“My words shall not pass away”
We live in the end times. That is actually a striking feature of Christian hope and witness because it is not simply about the passing events of the day but the constant hope of our looking to God now and always. In short, it is about our awakening to the eternal Word and truth of God as that by which “we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life”. Hope and comfort in the face of darkness and despair. Indeed, as Luke puts it, “this shall be a time for you to bear testimony” (Lk. 21.13). In other words, it is not simply the events and circumstances of our times that define us but how we face them.
That has very much to do with the witness of the Scriptures to “the God of patience and consolation”, “the God of hope”. In the Epistle reading from Romans, the word hope predominates. It appears four times. The resounding note of hope is emphasized as essential to the whole purpose and meaning of God’s Word written. “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” Paul writes, referencing, paradoxically, the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament. The things written for our learning will come to include Paul’s words which comprise such a large part of the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament. There is an important emphasis on the theme of Revelation, what is mediated by God to us through the Scriptures.
Our readings this morning open us out to the doctrine of Revelation, to the idea of the Scriptures received and understood in the Church as “a doctrinal instrument of salvation”, to capture in a phrase both Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker. As such, the Scriptures are neither an arbitrary collection of texts nor a mere reservoir of information; instead, they set before us a whole way of thinking upon God and his will for our humanity. This is succinctly and wonderfully expressed in today’s Collect which is, perhaps, the most well known of the twenty-four original Collects composed by Thomas Cranmer. It reveals his distinctive signature of drawing upon the appointed Scriptural readings. It is about praying the Scriptures understood credally.
This is exactly the point of the Litany, the first form of the Latin liturgy translated and reworked into English by Cranmer in 1544 and appointed for use in 1545. It was, we might say, the forerunner of The Book of Common Prayer itself. The Litany, like today’s Collect, shows the strong emphasis upon the doctrine of Revelation and a confidence in the Scriptures as “something understood”, as Herbert says about prayer. The idea is that the Scriptures are given for our learning. The Greek word is διδασκαλιαν, our education, or teaching. The Latin word is ad nostrum doctrinam, for our doctrine, our learning.
Nothing could be clearer about the primacy of understanding, of things intellectual. Equally, nothing could be clearer about the relation between intellect and will, of heart and mind. For it is “by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, [that] we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life”. What Cranmer has rightly grasped is that hope is not about temporal matters but concerns what is everlasting. “Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away”. Therein lies the radical meaning of Christian hope “in the power of the Holy Spirit”. It is now and always.
The Scriptures which Paul reminds us are “written for our learning” have to be at the very least heard, and as such proclaimed. Such is the true nature of the Church. Where the Word is faithfully proclaimed and the Sacraments faithfully administered, there is the Church, as Luther and the Augsburg Confession teach. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God”, as Paul puts it (Rom. 10.17), hence the importance of the liturgy which is Word-centered and Word-saturated. It is where the Word of God is proclaimed, the Word audible and the Word visible. It cannot be simply a matter of private devotion and reading. Cranmer’s phrasing is precise. We pray that “we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them”. “In such wise” means in accord with the purpose and meaning of the Scriptures as “written for our learning”. The learning happens through our prayerful attention to what is heard from what is read and proclaimed.
Hearing and reading are inseparable in this sense. To mark the Scriptures is to take careful note of them, to attend carefully to what is proclaimed, and, as such, learned. But Cranmer goes on to add that what is proclaimed and heard and read, marked and learned is also to be “inwardly digest[ed].” There is a wonderful sense of the interdependence and complementarity of what is outwardly and inwardly expressed. With this phrase, Cranmer concentrates the great and long tradition of a kind of reading that transforms us into what is read and heard. It echoes God’s direction to Ezekiel to eat the scroll of God’s Word, to take the words heard and read into our very being. As such the dead scripta become living verba, words which are alive in us. Thus the traditional metaphors for reading and hearing stand in complete contrast to the metaphors of our techo-digital and image-based world. The contrast is between the metaphors of the surface, such as ‘browsing’,’ scanning’, ‘surfing’, ‘skimming’ and the metaphors of depth and eating, of ingesting and incorporation, taking the word into our very being, into the depths of our souls. This is deep reading in contrast to the shallow reading of our world, itself a kind of end-time with respect to reading in a way. What Cranmer suggests is something sacramental in the sense of the Word embodied in us, the Word which in the Christian witness is ultimately, the Word made flesh who dwells with us and in us.
The culture of hearing and reading is about what lives in us. Culture is life itself and here is the form of our incorporation into God who is essential life. We are reminded of the idea of God’s eternal Word, “words [that] shall not pass away”. We are awakened to God’s Word as eternal Light and Life coming towards us in the pageant of Scripture and Sacrament. Such is Advent.
This focus on the Scriptures as God’s Word written for our learning in turn shapes our lives in their outward aspects precisely because we are embodied beings who inescapably live in community with one another. That is shown in the Litany in the comprehensive scope of its petitions and prayers as grounded definitively in God revealed as Trinity and in the saving work of Christ applied to our world with respect to all conditions of humanity.
Cranmer’s Collect in turn was taken up by Sir Francis Bacon in his famous essay, “Of Studies”, where it is applied to the different areas of study and knowledge and to the idea of different kinds of reading according to what is needed for the maturing in understanding of human beings. At once counter-culture, our readings and liturgy offer redemption and hope in the face of darkness and despair. The end of man, as Austin Farrer says, is “endless Godhead endlessly possessed”. That is what is opened to us in the Word proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated, the Word “heard…read, mark[ed], learn[ed], and inwardly digest[ed].
“My words shall not pass away”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 2, 2022