You will have noticed that we have put the lectionary and the Book of Gospels on a special table with a covering and with candles near it. By this we are enthroning the Word of God as requested by Pope Francis for this Third Sunday in Ordinary Time. He has designated this Sunday as the Sunday of the Word of God: so these books which contain the Word of God and especially the Word of God proclaimed out loud for the congregation in the church for the celebration of Mass.
Today sees a special focus on these books but even on more ordinary days they are treated with reverence, they have special covers, they’re often carried to and from the lectern with some care.
You might say that there are two volumes, but to be pedantic about it, a volume was originally a scroll; these are in fact codices. It is significant that each of them is a codex. The codex was invented just before the Christian era. Before then the books were scrolls. Indeed, in the Jewish synagogue the Torah is written even today on large scrolls. In Roman times there were standard sized scrolls and I have read that the Gospel according to Matthew was about as big as you could fit on a single scroll.
Those of you of my generation will remember audio cassettes with two spindles which turned the tape from one spindle to the other. So with a scroll, you twiddled one spindle to move the text along, unrolling it from one spindle to another. As with a basic cassette player where it could be hard to find a track, so it could be hard with a scroll to find a particular passage and to mark it.
The codex developed from the tablets which Mediterranean people used for notes, commercial documents and less important messages. They consisted of small rectangular pieces of wood which had a slight hollow gouged out and filled with wax. One wrote on this with a stylus and you could rob out what you had written with the flat end of the stylus. Often several tablets would be joined together to form a sort of notebook. It was from this that the codex developed.
At first, they used sheets of parchment, not for its permanence (parchment can last for centuries if cared for) but because you could write on it in ink and then scrape off what you had written and reuse the page. Scrolls were for serious stuff, codices for the ephemeral.
But Christians took up the codex; it suited them very well. You could make a single section or sew several sections together, putting boards at front and back. They did not take up the space of a scroll and you could put several works together in one codex. It suited their way of taking passages out of books for use at services. The Bible remained a collection of books; Bibles in a single codex only became common in the 13th century when university students needed them as textbooks. Even so, it became easier to look at texts in different Biblical books. So it is easier to look up the passage in Isaiah which we have as our first reading, while you have a finger in the codex with Matthew in it. It becomes easier thus to see the Old Testament in the New and to see the prefiguration of the New Testament in the Old.
So when we enthrone the word of God, we enthrone it in a codex, easy to open and to use, easy to find or mark your place. We can reverence it and carry it in procession. But we do have to be careful that we do not simply stop there. We can honour the Word of God by putting it into codices made of smoothest parchment or hand-made paper, codices covered in fine leather and even gold and jewels. But the Word of God does not want to stay in a codex, no matter how well made, or badly made. The Word of God wants to get off the page and into our ears and our eyes, into our lives and our hearts.
That is dangerous. We heard in the Gospel this morning, “follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” That was to Simon and Andrew, but one day it might be to us. The Word of God is in its own way a real presence of God and by it He can really speak to us and call us to follow Him. And if the codex is a useful way of carrying the Word of God, the best way of carrying the Word of God is carrying it in our hearts and minds, living it in our lives and speaking it by our mouths.
DMS