In obedience to Pope Francis’s institution of Word of God Sunday, the community of the Lazarist Fathers of Beirut decided to organize periodic Biblical sessions in order to help people to read the Holy Scriptures well and, for this year, especially the Old Testament.The sessions, open to all, will span ten consecutive Sundays beginning on January 26, 2020. The conferences take into account the following presupposition: approaching biblical texts with eyes fixed on Jesus Christ the Eternal Word of the Father, the divine Lamb worthy of opening the Seals of the Ancient Scriptures. This without forgetting the different scientific methods and approaches that help us to detect the deep meaning of the Old Testament, without however falling into the fanaticism of a blind faith or an irresponsible openness to science which will make us lose the uniqueness of the leap into the Christian faith.

The first two meetings will lay the foundations for reading the Holy Scriptures from an anthropological and theological point of view.

Indeed speech is the privileged place of the possibility of relationship between mankind and the world. It is the means by which we emerge from ourselves to exist for the other and to overcome his loneliness. It is also the intermediary through which humanity expresses the impact of the world on it. Speech is the narration which allows the present to meet the past while bringing out the future. Finally, speech is not a simple arbitrary code that allows people to communicate, but the fruit of human experience in which human wisdom has been led over the centuries. This wisdom is expressed through the symbol that allows mankind to transcend the linearity of speech and the immediacy of material.

This linguistic introduction allows us to understand the word as the imprint that God has left on our humanity. Our God indeed is a speech or a dialogue among Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The ability to call ourselves humans with our desire to communicate have prompted us to the Word; this is nothing other than the image of God in us. God re-enters human history through the fault of human desire for relationship. In the Son, God took human language upon himself to make him “Capax Dei” [capable of God].

When God himself he wanted to speak and reveal himself to mankind, he wished to “obey” the structure of humanity. He did not send predefined words to speak of himself, but he wanted his Christ Image to be the fruit of a human word which describes the impact of his Revelation and his Love. God reveals himself in human forms to bring the discourse of man about God to its fullness in the Incarnation of the Son where God wanted to bring all fullness. God wanted to be spoken by and manifested to man through human words about Him. This journey finds its fullness in the Incarnate Word where God expressed himself by using human language and human wisdom.

Finally, the Bible is a divine Word spoken with human words. It is the story of the perfecting of the human-divine discourse about God made possible by Divine Revelation in the forms of human expression. The Bible is the story of the manifestation of God as discourse and dialogue which wishes to encompass and integrate into it the communions of men so that human life becomes an eternal communion in God and with God.

On this anthropological and theological basis we will discover the Bible as the witness par excellence of this History of Salvation.

Fr. Ralph Germanos, cm

The Lazarist Fathers – Achrafieh – Beirut – LEBANON