This was the Sunday of the Word of God, a celebration in the liturgical year to emphasize the Church’s reverence for Sacred Scripture. Devotion to and study of the Sacred Page is at the very heart of the Church’s life, as the Bible tells the epic story of God’s covenant of love for His chosen people.* Through devotion and study, seekers are grafted into that epic story. Thus, they become recipients of the amazing gifts that benefit their pilgrimage of discipleship in everyday life, just as Israel received.
Endurance
The first of these gifts is endurance, which helps us meet the challenge of long-term suffering. Life may be short, but sometimes the days and seasons are long. Any day can be filled with frustrations, tribulations, and even disasters. It seems, often enough, that there are strings of such challenges, sometimes for multiple days or weeks or months consecutively. Even in short doses, these cause us to suffer, physically and emotionally, and the suffering is augmented the longer the tribulation lasts.
It is endurance that allows us to meet suffering. In fact, St. Paul connects the two in his letter to the Romans: “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character” (Rom. 5:3-4 ESV). But there is more than that one example. While St. Paul specifies the connection, it is present throughout the Bible. Another example is in Lamentations, a collection of psalms in the Old Testament written by someone who had witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C. and the exile of the Jewish people. In the middle of that text, we read:
I am the man who has seen affliction
under the rod of his wrath;
he has driven and brought me
into darkness without any light . . .
I have become the laughingstock of all peoples,
the object of their taunts all day long.
He has filled me with bitterness;
he has sated me with wormwood.
. . . so I say, “My endurance has perished;
so has my hope from the Lord.” (Lam. 3:1-2, 14-15)
Whether twenty-six centuries ago in the Fertile Crescent or in the Year of Our Lord 2025 in the United States, all of us have experienced diminished or exhausted endurance because of suffering. Yet the author of Lamentations follows this admission with a prayer, a prayer he could pray because he knew the story of God’s faithful covenant love for His people:
Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
the wormwood and the gall!
My soul continually remembers it
and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness. (Lam. 3:19-21)
When we read Israel’s story, and become bound up into that same story, we gain endurance through the frustrations and disasters that plague us. We come to know of God’s promises and His faithfulness by reading and praying the Scriptures; and they allow us to know, like Israel, that we can take the next steps, even if they hurt.
Encouragement
While we are gaining endurance through suffering, we also need something to lift our spirits and lighten the proverbial load. We need encouragement. Again, St. Paul connects these two important realities in his letter to the Romans: “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony” (Rom. 15:4-5).
We see the Lord’s efforts to encourage His people, including us, all throughout the unfolding biblical epic. For example, the author of Sirach notes that God “encouraged those whose endurance was failing,” especially when they repented of their infidelity to His covenant (Sir. 17:24). The Acts of the Apostles is replete with examples of the early Church finding and giving encouragement, and one of the Church’s earliest evangelizers and leaders was Paul’s traveling companion, Barnabas, whose name in Hebrew means “son of encouragement.” Again in St. Paul’s discourse, we find him expressing gratitude that God has chosen to speak through prophets, in words the people can understand, “for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation” (1 Cor. 14:2-5). It is a great gift that we are able to read, pray, understand, and assimilate the message of encouragement present on the Sacred Page.
Hope
Still, there is one more gift that draws these previous two together and carries them further, into eternity: the gift of hope. We see the connection, again, in Paul’s letter to the Romans: “. . . and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us” (Rom. 5:4-5).
As with the other two gifts, the gift of hope from God is present throughout the narrative of God’s covenant relationship with His people. This is especially true in the Psalms and Proverbs. The messages of Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah are replete with the idea that Israel’s fulfillment could and would be reached if they were faithful and obedient to the covenant law. The wisdom literature, from the Book of Job all the way to the literature of the Second Temple period (such as Wisdom, Sirach, and 2 Maccabees), highlights that truth as well. Drawing all this revelation together, St. Paul writes to the Romans, “For in this hope we were saved” (Rom. 8:24), that is, the hope of salvation and eternal peace with God.
This is why the author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes that God’s covenant oath provides “strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.” This hope, he continues, is “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain” (Heb. 6:18-19). Just as an anchor prevents a ship, or even a small barque, from drifting into destruction during a storm, so the gifts of endurance, encouragement, and hope keep us tethered to Divine Truth and Love during the storms of our lives.
How to Access Scripture’s Gifts
All this is psychologically and theologically rich. But what about practically? I want those gifts, but how can I have them in my life?
There are at least a few ways that a person can find and experience the endurance, encouragement, and hope gifted by God through Sacred Scripture. One great option is to undertake the Bible in a Year process (Ascension Press provides one and so does the Augustine Institute on the Amen app). No matter the particular resource, this undertaking allows a seeker to learn and understand the epic of covenant history contained in the Bible. Once a person has that framework, he or she can bring it to future Bible study and prayer. Praying the daily Mass readings can become extraordinarily fruitful at that point. The same will be true for praying the Divine Office (also known as the Liturgy of the Hours), which puts a person in contact with the message of hope in the Psalms and great biblical canticles.
In the end, however, none of these will be very fruitful without anything less than a frequent, even daily commitment to grow in endurance and encouragement through the Scriptures. Only a determined dedication will allow that person to find the hope God has in store.
If we haven’t already, let’s all make (or renew) our commitment to encounter God’s great gifts found in Sacred Scripture!
*See the Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum) from the Second Vatican Council, for example, for a more detailed exposition of this truth.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash