Most. Rev. Benjamin Marc RAMAROSON, C.M., Bishop of Farafangana (MADAGASCAR) calls for “exegesis rooted in culture.”
Through our contact with the Word of God, what can we from Madagascar contribute in this sense for the Word to be enlivening and efficacious at the beginning of the third millennium?
I only hope that the freshness of the reading of the Word, lived within our culture and by our people, may help the entire Church, as well as ourselves in our challenge of inculturizing the faith that the Western Churches on the path towards new Evangelization.
This exegesis that I might dare to call “exegesis rooted in cultureâ€, needing authentic inculturation, is not merely “paint†but a “personalization†of faith nourished by the well-accepted Word, filled with ancestral tradition.
The majority of our people do not know how to read or write. Practicing the Word of God is often limited to reading done in the church during liturgical celebrations.Fortunately, this sad situation does not stop the Word of God from taking root and even engendering lovely and marvelous surprises.
Our culture is not without analogies with the pedagogy of Jesus in the Gospel. These illiterate persons have a strong sense of the sacred and understand “symbolic languageâ€. Because of this, many Bible books, notably the Gospels, are not foreign to the poor people in our countryside. The Writings appear to be close to them because the literary environment in which they were created is close to their life. It is easy for them to comment on this word and we are often surprised by the depths of certain spontaneous comments that would astound specialists.
Sometimes, the richness of comments, marked by a spiritual depth which is never wrong, recalls that of the Fathers of the Church. This is not a scientific exegesis but an exegesis in its first meaning, that is to say an interpretation that helps welcome the teaching of a text in its purity.
May I, in this Synod, suggest to the exegetes, to Pastors, to keep in mind this form of approach, different from the scientific studies but enriching especially because of the lectio divina because, the aim of exegesis that St. Paul evokes: “with all God’s holy people you will have the strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; so that, knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond knowledge  (Eph 3:18-19).
[Original text: French]
Tags: Madagascar, Ramaroson
