In 2019, Pope Francis declared that the 3^rd Sunday of Ordinary Time each year should be designated as the Sunday of the Word of God.  In his decree announcing this annual celebration, the Holy Father made reference to the importance that the Word of God has in the context of the celebration of the Eucharist, citing the Second Vatican Council:

the Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures as she has venerated the Lord’s body, in that she never ceases, above all in the sacred liturgy, to partake of the bread of life and to offer it to the faithful from the one table of the word of God and the body of Christ.

(Dei Verbum, 21)

Paying attention to how Christ is present to us in the Scriptures proclaimed at Mass is one of the key ways of getting more out of our experience of this greatest of prayers.  It can be a common lament of people that when they pray, they do not hear God speaking to them.  With reverence for the pain that we can feel when it seems as though He is silent, I ask the person when they last heard or read from the Scriptures.  I tell them that when they did so, God was indeed speaking to them, loud and clear!  Again, with all reverence for the struggle of trying to hear God speak to us, it is helpful to acknowledge this truth, that when we encounter the Word of God, we encounter God Himself.  We may not understand what He is saying, or feel as though He is speaking to us, but He is!  What is lacking is never the Word of God.  Being aware that God is really speaking to us here and now in the readings at Mass will only serve to deepen the quality of our prayer at Mass and increase our hunger for Him in the Eucharist.

In my bulletin article from the Sunday of the Word of God in 2021, I shared a powerful quote from Pope Benedict XVI to drive this connection home more explicitly.  I think it is worth repeating here as we begin to consider this section of the Mass:

The sacramentality of the word can thus be understood by analogy with the real presence of Christ under the appearances of the consecrated bread and wine. By approaching the altar and partaking in the Eucharistic banquet we truly share in the body and blood of Christ. The proclamation of God’s word at the celebration entails an acknowledgment that Christ himself is present, that he speaks to us, and that he wishes to be heard. Saint Jerome speaks of the way we ought to approach both the Eucharist and the word of God: “We are reading the sacred Scriptures. For me, the Gospel is the Body of Christ; for me, the holy Scriptures are his teaching. And when he says: whoever does not eat my flesh and drink my blood (Jn 6:53), even though these words can also be understood of the [Eucharistic] Mystery, Christ’s body and blood are really the word of Scripture, God’s teaching. When we approach the [Eucharistic] Mystery, if a crumb falls to the ground we are troubled. Yet when we are listening to the word of God, and God’s Word and Christ’s flesh and blood are being poured into our ears yet we pay no heed, what great peril should we not feel?” Christ, truly present under the species of bread and wine, is analogously present in the word proclaimed in the liturgy. A deeper understanding of the sacramentality of God’s word can thus lead us to a more unified understanding of the mystery of revelation, which takes place through “deeds and words intimately connected”; an appreciation of this can only benefit the spiritual life of the faithful and the Church’s pastoral activity. 

(Verbum Domini, 56)

Feast Day: September 21^st | Patronage: accountants, tax collectors, bankers, and civil servants | Iconography: Bearded, Holding or Writing Book, Inspired by an Angel, sometimes his Call is Depicted with Jesus pointing for him to join the apostles.

One of the oldest fragments we have of St. Matthew’s Gospel is academically called “Papyrus 104”, and is a tattered page containing Matthew 21:34-37 on its front, and Matthew 21:43 and 45 on the back. We only have part of the whole page, hence the missing in-between verses, though verse 44 is missing on a handful of other ancient papyri, so it could be that some copies of Matthew’s Gospel lost it along the way. Now, if you knew ancient Greek, you could determine that this page dates back to between 100 and 200 AD (primarily because of the shape and style of the letters and the types of punctuation that are present). But here’s the amazing thing, among ancient documents, the ones we have for the New Testament are massively closer to the events they describe than almost any other ancient texts. For instance, this page from Matthew’s Gospel comes from less than a century after Matthew wrote his Gospel. Compare this to The Gallic Wars, a famous writing of Julius Caesar which historians wildly accept as a legitimate record of that particular campaign, of which our earliest fragment/copy comes from 750 years after it was written! We have thousands of fragments from all throughout the New Testament that attest that the Gospels and Letters and Acts that we read and believe is the same one written by Paul and Matthew, Mark and John, and many of them date back to within a century or two of when those books of the New Testament were first written. Almost every other ancient text has at most a dozen such fragments, some like The Gallic Wars not until several centuries after the fact. (Another example: Homer’s Odyssey was written 7 or 8 centuries before Christ, and the oldest fragment we have of it is 13 verses, chiseled into a clay tablet from about 300 years after Christ.)

