Bible Sunday: Yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so.
Isaiah 45:22-end, Romans 15: 1-6, Luke 4:16-24
11:00am Eucharist
One of my earliest memories is being rocked to sleep as a small fractious child in the arms of my adoring mother with the words ‘Yes, Jesus loves, me. Yes, Jesus loves, me. Yes, Jesus loves me, for the Bible tells me so.’
Enfolded and swaddled by that beautiful reminder at such a tender age of Jesus’ love embedded something unmistakably permanent in me. Not only the knowledge of Jesus’ love, encapsulated in the warm embrace of my mum, but the source of that love and where it could be found, proved, and relied upon.
Between the years 1522 – 1545 Martin Luther translated the Bible into German from Latin, so as to be read by the ordinary person. And as an aid to the understanding of his Bible, Luther provided a preface for most of his books. In the preface between the Old and the New Testament, Luther wrote
‘Therefore let your own thoughts and feelings go, and think of the Scriptures as the loftiest and noblest of holy things, as the richest of mines, which can never be worked out, so that you may find the wisdom of God the he lays before you in such foolish and simple guise, in order that He may quench all pride. Here you will find the swaddling-clothes and the mangers in which the Christ lies, and to which the angel points the shepherds. Simple and little are the swaddling-clothes, but dear is the treasure, Christ, that lies in them.’
Simple and little are the swaddling-clothes, but dear is the treasure, Christ, that lies in them.
Those swaddling-cloths, the warp and weft of the swaddling-bands of scripture are infinitely precious in that they bring us to Jesus. If we take the baby out of them, if I remove the living word of God made flesh out of them, they are like used nappies.
So how do we prevent ourselves from removing the living the word of Jesus from the written word of scripture?
Today the Church of England celebrates Bible Sunday, but it is helpful to note that today is not the only time in the year when the scriptures are celebrated. In fact, Scripture is essential to our identity as Anglicans. Our common worship life is centred around scripture and Common prayer, as the Sunday Eucharistic Lectionary gets us through most of the Bible every three years in Church. Some of which we have heard today in the prophecy of Isaiah, the book of Psalms, the letter of Paul to the Romans and the Gospel according to Luke.
There is a wonderful joke out there that says the reason Anglicans like the Bible so much is because it quotes the Prayer Book so often. And whilst there is much truth to be found in that joke, the Anglicans were the first to give the Bible to the English-speaking world. Within the pages of this book we encounter God in the clearest light, in it and through it we meet Jesus, and through the person of Jesus we discover who we are each called to be.
In the word broken open, in the word made flesh we find Jesus.
And in bread broken open, in the word made flesh we meet Jesus.
I could give you a thousand and one ways of reading and listening and absorbing scripture, ways to enliven your personal Bible reading and yet we need to find ourselves swept into the flood of the whole story and within that flood, we find Jesus.
In the gospel of Luke which we heard this morning, we see Jesus, who, after reading a passage from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, rolls up the scroll and said, “today the scripture has been fulfilled”. Not only that particular scripture, but all Scripture has been fulfilled in Christ; he is God’s yes to all the promises and all the prophecies.
In and through the work and life and death and resurrection of Jesus, found in the leaves of our well-worn or pristine copies of our Bibles, we meet with the one who knew all pain, who faced all rejection, who declared love as the greatest warfare, who came with skin and bones, flesh and blood as our saviour and friend.
Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, an Italian Catholic Cardinal says that ‘in the incarnation, Jesus hides under the veil of flesh and, in the Eucharist, under the veil of bread, so in Scripture he hides under the veil of speech.’
In the Word broken open, in the word made flesh we find Jesus.
And in bread broken open, in the word made flesh we meet Jesus.
And it is the responsibility of the Church to keep the Word of God, the word made flesh alive. If we, the Church control it, anesthetise it, keep it under strict control and keep it veiled as an artefact of times of old, we tame the lion. We reduce it into bitesize quotations, theological theories and nice stories at our peril. It becomes a straitjacket to bind ourselves and others.
Instead, we the Church are called to allow the Word of God to circulate and move about, to break off and cry out, to tear down and to build up. To find ourselves and our story within its redemptive story.
So we read, and we mark, and we inwardly digest the whole arc of scripture. We ourselves are read by scripture. In it and through it we find our joy is held in the joy of Jesus. Our pain is held in the pain of Jesus. Our grief is found in the grief of Jesus. Our life and our death is found in the life and death of Jesus.
And in the words of the song, sung to me as a fractious baby in the arms of my adoring mother, wrapped in the warp and weft of swaddling cloths, we hear the words for ourselves and for our neighbour and for the whole world: ‘Yes, Jesus loves, me. Yes, Jesus loves, me. Yes, Jesus loves me, for the Bible tells me so.’
Amen