NOTES for Ti2 3:14-4:5

Today we often complain that the church, as people say, has deteriorated: before there was faith and an understanding of the foundations of spiritual life, but now, they say, nothing of the kind can be found. Paul's letters, however, refute this very widespread church myth. The situation in the Church was never ideal, and in different churches it was less than ideal in different ways.

But there was also something common, and this common element had a single spiritual root. The apostle defines it clearly and briefly: the search for "teachers," for those who "please the ear," who tell people what they want to hear. And often, and in early Christian times most often, the issue was the understanding of the Bible, of the sacred books. It is no accident that Paul says that Holy Scripture is God-breathed in its entirety, and therefore it is also, in its entirety, "useful for teaching."

But one can learn something from Scripture only when one receives it as it is, and in all the fullness available at the moment. A rabbi-teacher could be a great help here: he not only explained the meaning of one text or another, as modern commentators do, but also helped a person work with the text. Or rather, he helped a person approach the text in such a way that the text could work with him, with its reader.

For behind every God-breathed text stands the One who is its true Author, and the meaning of reading the Bible precisely as sacred Scripture is to allow the Author, through this particular text in each case, to work with oneself. Such reading presupposed a certain skill, and least of all in this skill was what we often love so much today and what could be called the principle of "me and the Bible" or even "me in the Bible": my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions, my experiences concerning one passage or another.

Meanwhile, an adequate perception of the sacred text is possible only when the principle of "the Bible in me" is at work: here there is no room for my reflection, whether intellectual or emotional, but only an inner silence in which the text of Scripture sounds, having become God's word addressed to me. The practice of such reading was known both to the Synagogue and to the Church, although in the Church it eventually moved almost entirely into the monasteries.

This kind of reading was a priceless spiritual exercise which, along with inner prayer and conscious life, helped a person grow within himself that spiritual core which in those days was called the inner Torah. But this was rather intense and not always pleasant spiritual work, and far from everyone wanted to engage in it. Whoever did not want to do so looked for a "teacher" ready to "reflect" and "experience" together with him, turning with his student before the inner mirrors of his own reflection.

There could, of course, be no talk here of any spiritual work, but this sort of pastime was pleasant for those who liked it, and it could easily be passed off, to oneself and to others, as "studying Scripture" and as "spiritual life." This is the profanation of true knowledge of sacred Scripture against which Paul warns his student, for whom it was especially relevant: Timothy, judging by everything we know about him from Paul's letters, was precisely a rabbi-teacher, and the temptation to become a "teacher who pleases the ear" was quite real for him.