Monday, September 30, 2024
Memorial of Saint Jerome, Priest and Doctor of the Church
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Jerome
the words come in with a whistle
like the sound of an incoming missile
it’s so good to hear it
“Let us live in the Spirit,”
From Romans, St. Paul’s Epistle.
No, St. Jerome didn’t write that (it was penned by Garrison Keillor on the edge of his New York City Episcopal church bulletin). But without Jerome’s heroic efforts at translating the Bible into Latin, we might never have known Paul’s letter to the Romans existed. Jerome’s efforts made up one of the largest steppingstones on the path from first century parchments to Zondervan’s giant presses, which print out thousands of Bibles each day.
Jerome loved women. Most of his letters were written to female patrons. He encouraged their desire to leave lives of pleasure and seek the solace of a convent and the life of poverty, chastity and obedience. For his own part, he spent four years in the Egyptian desert recovering from his own dissolute youth, and thereafter earned the ridicule of official Rome for his virtuous life.
Did he heal the wounded paw of a lion in the desert? Perhaps. He was a man of extremes, and often sought extreme adventure, whether or not that included lions, and ever since artists have painted a lion in his study or in the wilderness alongside him.
I imagine Jerome especially loved the book of Job, oldest book in the Bible.
The Lord said to Satan, “Whence do you come?” Then Satan answered the Lord and said, “From roaming the earth and walking up and down in it.”
Just let me at him, Jerome might have said. I’ll teach that devil a thing or two. In fact, Jerome didn’t think the devil deserved the power in men’s lives that others acknowledged. He believed that all Christians, fallen away or not, will eventually be reunited with God. Job lived through the loss of everything he held dear, and though tempted, he did not turn away from his Maker.
Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I go back again. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away blessed be the name of the Lord! In all this Job did not sin, nor did he say anything disrespectful of God.
Our Sunday School class discussed doubt yesterday. I wondered if hell exists. I doubted those passages in the bible which speak of eternal fire.
The wonderful thing about doubt is that it gives rise to faith, far stronger than certainty, with its human limitations. Faith comes through the finger of God. Paul Tillich wrote, “Doubt is not the opposite of faith. No, it is an element of faith.”
Though you test my heart, searching it in the night, though you try me with fire, you shall find no malice in me. Show your wondrous mercies, incline your ear to me and hear my word.
(Job 1, Psalm 17, Mark 10, Luke 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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