Sunday: Week 5 in Lent Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
WEEK 5 SUNDAY...

...‘Sticks and stones may break my bones,’ goes the old jingle, ‘but words will never hurt me.’ It’s a lie. Don’t believe it. Words are far, far more powerful than anything else. A sword can maim or kill, but only in the crudest of fashions, cutting off life as it was. A word can transform, for good or ill; it can build up a person’s confidence or pull it down. When, some years ago, I was asked to reflect in public on the moments in my early life when people had helped me find my way, what came back to my mind, very strikingly, were half a dozen occasions when someone had said something, just a sentence or two, no great long lecture or anything – something that had opened up a new world that I knew I wanted to explore, a new path- way that I knew I had to walk. Those are the words that are worth their weight in gold, words that transformed my life far more thoroughly than any mere promises, bribes, threats or punishments could ever have done.

If that is true of human words – and often the people who speak those life-transforming words have no idea at the time of the long-term effect of what they’re saying – how much more is it true of God’s word. One of the great sorrows of our age is that people even inside the church, let alone outside it, have so reacted against the over-dogmatic claims of some ‘conservative’ Christians concerning the literal truth of the whole Bible (when a great deal is manifestly poetry, and so on), that the whole idea of the Bible itself as ‘God’s word’ is discounted by many...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright