On the Holy Scriptures

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

The Gospel is read in church at almost every service; at every service we stand before the word of God and think that by doing so we become the people of God. But much more is required of us if we want to be the people of God, the people who can say that the Divine word belongs to them.

The Bible was born in a human community; The Gospel was born in the Church; both the Israeli community and the Church of God existed before the Holy Scriptures appeared. It was from within this community that the knowledge of God, the love of God, the vision of His ineffable beauty, as well as the state and destiny, the formation and calling of man, was born. The people of God are a community that bears witness to something that it knows for certain, which is its life, the object of its love, its joy. The people of the Bible are not the people who read the Bible, faithfully preserve it, and proclaim it; the true people of God, the true people of the Bible, the true people of the Gospel must be a community that can write the Holy Scriptures themselves, preach them from their own experience, give them a beginning, give birth to them. If we are not such a community, we truly do not belong to the Gospel or to the people of God.

Often we console ourselves with the fact that we are a community of prayer, where the word of God is proclaimed, where it is preached; a community that in one way or another strives to live by the word. And yet, if we look around, everything we see testifies to just the opposite; if we were a community from within which, from the depths of experience of which the divine word was born, then to those who hear us repeat it, proclaim it, and preach it, it would be a twofold revelation: a revelation of what is proclaimed, and a revelation that what is proclaimed has become flesh and blood, has become a reality of human life; a community that preaches the Divine word would be a proof of the truth of that Divine word.

Do we see this? Can we say that the community that we are, large or small, is the embodiment of the message we carry, the Good News that Christ has brought to the world? Is it not still true, perhaps more now than in earlier times, that the word of God is blasphemed and ridiculed because of us?

This is the revival to which we are called: we have a book born from the very depths of the human experience of God, a book where God does speak through a community that was able to bear witness to the truth of the word. We must become such a community again, we must learn to live according to the word of God Himself, the revelation of His will; we must learn to be a people whose lives are in harmony with the word of the Gospel.

As long as the Gospel remains an external law for us, as long as the Gospel remains a Divine will, different from or contrary to our will, we are not an evangelical community; we may at best aspire to be one, but we are not yet a community capable of giving the world a revelation of the gospel. Christ said that the word He preached was not merely an arbitrary command of God, but a revelation of the true man, a revelation given to us and to others of how the real man feels, thinks, desires, and lives. As long as our feelings are not like that, as long as our thoughts are not like that and our lives are not like that, we are not only "disobedient" to God's law, we are not only betraying ourselves, we are simply not "human" in the true sense, in the sense of the vocation contained in this word.

Thus, the renewal of the Church begins with each of us; transformations in the Church, when they concern the forms of prayer, when they touch external structures, are not yet a return to the origins, to the original sources. There is one source of light from which the water of eternal life gushes: the Gospel itself, which is a revelation (for each of us and for all of us) of what Man and human relations are.

Let us hasten to accept this testimony of the Gospel, realizing that when judgment comes upon us, it will not be God and the law, which is different from us and alien to us, that will judge us. But we will see what we were meant to become, what we could be, and what we didn't want to become. Then there will be sorrow, then there will really be weeping, not because God will curse us and reject us, but because, seeing the beauty of our calling, we will see how far we have fallen away from it.

Let us now, while there is still time – and it does not take years – it takes one moment to transform life – let us turn to the Gospel itself, let us learn from Christ Himself what we are, what we can be; and if we doubt whether this is really possible, let us remember the words of Christ, when Peter said: Who then can be saved? and Christ answered him: With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible... Let us go forward, in this hope, in this joy and in this confidence. Amen.

November 26, 1967

Lane. S.