read the Bible primarily for information. We should read as an entry to prayer, using the Scriptures to begin that dialogue with God that prayer should be. Let the words give birth within us to thoughts and resolutions that relate to our circumstances, so that, through the text, God can reveal to us the sins we must destroy and the virtues we must cultivate with His help. Then, at every moment, God can say to us in our prayer, "Your faith has saved you."