Jesus Unrolls the Scroll

Pastor’s Column

3rd Sunday Ordinary Time

January 26, 2025

When Jesus goes home to Nazareth in today’s gospel, all eyes are upon him. He unrolls the scroll in the local synagogue where he grew up to read from Isaiah and then sits down to expound on what he has read. But this dramatic beginning to Jesus’ ministry reminds us of another even more momentous moment when Jesus will unroll another scroll – and the account of this, which will occur at the end of time and at the end of our lives, is found in the Book of Revelation.

          All of heaven grows silent in Revelation 5 as a scroll with seven seals is presented to Christ, for only he is worthy to open this great and sealed document.  Both of these scrolls, unrolled by Christ at two different points in salvation history, are really one and the same: Scripture. We are now living in the time between these two events, and it is only in Christ that we can really understand what human history, and indeed our own personal lives were really all about. And how do we meet and come to know Christ? Primarily through the Word of God. In prayer, we speak to God, and in Scripture, God speaks to us.

          Books at the time of Christ were typically scrolls, usually between what would look like to us to be two rolling pins (I finally threw my mother’s rolling pin out, now I wish I had kept it as an example!). Even today, most Jewish synagogues still have at least a Torah scroll that would have looked like the one Jesus used. At the end of time, later in Revelation 20, Christ will open the Book of Life: “And the book of life was opened, and other books were opened which recorded what the dead had done in their lives, by which they were judged.”

          What does the scroll that is your life consist of? What will that book say? For it will be read out loud to us at the moment of our death. Since we are still in life on earth, we are still writing the book. To use a different analogy, each day is a page in this book, unique to you. Our lives are like the Bible itself, each of us a gospel, where we will discover where Christ was active in our lives, what our sufferings were meant for, why we were tested. Our book will be filled with stories of sin, conversion, redemption, discernment, trials and offerings of prayer and assistance to others (or the lack thereof) made to God, our prayers and striving. We also have in the Catholic Church the great Sacrament of Reconciliation, by which we can edit and erase the record of our sins sacramentally. This gospel then while it records that which happened two thousand years ago, also lies in the future of each one of us. The time to prepare is now.

Father Gary