Seventeenth Sunday In Ordinary Time, Cycle A -- 17th Sunday, Year A

A foolish old farmer, so the story goes, concluded one day that the oats he had fed his mule for years were simply costing him too much. So, he hatched a plan: He mixed a little sawdust in with the feed, and then a little more the next day, and even more the next, each time reducing the amount of oats in the mix. The mule didn't seem to notice the gradual change, so the farmer thought things were fine and kept decreasing the proportion of oats. But weeks later, on the day he finally fed the poor beast nothing but sawdust, the mule finished the meal ... and fell over dead.

This reminds me of a high-powered non-practicing Catholic jewelry store executive who said, “I was always looking for something and knew my life was empty. I had tried self-hypnosis, Silva mind control, and TM [Transcendental Meditation]. I would try the latest fads. I had everything but had nothing."

He left the Catholic faith on September 12, 1986, because of misplaced hopes about a drug deal. The previous day he had met Jack Smith, a friend of three of his brothers, at a party. Jack had noticed the jewelry store executive’s excessive drinking, so Jack asked if the jewelry store executive would like to have the same high with no side effects. The executive agreed to meet him the next day in Jack Smith's hotel room. He had no idea the presumed drug dealer was an evangelical missionary. "I thought Jack had access to some new American drugs," he said. "I was shocked when I got to his room and saw him sitting with an open Bible on the table." Smith shared the gospel, and after 20 minutes the executive knelt to receive Jesus into his heart. He notes, looking back, that he was ripe for conversion. His wife, who also later accepted Christ, says they considered themselves Catholic but didn't take their faith seriously. "I hated confession, and I had no personal walk with God," she says.

Like the mule in the story, all they were eating was sawdust, fed to them by their worldly lifestyle full of self-seeking.

And now they had lost the treasure of the true faith, the true religion.

Paul Thigpen has noted that one is in danger of falling away from the Catholic faith if one has a loss of love for God, the gift of fear of the Lord, loss of joy, aversion to the Sacraments, prayer, Catholic fellowship and private Scripture reading.

Joy is a feeling of contentment that we get when we come into contact with something good, like the Catholic faith.

The ex-non-practicing Catholic jewelry executive later said, "I was mad at the priests because I was not told about a personal walk with God. Mass seemed an empty ritual to me." Fortunately, his brothers did practice the Catholic faith and started a local Catholic Answers branch to protect the faith of local Catholics from evangelical missionaries. [source: Beverley, James A. Source: Christianity Today, 48 no 2 Feb 2004, p 70-72.]

In the instructions on how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, which is designed to meditate on the Psalms and selected Bible readings and meditations for each day, it says that “the treasures of revelation and tradition to be found” there will contribute greatly to the spiritual life. “Bishops and priests should prize these treasures.”

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, "knowledge of revealed truth" is "deepened" by "theological research" and by "the intimate sense of spiritual realities which [believers] experience" (Catechism 94).

So, yes, it’s so important that ordinary Catholics read Scripture as a devotional inquiry which the Catholic Catechism calls “the intimate sense of spiritual realities which believers experience”—sounds like an invitation to know Jesus personally for Catholics when they read, meditate, and study the Bible, doesn’t it?

The Catholic Answers organization says, “we get questions all the time like, ‘What is the Catholic position on this Scripture passage?’” They respond by saying that “many people seem to have the idea that the Catholic Church has an official interpretation of every passage of Scripture. It isn’t true. The Church has no official commentary on Scripture. Only seven passages of Scripture have had their senses partially (not fully) defined by the official teaching church at the Council of Trent. And when there is consensus by the early Church Fathers on a Bible verse, the meaning of that verse can’t be contradicted by private interpretation.

A catechism is a nice summary of the basics of the faith in a few hundred well-crafted propositions. But Scripture contains tens of thousands of individual propositions, and to comment on the authentic meaning of each of them would swell the needed number of propositions into the hundreds of thousands or millions. Plus, Scripture has more than one level of meaning-- the literal and the spiritual, and the spiritual meaning may contain up to three different kinds of meanings. So that leaves 99% of the Bible undefined so a Catholic can personally read and reflect on the Bible and even study it with Catholic study bible, commentary book or on-line course.