Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire” (Matthew 3:4-10).
Bob said that as he read Matthew, it seemed to him that the Holy Spirit revealed to him the meaning of John's diet of locusts and honey. “Where have I heard of locusts and honey before? In the Old Testament!” Bob said. “I now believe Matthew is making a symbolic reference. Locusts represent God's judgment and wrath and the honey represents the 'Promised Land'. Matthew is implying that John's daily food were the fear of God and the promise of God.”
Bob then asked members of a Catholic Internet bulletin board what the “standard teaching of the Church” on this passage is and noted that he had “never heard this interpretation from any preachers or teachers I have ever heard. I genuinely believe God has given it to me as a gift!”
In an effort to help answer his question about the “standard teaching” of the Church on this passage, somebody posted some quotes about John the Baptist from various Church Fathers, none of whom happened to echo Bob's insight into Matthew 3:4-10. Bob, operating under the assumption that the Church functions by the principle, “That Which is Not Forbidden is Compulsory,” became confused by this. Nobody explained to Bob that the comments of the Fathers on this passage were neither dogmatic nor exhaustive of the text's meaning.
So Bob took these patristic quotes as “The Church's Official Interpretation From Which Only Heretics Vary by a Hairsbreadth” and formed the impression the Church somehow condemned his insight into the passage. Crestfallen, Bob replied that it appeared the Church said he was wrong, but he was still sure that this interpretation was a gift from God. The conversation continued, but with a tone of hurt indignation from Bob that the Church would slap down such a treasured insight.
Bob's misunderstanding was sad. For had he but known it, his insight into Matthew in fact stands in the midst of a method of Catholic Scriptural interpretation harking all the way back to the New Testament itself. In fact, his interpretation was a classic specimen of the “moral” sense of Scripture, one of the “four senses of Scripture” developed by medieval theology.
The idea behind the four senses of Scripture is that the Bible has a literal sense, but also “more-than-literal” senses. So, for instance, when Numbers 21:6-9 tells us that God afflicted rebellious Israel with poisonous snakes and then commanded Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and hoist it up on a pole so that all who looked at it would be healed, the literal sense of this text is “God afflicted rebellious Israel with poisonous snakes and then commanded Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and hoist it up on a pole so that all who looked at it would be healed.” The literal sense of the text is what the human author meant to say in the way he meant to say it. It is foundational to all the other senses of Scripture.
However, since God is the true author of Scripture the Church has always recognized that God can and does inspire human beings to say and record things that are pregnant with a meaning the human author himself may not guess. Again, the Bronze Serpent is illustrative here. The original human author was not thinking, “This serpent will really come in handy as an image of Christ Crucified someday!” From Moses' perspective, he was just doing what he was told, obeying one of God's strange commands because God commanded it. But Jesus, whose Spirit inspired Scripture, saw in Moses' obedient action the inner reality of his own coming crucifixion and declared, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15).
Jesus' ingrained habit of seeing in the events of the Old Testament signs which pointed to him is well documented and is what undergirds the Church insistence that there is, in addition to the literal sense, a second sense of Scripture — the allegorical sense. Again and again Jesus spoke of the events, places, things, and people of the Old Testament as though they were providentially arranged by God to be signs and shadows, reminders and hints, of himself.
He told his hearers, “You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me” (John 5:39). He declared that he was the “fulfillment” of Scripture (Luke 4:21). And when he had risen, he declared to his disciples that, “ ’everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, 'Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem'” (Luke 24:44-47). In short, Jesus continually insisted that he himself was the “second meaning” of the Old Testament and that, ultimately, it was all about him.
But that is not the only deeper sense of Scripture. As Bob saw, Scripture can also be read in a moral sense. John's diet of locust and wild honey can symbolize the fear of God and hope of the Promised Land of Heaven that animated the prophet. The temple can symbolize the body and we can see its holiness and purity as a symbol of our call to holiness and purity. That is why Paul told the Corinthians to avoid sexual sin lest they defile the Temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). And that is why Catholics ever since have seen in the imagery of Scripture a rich vein of moral meanings ranging from the conquest of Canaan as an image of our personal struggle against sin to Rachel and Leah as images of virtue and vice.
Bob was reading Scripture in a way familiar to all the Fathers. He simply happened on an image that had not been noticed by them. But there is absolutely nothing contrary to the Faith in that image and so it enriches the Faith to make use of it.
Also enriching to the Faith is the fourth sense of Scripture: the anagogical sense. This three-dollar word refers to that sense of Scripture which pertains to our final destiny in Christ. So, for instance, Jerusalem in its literal sense, refers to a literal city. But John sees an ultimate significance in Jerusalem as the symbol of heaven itself and so speaks of the “New Jerusalem” in Revelation 21:2.
Similarly, there is a real place near Jerusalem called the “Valley of Hinnom” that was the scene of child sacrifice under Manasseh. It was considered an accursed and unclean place and so it made a natural image for the ultimate accursed and unclean place. That is why Jesus warns his hearers of the fires of “gehenna” which literally refers to the Valley of Hinnom but by which Jesus also means “Hell.”
These four senses of Scripture give Catholics a rich and multi-layered mine of meaning from which to draw nourishment from their faith. Such richness does not mean that we can take Scripture to mean whatever we like, of course. We are obliged to pay attention to the literal meaning of a text and never use the other senses to contradict that meaning. We are obliged to always read Scripture in light of the Church's teaching. We are obliged to pay attention to the ways in which the New Testament, the liturgy and the Church exegetical tradition make these connections between the senses of Scripture. We are obliged to not demand that our particular insight into the secondary meaning of the text is the one and only meaning.
But within those elementary boundaries, Catholics have enormous freedom to mine Scripture for the nuggets of gold God has hidden there. Any spiritually fruitful interpretation of Scripture (such as Bob's) which does not conflict with the teaching of the Church is something that can enrich and deepen Catholic Faith. For as St. Augustine tells us, the New Testament is hidden in the Old Testament and the Old Testament is only fully revealed in the New. Or as Proverbs 25:2 said long ago, “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”
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This article originally appeared in Lay Witness magazine.
