York Minster

The letter kills you but the spirit gives life

Date: 27th May 2007
Preacher: The Very Revd Keith Jones

The letter kills but the spirit gives life.  I Corinthians 3 v 6

The first generation of friends and followers of Jesus Christ followed him in one surprising matter above all others.  They did not write.  They remembered, of course. They told and retold what Jesus had said and they passed on as faithfully as they could the fascinating story of the way that Jesus had died.  Those words and those events were of intense importance to them.  In comparison with them, the doings of Emperors and High Priests were of minor concern.  But for years (we don’t know how many years) they seem to have written little; or if they did it has not survived.  It was word of mouth that was for them the main vehicle of memory.

There are some days when this seems to me a huge virtue of theirs.  The sheer amount of written stuff, in church newspapers, magazines, websites, working papers and letters is horrifying.  And Christians were themselves soon enough at it.  The Gospels and the Epistles of St Paul show that.  But there is no document signed by Jesus himself.  Nobody refers to any; and there are no letters from the twelve apostles that can be trusted to be genuine: even those that carry the names of St Peter and of St John have question marks – and they don’t read as if they were written straight after the momentous events described in the Gospels.

The reason for their reliance on the spoken word is expressed by St Paul, whose letters are the first written records of what a learned Christian of the first century believed.  “The letter kills!”  He is thinking (he was always thinking) of the Jewish faith to which he owed so much.  That was unmistakeably written.  The Torah, the scrolls of the law, were to him unique treasures.  No other written words could compare with them, the words of Moses the friend of God, the charters of the people that God had called to be in a special relationship with him.  The wisdom there, Paul believed, was greater than anything a Greek could find in Plato or Pythagoras or Aristotle;  greater than the wise sayings of Egypt or Babylon. 

And yet, it had now been surpassed.  And what had surpassed it was not a book, or a written message at all.  It was a person, someone in flesh and blood who had brought the living presence of God into the world.   Somebody who had won friends, who had taught disciples, who had shown a new and living way to the heart of God.