The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first thinkers to make the point that words are living and dynamic. He put it like this:
“The written word is not only the vehicle of thought, it is the wheels.”
The wheels of thought. Wheels enable things and people to move. Words, Coleridge was suggesting, can move us in the sense that they can inspire us to change and to grow. He shocked his contemporaries by urging them to read their Bibles as they would read any other book. They were shocked because they didn’t understand that Coleridge was a man who read everything with a deeply thoughtful and critical attentiveness.
He was not, of course, saying that the Bible is just any other book, for he was a person who had a deep reverence for Scripture. His point was that if, when we open our Bibles, we switch off our powers of imagination, our intelligence, our openness to new meanings, we limit the Bible’s ability to speak to us, to move us and to change us. To use his own metaphor, we put the brakes on the Bible’s wheels.
Turning to today’s Gospel, it sounds as the congregation in the synagogue at Nazareth that morning was being attentive. Luke tells us that when Jesus finished reading, “the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him”. Perhaps they had noticed that Jesus had edited and rearranged the words of Isaiah as he read them. He combined two separate passages in order to include those words about proclaiming the release of the captives, and he left out a phrase about “the day of vengeance of our God.” It’s interesting to reflect on Bible Sunday that Jesus was selective in his use of Scripture.
Christianity has in common with the other two great Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam, that it is a religion of the book, and on Bible Sunday we celebrate the way in which God speaks to us through Holy Scripture. What sets Christianity apart from Judaism and Islam is the fact that when we use the phrase “the word of God” we may be referring to the Bible, or we may be referring to the person of Christ – the Word of God incarnate. God speaks to us not only through the fragile and ambiguous medium of words but also the loving vulnerability of a human life, the life of Jesus.
We need to hold on to those two meanings of the phrase “the word of God”, for they remind us that the Word of God is not primarily the written word, but the Living Word. If we read and interpret the Bible apart from Christ, we run the risk of looking for and finding the comforting certainties about morality and doctrine that, from time to time, we all crave. And that, as Coleridge would say, puts the brakes on the Bible.
That’s clearly the mistake that the congregation in the synagogue at Nazareth made. At first, they were impressed.
“All spoke well of him and they were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”
They were impressed even though he had said something very startling:
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”
By saying that, he was claiming to be the Messiah, God’s anointed, the one about whom Isaiah prophesied that he would “bring good news to the poor” and “proclaim the release to the captives”.
Yet as his sermon continued – and for this you need to read on in chapter 4 of Luke’s Gospel – he said challenging things which so angered them that they turned into a lynch mob intent upon killing him. The change of mood happened because Jesus went on to challenge their ideas about what the Messiah would accomplish.
That’s a powerful reminder that any of us can fall into the trap of finding what we would like to find in the Bible, rather than letting its words challenge and question us. If the Bible is the word of God, then it isn’t a receptacle for our thoughts and prejudices. It is the wheels of thought and wheels are for movement.
Coleridge believed that absolute truth is not to be found in the written word, not even in the written word of God, but only in God and in what we know of God in Jesus Christ. He urged people to read the Bible thoughtfully, critically and prayerfully – to read the word of God as lovers of Jesus the incarnate Word – and in so doing to draw closer to God.
It’s a curious fact about the Russian language that the word for “word” – slovo - is very similar to the word for “glory” - slava. And the resemblance is a family likeness, for they share the same ancestor, and they are also closely related to the verb slyshat, which means “to hear”. To read the Bible thoughtfully, open-mindedly and prayerfully is to have the humility of the hearer and it is in hearing the word in this way that we may draw closer to the glory of God and be moved and changed by our encounter with it.