How sweet are your words

Exodus 17.8-13 ‘Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed.’

2 Timothy 3.14-4.2 ‘That the man of God be complete, equipped for every good work.’

Luke 18.1-8 ‘God will give justice to his elect, who cry to him.’

 

How sweet are your words on my tongue!

They are sweeter than honey to my mouth.

(Psalm 119.103)

+

This morning’s second reading, with its reference to the scriptures, is a good opportunity to reflect on the word of God, as read in the Bible, and how that word is, to quote Psalm 119, ‘is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path.’ (Psalm 119.105).

I hope also it will inspire each of us back to reading the Bible, or reading and hearing the Bible in a fresh way.

Each of us will have a different relationship with books.

Some of us will be novel type people, some preferring thrillers or detective works.

Some of us will be non-fiction readers, some preferring biography or meaty history.

Books can open up new worlds for us and allow our imagination to run riot.

Some people are described as ‘bookish’ meaning that they always have their head in a book, and the implication that they are so in a book they’re not in this world.

A song of my youth, in the late 1980s, had this line:

I bought you a book

Now you can read, yes

Get the experience without having to bleed (The Bolshoi, ‘She don’t know’, 1987)

Could it be that, sometimes, Christians are to be so caught up in a book, the Bible, that they’re not in this world, that they don’t know how to bleed?

We read the Bible as ‘the word of the Lord’, and know Jesus Christ as ‘the Word of God, the Word made flesh.’

The reading of the Bible is to bring us into a vibrant and living relationship with the Word Made Flesh, with Jesus Christ the one whose life blood was poured out for us.

Writing to Timothy, St Paul, speaks of being ‘acquainted with the scriptures’.

What a beautiful phrase.

Being acquainted with something or a person means to be at ease with them, familiar with them and deeply affectionate.

I wonder if that’s how you feel about the Bible?

Are you at ease with it, familiar with it, deeply affectionate towards it?

The sad fact is that Christianity in the modern world has gone down two routes, both of which would be unrecognisable to St Paul or the Fathers of the Church.

One route is the ‘Biblicist’, where the Bible is to be taken literally without nuance or appreciation of context.

The other is the ‘Bibliosceptic’, as I’ll call them, are those who say that the Bible is a text from a remote past, that has some inspiring phrases, but that’s about it.

Both take the Bible literally but not seriously.

One sore point for Biblicists and Bibliosceptics alike is part of a verse from Paul’s second letter to Timothy which was read this morning: ‘All Scripture is breathed out by God’ – that means the Bible claims to be literally true they cry!

Taking it literally one uses it like an instruction manual, and also taking it literally the other effectively bins it.

It’s tempting to quote Jesus’ words to the Sadducees: ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.’ (Matthew 21.27)

Only one bit of the Bible was inscribed by God on tablets of stone, that’s the Ten Commandments.

The rest is breathed out by God and captured by human writers.

That is not to diminish the Bible, but to be real about it.

We are to be acquainted with the Bible, at ease with it, familiar with it, deeply affectionate towards it, because through the scriptures we meet Jesus Christ, ‘the word made flesh.’ (John 1.14).

Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s, said that ‘Christians are the people, not of a book, but of a person, himself described as the Word of God’.

And what Jesus, St Paul and others call ‘the Scriptures’ refer to what we call the Old Testament.

That is the first witness to Jesus Christ, as he himself makes clear to the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus on the Day of his Resurrection:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24.27)

That’s what the apostle Philip did on the road between Jerusalem to Gaza with an Ethiopian man when he asked about what the prophet Isaiah was on about:

Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. (Acts of the Apostles 8.35)

When this was opened to them on the road to Emmaus, and then Jesus broke bread, the two disciples declared:

“Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24.32)

The Ethiopian heard Philip’s interpretation and asked immediately to be baptised.

We don’t read this book to get the experience without having to bleed, but we read the Scriptures to take up the cross of the One who suffered for us.

So, the Scriptures, that wonderful collection of texts, different in genre, written over centuries, are the reliable witness that the Church has to the mighty acts of God in Christ.

Their purpose is that we come to know Jesus, the Word Made Flesh, in the power of the Spirit, so that with him we see the Father’s face.

May we each renew our acquaintance with the Scriptures, cherish them, be at ease with them, love them.

As we come to taste the Living Bread from heaven may we also say of the Scriptures:

How sweet are your words on my tongue!

They are sweeter than honey to my mouth.