Sunday 30 October 2011

The Word of God

   Through all the words of Sacred Scripture, God speaks only one single Word, his one Utterance in whom he expresses himself completely:

       You recall that one and the same Word of God
       extends throughout Scripture, that it is one and
       the same Utterance that resounds in the mouths
       of all the sacred writers, since he who was in the
       beginning God with God has no need of separate
       syllables; for he is not subject to time. (St. Augustine)

   For this reason, the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord's Body.  She never ceases to present to the faithful the bread of life, taken from the one table of God's Word and Christ's Body.

   In Sacred Scripture, the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength, for she welcomes it not as a human word, "but as what it really is, the word of God."  "In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and talks with them."

   Still, the Christian faith is not a "religion of the book."  Christianity is the religion of the "Word" of God, "not a written and mute word, but incarnate and living."  If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, "open [our] minds to understand the Scriptures."

                       -- Catechism of the Catholic Church
                           paragraphs 102-104, 108


           In the beginning was the Word,
               and the Word was with God,
                    and the Word was God.
                           -- John 1: 1