B.Y.O.B.

Learning to crack the code of Scripture

01/08/2021

1 John 5:5-13 Beloved: Who indeed is the victor over the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is the one who came through water and Blood, Jesus Christ, not by water alone, but by water and Blood. The Spirit is the one who testifies, and the Spirit is truth. So there are three who testify, the Spirit, the water, and the Blood, and the three are of one accord. If we accept human testimony, the testimony of God is surely greater. Now the testimony of God is this, that he has testified on behalf of his Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God has this testimony within himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar by not believing the testimony God has given about his Son. And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. whoever possesses the Son has life; whoever does not possess the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you so that you may know that you have eternal life, you who believe in the name of the Son of God.

Have you heard of the enigma machine? The word “enigma” means mystery or puzzle or riddle, and the “enigma machine” was a device that took normal communication and scrambled it into a secret code so no one else could understand it. It made language a mystery. Sometimes, when my whole family is together on a facetime call – parents, brother and sister, nieces and nephews – and we want to say something my nieces and nephews cannot catch, we speak in Malayalam. Our Indian language is our modern “enigma machine,” a secret code language that hides what we say from others.

By the way, if you want a movie example of the enigma machine in action, you should watch The Imitation Game. It is based on a true story about the British scientist Alan Turing, who cracked the code of the enigma machine used by the Germans in World War II. The Germans thought no one could decipher their enigma machine, but they were wrong. Nevertheless, the enigma machine was a very useful tool to communicate through code language, making language a mystery.

I would suggest to you that the Bible is a sort of sacred enigma machine. That is, the sacred authors did not always “say what they mean and mean what they say” in writing the 73 books of the Bible. Rather, they used a very specific code language, namely, the language of faith. Those without the deciphering technique called “faith” can read the Bible but they will miss the hidden and real message. And Jesus specifically sent the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and their successors, the pope and bishops, to crack the code of the Bible when we read it.

One of the masters of of the enigma machine was St. Paul, who wrote 13 New Testament letters. St. Peter recognizes this, and therefore, at the end of his second letter in 2 Peter 3:16, says: “In [Paul’s letters] there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures.” That is, Paul sort of wrote his letters in Malayalam (not literally) so he could hide his real meaning and message behind code language. But we can crack the code of the enigma machine called the Bible with the help of faith and the guidance of the Church.

In the first reading today St. John also speaks in veiled language. He writes cryptically: “So there are three who testify the Spirit, the water, and the Blood and they are of one accord.” John’s hidden meaning may not be immediately clear to just anyone who picks up the Bible and turns to 1 John 5 and starts reading. But because you and I are people of faith and have the help of the Church guided by the Holy Spirit, we can crack the code, and solve the riddle. We know “the Spirit, the water, and the Blood” refer to the sacraments of initiation. The water symbolizes being washed in baptism, the Holy Spirit is received in the sacrament of confirmation, and the Blood is poured out for us at Mass, in the Eucharist. To those without faith the Bible might as well be written in Malayalam!

My friends, there is a war going on, and I do not mean World War II, with the Allied and Axis powers. There is a spiritual war going, and there always has been since the days of Adam and Eve in Genesis. We have an Evil Enemy who is trying to defeat and destroy us and it is not the Republicans or the Democrats. It’s the devil. In this war God communicates to us through an enigma machine called the Bible, filled with the war strategy on how we will win. And the devil cannot crack the code because he does not have faith. It all sounds like Malayalam to him.

That’s why we, too, need to study the Scriptures because as St. Peter said, it may not make sense to us either. By the way, I am finishing up a Bible study on the Acts of the Apostles, which I hope to record and make available soon. In other words, my Scriptural Malayalam is getting better! I highly encourage you to buy a Bible and read it daily and study it assiduously. Otherwise, you will miss the vital communications needed to win this war. The most important part of every Bible study is BYOB. Can you crack that code?

Praised be Jesus Christ!