“This saying is hard; who can accept it?”
We need faith, a gift of the Holy Spirit to believe the words of Jesus.
It is the Spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail.
The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.
Together with the Father, from all eternity, Jesus breathed forth the Spirit. We saw this symbolized in his mission in time when living water flowed from his wounded side and when he breathed on the disciples after his resurrection. It makes sense that the Word of God would never be without the Breath of God. The words of Jesus, and the words about him, recorded in Sacred Scripture, are not the same kind of words as the words of men. They are words of God, breathed by God.
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (see Second Timothy 3:16-17)
The "word of God is living and active" (see Hebrews 4:12) because God is truly present therein. The words themselves are Spirit and life because the Spirit inhabits them. The words themselves contain more truth than we will ever be able to access in our lifetimes, probably even in eternity. But the Spirit who guides us into all truth (see John 16:13) also wants to guide us as we read the Word, making it ever new, applying it to the times in which we live and the challenges we face.
We have a choice, as did the crowds, as to how we will receive the word. Will we let the Spirit speak, or we will try to do it without his help and inspiration, relying only on our flesh? May we accept it "not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers" (see First Thessalonians 2:13).
We receive an invitation in every of Christ, but to accept that invitation we must humble ourselves enough to let ourselves be drawn by the Father.
And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me
unless it is granted him by my Father.”
It is this being drawn by the Father that we desire when we try to practice Lectio Divina. We pay attention to the word, looking for the specific movements of its living vitality as we do, listening, as it were, for the nuances of breath of the Father as he speaks specifically to us in that moment.
As we read and accept more and more of the Scriptures we do grow in understanding. But at the same time we grow in something else, something even more important. We grow in a trust which lets us take God at his word even when we don't fully understand.
Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
The first work of the Spirit in us through the Word is an invitation to believe. But together with this we are invited to realize more and more the hope of our call, and to become ever more rooted and grounded in love as we are conformed to Christ himself.
that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (See Ephesians 3:16-19).
The vital starting point is that we say with Peter, "You have the words of eternal life." This is the posture that will open us to the same transformation that Peter himself experienced. In his healing of Aeneas and Lydda we see Peter operating at a level impossible to those limited to human modes of understanding. But such a level is not meant to be impossible to us. To grow toward it we need to welcome the Spirit as Peter did. Let us remember that every time we open the Sacred Scriptures it is always an occasion to receive this grace. It is a perfect way to prepare for the Church's celebration of Pentecost.
O LORD, I am your servant;
I am your servant, the son of your handmaid;
you have loosed my bonds.
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