I bow
my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes
its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that
you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and
that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and
grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to
comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and
depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses
knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14-19)
John
Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is in 2 substantial volumes,
and once long ago I read it. Thomas
Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, from the late Middle Ages, runs to some 61
volumes, unfinished, and I haven’t read it.
Aquinas said the Summa is a work suited to beginning
students… but just before he died he told his long-suffering secretary: …all
that I have written seems like straw to me[1]. The great Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics runs
to over 6,000,000 words and 9,000 pages, in 5 volumes, unfinished. I have read some of it. St Paul had read none of those things, but
those writers had all read Paul. And
Paul had written: I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all
the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth… There is a story about Karl Barth (it may be
apocryphal) when someone asked him to say in one simple sentence, what it is
all about, he said: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so…
Jesus
himself wrote nothing that we know of. By
contrast the 19th and 20th centuries saw a huge flood of
spiritual and theological writing and research… some of it priceless,
indispensable… some of it less than memorable… continuing to this day. In ineffable ways the best of it teaches that
wisdom may eventually require an willingness also to set the books aside, at
times, to pause the debates and discussions and study groups, and to delay the
surveys and reports… and to know instead how to be still and wait. Some theologians have always known that, and
someone said recently, if you don’t know how to pray you can’t be a theologian.
Breadth
and length, height and depth, after all, is Paul’s way of saying in words that
we don’t have words, however finely crafted, to convey what Lutherans call the
whole counsel of God... love and truth, mercy and justice. When we learn to be still, somehow we open a
door to admit change, sub-verbally, to allow the departure of fear, to see
things begin in us that we could not achieve ourselves, to become more loving
if only because we are less afraid of life and death and tomorrow… or of doing
or believing the wrong thing. Paul
writes, to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge… to
know what words cannot express, what cannot be imagined or represented… surpassing
knowledge. In silence and stillness this
faith, hope and love begins to be instilled in us, as we stop trying to possess
it, define it, or to own it or to boast – or to trivialise it by our human need
to be always happy and admired.
So
now, as you see, I have just used a lot of words to say that it’s not about
words. The Word of God is, as we learn
in John’s Gospel, not a book but Jesus Christ, a person, incarnate, risen and
present, as he said, to the end of the world.
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