Father Armindo Vaz, Cathedratic Professor at the Catholic University of

Portugal

“What we find in the Bible is a deep dialogue between

theology and anthropology”
Catholic Church dedicates the current liturgical year to the Gospel of Saint
Luke and the Diocese of Macau invited a very well known biblical specialist,
carmelite priest Armindo Vaz, to explain what distinguishes Luke’s Gospel
from the other three. An invited teacher at the University of Saint Joseph,
Father Vaz, says that the Evangelist – the only biblical author that was not an
Hebrew – offers a very particular perspective on the life of Christ and the
salvation history proposed by Jesus. The legacy of the Gospel of Saint Luke
will be discussed at the Cathedral of the Nativity of Our Lady at the end of the
month. Armindo Vaz explains why Luke’s Gospel is still relevant today.
Marco Carvalho

We see theology and theological studies being sought after by a

growing number of laymen and non-ordained Catholics. What does this
trend says about the future of the Church? Does it belong to lay people?
Yes, undoubtedly. We are witnessing this trend ever since the Second
Vatican Council was organized. Laymen are showing a renewed interest on
theology an on the Bible and this is a phenomenon that happened on the
Council’s recommendation. The Council has invited the Catholic to read the
Holly Scriptures regularly. Laymen understood that reading the Bible is an
important task. They felt and still feel that life cannot be reduced to materiality,
to the act of managing and taking care of our earthly endeavours. They have
realized that there’s more to life. That life needs to have a meaning. Not any
meaning, but a transcendental one. The Holly Scriptures and theology will
help them to attain that meaning. We are fully convicted that the future of the
Church belongs to laymen. The last few Popes made that purpose very clear:
the future of the Church is in lay hands. Not only in their hands, evidently, but
they need to exert their own ministry. Even tough they are not ordained
ministers, their role is of utmost importance for the life of the Church. They
need, nevertheless, to apprehend the message of Christ and the Gospel to
fulfil their role as accurately as possible. Laymen need to understand that their
contribution to the transmission of the faith, both at home and society-wise, is
essential for the Church to progress. Without them, it can’t reach those that
need faith the most in such a capillary way.

The Bible is said to be the most published book ever. Is it also the most
read? The Catholics … Do they know the Bible as they should?

The Bible still is, as you were saying, the most purchased, the most read and
the most translated and people are aware there are some very good reasons
for that to happen. Its quite obvious that we own a lot to the classics, be they
Greek or be they Latin, but we also know that the Bible dialogues very well
with classical literature, namely the Greek and Latin literatures. This is
something that still happens today. The classic masterpieces try to explain
Human life and the Bible wants to do just the same thing. The Bible is
important for all mankind – and not only for believers – to the extent that its
authors tried to understand Human history in the light of the Divine, in the light
of transcendence. They tried to understand the events on human history
under God’s light, by noticing how he intervenes. He doesn’t act in an
obvious, interventionist way, but by faith. This same faith made the Biblical
authors feel that God is part of this world and this world wouldn’t be anything
without him. What we find in the Bible is, actually, a deep dialogue between
theology and anthropology: a dialogue between a conception of God that
begins with the human being and a conception of the human being that
begins with God. The Bible gave us the highest possible idea on the human
being and this starts in page one of the Bible, in which men is said to have
been created in the image of God. This is the higher and most noble way of
understanding Human existence, to proclaim that God made the Human
being. We have to understand that we are witnessing faith at work whenever
we say He made men on his own image. The Bible sets a dialogue between
these two protagonists: God on one side and the Human being in the other.
The Biblical authors understood the importance of God in men’s very own
existence and they made sure they realized that right from the beginning of
the Bible. I would say that the Bible is a conception of Human history under
the light of God. That’s the reason why it begins by describing the creation of
the World and the creation of Humanity and ends with the description of its
end. From the outset of the first chapter of The Book of Genesis up to the
Book of Apocalypse, we can devise a positive tension on human history. A
history which is seen by the biblical authors as a permeated history,
impregnated with the continual presence of God. There is, in the Bible, a great
buoyancy, in which God is seen as an actor. He is seen as a real actor,
although spiritual and invisible, one that gives purpose to the existence to the
Human being. The entire human history is told between these two great
books, the Genesis and the Apocalypse; a human history that is seen
impregnated all over with the action of God himself.

The Biblical exegesis is sufficiently cultured by the Catholic Church?

Many Catholics seem to have a somehow superficial knowledge of the
Word of God and there are many that look to the Holy Scriptures as if
they were some sort of hermetic knowledge. Is the Church promoting a
deeper knowledge of the Bible? Or the Vatican should do even more?

