To enter into God's story, we need to understand how we have come to participate in it. It is true that the divine history recorded in the Old
Testament focused primarily on the nation of Israel, but the history and truth that the Israelites died for and taught to their children would one day become the history of a people they knew not. Even so, throughout the history of the Bible, those who belonged to the covenantal family recognized that the story they were living extended beyond themselves to future generations. Their history, with all its triumphs and disgraces, would one day become our history as twenty-first-century Roman Catholics. With the dawn of the New Covenant, Jesus integrated the nations into His universal kingdom, opening wide the gate to Yahweh's covenantal family. Those who enter through that gate—Jesus Himself (cf. Jn. 10:1-10)—take on a new identity, including a new personal history. Suddenly, all that went before us in that small land of Canaan becomes intimate and important for us today.
Saint Paul describes how Jesus opened the covenantal family to those outside of Israel:
Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances (Eph. 2:11-15).
For the sake of continuity between the Old and New Testaments, the point must be made that neither Jesus nor Paul had plans of starting a new religion; rather, all that they taught and did was an extension of what preceded them. As Catholics, we should never read the Old Testament with an attitude that ties the Old Testament strictly to the Jews, and the New Testament to Christians:
The Church, as early as apostolic times, and then constantly in her Tradition, has illuminated the unity of the divine plan in the two Testaments through typology, which discerns in God's works of the Old Covenant prefigurations of what he accomplished in the fullness of time in the person of his incarnate Son (Catechism, no. 128).
Christians therefore read the Old Testament in light of Christ crucified and risen. Such typological reading discloses the inexhaustible content of the Old Testament, but it must not make us forget that the Old Testament retains its own intrinsic value as revelation reaffirmed by Our Lord Himself:
[T]he New Testament has to be read in the light of the Old. Early Christian catechesis made constant use of the Old Testament. As an old saying put it, the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New (Catechism, no. 129; cf. DV 14-16).
As Catholics, we should embrace both the Old and New Testaments, not simply because they are a dynamic unity, but because they have been handed down to us as a precious family heirloom through the expansion of God's covenantal family. Most people are not deeply interested in the history of someone else's ethnic or
religious group. What captures our imaginations and stirs our interest is reading about our own history.
It is of the utmost importance for the modern Christian to understand what Saint Paul teaches about this integration between Jews and Gentiles—the Old and New Testaments. In Eph. 3:6 he says, “[T]he Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” In other words, those who have come into the Catholic family have a new history. Israel's history is now also Catholic history and, as Saint Paul states, Abraham “is the father of us all” (Rom. 4:16). Pope Pius XI once made the striking observation that “spiritually, we are all Semites.”19 Paul
elaborates further on this theme when he depicts Gentiles as branches from “a wild olive tree . . . grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree” (Rom. 11:24). As Gentiles, we are allowed to “share the richness of the olive tree” (Rom. 11:17). The “root” of which Paul speaks is the line of heroes, such as Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon, who have participated in the previous covenants.
Mary has a unique role as one who stands between the Testaments. As Cardinal Ratzinger points out, Mary
binds together, in a living and indissoluble way, the old and the new People of God, Israel and Christianity, synagogue and church. She is, as it were, the connecting link without which the Faith (as is happening today) runs the risk of losing its balance by either forsaking the New Testament for the Old or dispensing with the Old. In her, instead, we can live the unity of sacred Scripture in its entirety.20
The Bible is so very exciting to read because we, like Abraham and David, are stepping into the divine drama, we are receiving the baton, we are walking in the New Covenant. Matthew wrote, “Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Mt. 13:17). How privileged we are to participate in God's story from the vantage point of the New Covenant!
No longer do we search aimlessly for meaning, trying to find ourselves. The adoption into the Catholic Church, the New Covenant, gives our lives meaning, continuity, and challenge. However, it is one thing to have received the Bible as a family heirloom; it is another to live by it. To do this we must understand it—which brings us to the subject of how to read the Bible.