Ok, that’s cool enough, but there’s another amazing part of this story. That fragment you can see of St. Matthew’s Gospel is part of what is called a “codex”, a fancy word for a stack of vellum, papyrus, or metal pages held together in some fashion. In other words, it’s a page out of a book, that you can flip around in, with text printed on both sides of the page. There are a few examples of codex-like objects from before the time of Christ, but the vast majority appear in the first century AD (most of these being the Christian New Testament!), and codices outstrip scrolls in popularity around AD 300. Christians didn’t just want libraries or synagogues to contain the Word of God; they wanted to carry it with them, to see the intricacies of God’s word, to see the connections between Old and New Testament, to tease out Who God reveals Himself to be in its pages. (Plus, it’s a bit easier to hide a small book of Matthew’s Gospel in your pocket than it would be to lug around a few scrolls, especially if the government is out to get you and is looking for such things…) Lastly, codices, besides being more accessible and portable, can also contain a lot more text, even up to the entirety of the New Testament.

And one of the first pages, from one of the first books, is from St. Matthew’s Gospel. How cool is that?!

Here’s the front side of this amazing page. (Bold indicates the letters we have; the others have to be filled in from the other copies that we have of this passage.):

“…he sent his servants to
the vine-growers to collect the harvest
that was his. And the vine-growers took
his servants; indeed,
they beat one and they killed another,
and another they stoned. Again, he sent
other servants, more than
the first: and they did …
unto them likewise. But last of all he sent…”

– Fr. Dominic has always liked reading books but never realized that proclaiming the Gospel was the impetus that made books popular in the first place!

– Fr. Dominic 

As I was composing last week’s bulletin on the Opening Collect, it was my hope that I could explain what I wanted to explain in one article, but there is an additional element about the Collect that I think is worth further reflection.

Recall the explanation of the Collect from the GIRM:

Next the Priest calls upon the people to pray and everybody, together with the Priest, observes a brief silence so that they may become aware of being in God’s presence and may call to mind their intentions. Then the Priest pronounces the prayer usually called the “Collect” and through which the character of the celebration finds expression. (GIRM, §54)

I draw our attention to the final phrase, that the Collect expresses the character of the celebration that will follow.  We see this in a few different ways.  When the Church celebrates a feast day of one of the saints, the Collect has the nature of highlighting something about the saint of the day and asking for their intercession so as better to imitate their fidelity to the Lord.  For example, the saint the Church usually celebrates on September 3 is Pope St. Gregory the Great.  Here is the Collect for that Mass:

O God, who care for your people with gentleness
and rule them in love, through the intercession of Pope Saint Gregory,
endow, we pray, with a spirit of wisdom
those to whom you have given authority to govern,
that the flourishing of a holy flock
may become the eternal joy of the shepherds…

During the special seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter, the Collect will take on the character of that season or that day.  For example, here is the Collect for Easter Sunday:

O God, who on this day,
through your Only Begotten Son,
have conquered death
and unlocked for us the path to eternity,
grant, we pray, that we who keep
the solemnity of the Lord’s Resurrection
may, through the renewal brought by your Spirit,
rise up in the light of life…

During Ordinary Time, the Collects are more general and in keeping with the focus of Ordinary Time as “a time for growth and maturation, a time in which the mystery of Christ is called to penetrate ever more deeply into history until all things are finally caught up in Christ.” (https://www.usccb.org/prayer-worship/liturgical-year/ordinary-time) 

In addition to praying with the readings of the Mass as a good way to prepare for Mass, praying with the Collect can also be very fruitful, so do not overlook these gems that the Church offers to us as sources of rich reflection and meditation.