It certainly is. Some of the last Popes – Pius XII and Paul VI, but mainly John
Paul II and Benedict XVI – gave particular relevance to the techniques, the
rules, the principles and the methodologies accordingly, to which the Holly
Scriptures should be read and understood. It were the teachings of the
Church that taught us how to properly read the Gospels, so we can avoid
being entrapped in a literal reading of the Holy Scriptures. The Bible should
not be read as if everything that is narrated had actually happened as it is
described there. We can’t read the Bible this way. We will fall in a quagmire of
fundamentalism if we do so. I recognize this still happens a lot and it doesn’t
happen only among protestant believers, but also among Catholics. We still
find many that believe that every thing that is within the Bible is true. They are
not wrong, but they often see the message of the Bible in a literal way. The
Biblical exegesis methods proposed by the Church require from us a certain
accuracy and we should be able to understand that the Bible is not history
because it is not historically accurate. The Bible is literature …

Literature with an important message, nevertheless …

Exactly. It is sacred literature. The Bible, as I was saying tells a sacred story,
a story that is impregnated by the very own spirit of God. The Biblical
exegesis should be able to bring to the surface the spiritual and human
message of each and every passage, but the most important is not to devise if
what is described in the Three Wise Men episode is historically accurate or
not. A rigorous analysis will allow us to conclude that it didn’t happen exactly
as it is told and, therefore, there’s no historical accuracy to it, as there’s no
historical accuracy regarding the crossing of the Red Sea. We are told that
the waters of the sea parted away to allow the Israelites to return to the
Promised Land, but we are being fundamentalists if we believe that really
happened. We are being too literal. What we should be looking to, when we
read the Gospels making use of the methods that were given to us by the
Church, is the spiritual message hidden in each text. We should try to
understand what those texts meant when the author wrote them, because the
author was trying to convey his own faith, What we should do is try to recover
the faith that the author wanted to pass on the reader. On one hand, we need
to understand the original meaning of the text, but also – and mainly – the
author’s intention. On the other hand, we also need to devise the extent to
which the Bible and the Biblical text will helps us to live our lives nowadays.
The challenges we face are obviously different from the challenges people
had to face two thousand years or one thousand years ago.

You were talking about fundamentalism. The Catholic Church changed a

lot since the Second Vatican Council and the challenges that it faces are
also very different … In Europe we are witnessing some very unusual
trends: the number of believers that take part in Masses which are
celebrated in Latin is increasing. Is this sort of orthodoxy a normal
response to the challenges the Church faces? Or there’s a certain
nostalgia that the Vatican should be aware of?

Well, we have to understand that the Catholic Church, despite the existence
of dogmas and the guidance that it conveys, doesn’t try to force the Catholics
to live faith exactly the same way. We need to recognize and to understand
there are different ways of living our Christian faith. Those different ways – for
instance, to go to a Mass celebrated in Latin – are seen by those believers as
a legitimate and appropriate way for them to express themselves as children
of God. Should we consider them fundamentalist? I don’t think we can call this
fundamentalism. I would call them different ways of praying. To be a
fundamentalist would be, for instance, to take the Holy Scriptures at word and
to interpret the Gospels, for example, as if they were a biography of Jesus or
history itself. They aren’t. The accounts about the birth of Jesus don’t
necessarily mean that Jesus was born that way or that is childhood was spent
exactly as it is told in the Bible. That is fundamentalism. It is this kind of
fundamentalism that we should avoid.

You are in Macau to teach at the University of Saint Joseph, but you will
also deliver a presentation on the Gospel of Saint Luke. Saint Luke is
somehow apart from the remaining evangelists. Why is the Gospel of
Saint Luke that different?

