The Catholic Letter

A Commentary on Catholic Catechism Articles

Paragraphs 128 & 129

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On The Way We See Modern Times

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.
Christians therefore read the Old Testament in the 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. Besides, the 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.

Remember the movie Sixth Sense?  Some of you might have been smart enough to figure out the ending half way through the movie (my mom was), but I was clueless until the end.  

Here's the thing about it--if you watch it a second time, you see it in a whole new light.  You start to notice other things that you had missed before.  Like the way they have something red in the movie any time there's interaction between the ‘ghosts' and the living.

The Old Testament is kind of like that for us.  We read it in a special way, because we know the end of the story.  We can see how everything was leading up to something big.  We can see that the BIG THING wasn't what anyone expected.  And in retrospect, we can see that it was much BIGGER than what people were waiting for.

We can also see that the Old Testament, instead of declining in value after the resurrection, was actually elevated.  Now we have a new set of glasses which will help us see the core message better.  It's like the old was brought to life suddenly.

Sometimes I think that it would be really nice to be able to look at modern times in retrospect.  Usually,I can look back at hardship in my life, and find meaning to it.  But during those hardships, it very rarely makes any sense to me.  When I lost my job six or seven years ago, I had begun to think that God had some kind of agenda against me.  But now, I can see that I was being led somewhere.  It makes more sense now.  I can see purpose and life to something that seemed fruitless and dead.

If you're going through hardships now, believe me, I can sympathize.  

But I would point out that even if we don't know the immediate future, we do know the long term answer to all the evil going on now.  We know that God wins in the end.  And so we can begin to make some sense of all this chaos.