Words of Light and Hope from Jane McLarty

Words of Light and Hope for Sunday 23 rd October

This Sunday 23 rd October is Bible Sunday – and so for this week’s ‘words’, some passages on the Word…

In truth, before Jesus, Scripture was like water, but since Jesus it has become for us the wine into which Jesus changed the water.
(Origen, c185 – 253 CE)

Scripture is an ocean that will never finish being explored. (Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism)

When the Old Testament foretells what the New Testament declares accomplished in the Lord, they face each other like the two cherubim, their gaze fixed on the mercy seat, because they are looking at the Lord between them and they…are recounting in
harmony the mystery of his loving purpose. (Gregory the Great, 540 – 604 CE)

Never approach the words of the mysteries that are in the Scriptures without praying and asking for God’s help. Say, ‘Lord, grant me to feel the power that is in them.’ Reckon prayer to be the key that opens the true meaning of the Scriptures. (Isaac of Nineveh, (c 613-700 CE)

It is said that after a lecture in Chicago in 1962 a student asked Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian, whether he could summarise his
life’s work in theology in one sentence. Barth replied, “Yes, I can. In the words of a song I learned at my mother’s knee: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’”