I was asked to deliver a presentation on the evangelist that is being

celebrated by the Church on the current liturgical year. This year, the Church
is celebrating Saint Luke and I will produce a very generic presentation on
Luke’s Gospel, where I will try to show the particular characteristics and
specificities that we will find on it when compared with the remaining Gospels.
Luke is, actually, a very particular author. He is the only Biblical writer with
non-Jew roots. He was, as it seems, an Hellenized Christian, a Greek that
converted to Christianity. That’s the firs particular aspect, but there’s more
and some of them are really surprising. We will find in his Gospel narratives,
verses and details that we won’t find in the other Gospels. What I will try to
convey is that Luke has a very particular vision not only of Christ’s life, but
also of salvation history. It is a salvation history that Luke will find already
structured in the old Hebrew Scriptures, the set of books that the Catholics
call the Old Testament. Lukes tries to interpret the life of Jesus in the light of
those Sacred Scriptures, setting a dialogue between the Christian faith he
was already living, some 40 or 50 years after Jesus’ resurrection, and the
salvation history he discovered on those old Hebrew Scriptures that were
adopted by the Church. The primal Church created its Old Testament from a
set of 46 books that Luke knew very well. He had a very particular sensibility
about the universal character of the idea of salvation as Christ saw it and he
builds his Gospel around a very well defined theological and biblical category,
which is the Exodus and the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery and their
return to the Promised Land. In the central part of his Gospel, from chapter 9
to chapter 19, Luke tell us about the long journey that Jesus makes and that
takes him all over the land of Israel. He starts in the North, in Galilee, goes
through the centre of Israel and Samaria and he visits Jericho before finishing
his tour in Jerusalem, already in Judea. Luke shows us that Jesus made this
journey as if it was an exodus. He actually uses the word in the beginning of
his narrative, in chapter 9, where he tells the episode of the transfiguration of
Christ. Jesus travels all through the land of Israel and Luke uses this journey
to insert many of the teachings that he receives from the apostolic tradition,
from Christ’s public ministry, the three years Jesus spent preaching, healing
people, taking care and nurturing them. Those three years, in which Jesus
told his disciples to spread the message of the Gospel, are told by Luke in a
very particular way, so the reader is lead to understand Christ’s life as a form
of liberation: Exodus and Easter. The same way the Hebrews had to leave
Egypt and were forced to travel through the desert and to submit to their own
exodus in order to reach the Promised Land, so did Jesus, Luke suggests.
The journey Jesus makes all through the Land of Israel is also a personal
journey through the desert of sufferance, through passion and death, until he
is liberated by resurrection first and then by his ascension to heaven. In a
certain sense, Luke suggests the reader should be able to follow on Jesus’
footsteps. Jesus made his exodus and so should the reader, because
salvation isn’t something that one can delegate. Everybody needs to travel his
own path. This is the message that Luke has for his readers, whether they live
today or they have lived two thousand years ago. We all have to complete our
own exodus, our own journey of liberation.

As you were mentioning, Luke’s Gospel was written many years after
Christ’s resurrection …

Yes, it was written around year 70 or 80 ...

Having been written, as you were mentioning, by a non-Jew, how does

the Gospel of Luke reflects something that was already happening by
then and which is the projection of the message of Christ behind the
borders of the Holly Land?
Luke, more than Matthew and Mark, underlines the universality of the
message and of the salvation of Christ. He promotes this aspect in several
different ways, by stressing, for instance, that Jesus dedicated himself very
particularly to the pagans and to the Samaritans – which were seen as
pagans by the Jews – that he found on his way. He has shown mercy and
compassion for those that came from abroad, from Phoenicia and the lands
surrounding Israel. Luke underscores the universality of the message of Christ
already in his programmatic speech. It’s precisely there that we have to focus
in order to recover this universality in all its splendour. His programmatic
speech, which corresponds roughly to the Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel, is
the speech that Jesus makes at Nazareth synagogue. Preaching to their
countrymen, to the people of the village of Nazareth, Jesus suggests that he
came for all and not only for them, not only to save the Jews. He came for the
salvation of all, he suggested. The Nazarenes didn’t’ like what they were told
and they even advocated to throw him down a hill. Seeing their reaction,
Jesus told them: “You are well aware that there were many poor widows in
Israel, but not a single one of them was visited by the prophet Elijah. He was
sent, as you know, to a foreigner, a widow in Sarepta, in Phoenicia”, he
recalled.
“There were also” – Jesus continued – “many lepers in Israel when Elisha
roamed the Earth, but none of them was visited by Elisha. He was sent to a
Syrian general, Naaman, and he cured him. But it was to a foreigner that
Elisha was sent”.
What Jesus was saying was precisely that salvation came for all and this
same message was already an old one: “In the Old Testament we have
already many examples that God wants us all. He has sent his prophets to
foreigners and salvation is not limited to the Jews. You should realize that”, he
said. They didn’t accept his message and they suggested, once again, to
throw him down the hill. We can devise in the words of Luke the universality of
the message of Christ. We will find, nevertheless, this very same universality
right at the beginning of the Gospel of Mathew, when he described the
journey made by the Three Wise Men only to adore Jesus. When they arrive
to Jerusalem the Jews knew nothing about the birth of the Saviour. Those
Wise Men, who were pagan, asked around: “Where is the king of the Jews?
Where was he born? We came to adore him”, Mathew – who was a Jew –
writes. Nobody knew about anything. Mathew suggests that, while the
Hebrews didn’t even realized about the birth of the Messiah, the pagans came
to adore him, to venerate him as if he was their own king. The Gospel says
they prostrated themselves in adoration. They accepted him as their king,
having realized that the message of Jesus is a message that fits all Humanity.