Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom
Bible Sunday 25th October 2026
St Bene’t’s Cambridge
Professor David F. Ford
Nehemiah 8:1-4a, 8-12; Psalm 119:9-16; Colossians 3:12-17; John 20:24-31
It is so good to be here with you in St Bene’t’s in this church where I have spent so many years as a worshipper—first as a student, later with my family—and where I have been fed by the sermons of Bishop Michael, Brother Anselm, Brother Martin, Brother Sam, Angela Tilby, and, when she was a curate here, my wife Deborah. Thank you for the invitation.
On Bible Sunday it seems right to honour a great translator of the Bible. Practically all of the world’s two billion or so Christians depend on translations of the Bible. Listen now to this morning’s reading from the Letter to the Colossians as given in The Message, the translation by Eugene Peterson that has been—I think it is fair to say—a revelation to so many people. It often amounts to an improvisation! I wouldn’t like it to be my only translation, and the New Revised Standard Version we have had is better as our habitual version, but I think in this reading today Peterson gets the spirit of the text in a way that enriches every other translation I know.
Here it is (you have it in your handout to savour later):
12 So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength [I like that translation of praǔtēta], discipline.
13 Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offence. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you.
14 And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It's your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.
15 Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness.
16 Let the Word of Christ - the Message - have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God!
17 Let every detail in your lives - words, actions, whatever - be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.
What I want to focus on this morning is, in the NRSV translation: ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly’; and, in Peterson’s: ‘Let the Word of Christ - the Message - have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives.’ The questions I want all of us to ask ourselves this morning are: How much room in your life do you give to the Word in the form of the Bible? How richly, abundantly, does this message dwell in you, enliven you?
But I have one problem with both of the translations we have heard. Neither puts wisdom [sophia] (or what Peterson calls ‘good common sense’—I do very much prefer ‘wisdom’ to that) in the right place, where it is in the Greek, right next to the word of Christ. The King James Version does get it right. It says: ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom…’. Our aim should be to be as wise as possible in our relationship with the Bible.
Of course, there are a great many foolish, ignorant, and dangerous ways of relating to the Bible, which I am not going to go into this morning—but it is always worth remembering that, as with so many good things, such as family life and, indeed, Christianity, the corruption of the best can be the worst.
But what is the best? Our biblical texts for today, Bible Sunday, are each profound in different ways.
Nehemiah 8
In Nehemiah 8 a whole community is gripped by a book that both pierces them to the heart and inspires their worship and celebration. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, ‘The Bible grips me like no other book’. So, let us give it every chance to do that, both individually and together.
Psalm 119
Psalm 119 goes to the heart of what can really ensure that you make enough room in your life for the Bible: wholeheartedly desiring God and God’s Word. As we have just sung: ’With my whole heart have I sought you… Your words have I hidden within my heart… I have taken greater delight in the way of your testimonies than in all manner of riches… My delight shall be in your statutes and I will not forget your word.’ (Vv.10, 11, 14, 16) And the rest of that extraordinary Psalm 119 (my favourite out of the 150), the longest chapter in the Bible, draws us deeper and deeper into the wisdom of having an overwhelming desire for God, God’s Word, and God’s wisdom.
Colossians
Then the Letter to the Colossians sums up the goal of this desire: ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom’. And at once this is connected with the wisest single way to help that long term, formative indwelling of the Word and its life-giving meaning to happen, something tried and tested down the centuries and around the world today: worship: ‘…with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.’
The most encouraging thing for us here on Bible Sunday is that we are doing this. There is nothing like good worship for enabling us to internalise the Word. Our liturgies - Eucharist, Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Baptism, Confirmation, marriage and funeral services, and more: all those services are utterly soaked in scripture; the texts of the liturgy have been shaped by people in whom the Word of Christ has dwelt richly; the readings through the Church Year give us the full range of the Bible, including the awkward bits; and always there are the Psalms, which Colossians appropriately mentions first of all. Then there are the Collects, distilling the essentials of our faith, uniting the theological, the imaginative, and the practical, and always steeped in scripture. And of course occasionally sermons may help too!
To take in even a fraction of all that is to find the Word dwelling in us, inhabiting us, and forming us; and to do it year after year after year, as many of us do, is to find a richness and an abundance of meaning that can nourish us through good and bad times. As Jesus, who was also steeped in scripture, said when tempted in the wilderness, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ (Matthew 4:4) I remember my first ever retreat as a student, led by an Anglican monk who said to me, as he gave me a copy of the daily office for daily prayer, ‘Try it for five years or so, and you’ll find it works ‘. He was right. I wonder how many people here have tried St Bene’t’s for more than five years, as I have? Do raise a hand.
John
Then there is our Gospel reading today. This can be seen as the blessing of Jesus on us as readers. And what a blessing!
Thomas has not trusted the reports of his fellow disciples that they had seen the resurrected Jesus. He will only be satisfied by seeing and touching him for himself. When that happens he realises what it means: who Jesus is. He cries out the culminating theological statement of the Gospel: ‘My Lord and my God!’ This is nothing less than a God-sized event happening in this human being, who is utterly one with us—human and woundable—and also utterly one with God. No wonder Thomas had had difficulty: this is unique, unprecedented, it does not fit any of our categories, of God or humanity or reality—it is completely new, absolutely astonishing news.
Then note what happens next, in two key steps. First, Jesus says: ‘Have you believed/trusted/had faith [it is extremely significant that the Greek verb here, pisteuein, means all three together, believing, trusting, and having faith, and that its core meaning is best understood as trust—that is vital for the relevance of the Gospel to our increasingly trust-poor society and world] because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe/trust/have faith.’
Then second, immediately, the author addresses us readers for the first time, saying that what has been written in this book has been written ‘so that you may come to believe/trust/have faith that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing/trusting/having faith you may have life in his name.’ The blessing of Jesus is on those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe/trust/have faith. We readers, who have not seen him, and who trust the good news of the Gospel message, are therefore among those who receive this blessing.
And what is the substance of the blessing? Nothing less than what Thomas cried out: ‘My Lord and my God!’ The substance is Jesus Christ alive and in person, present as God is present, present to every reader.
So, as we read, we can read ourselves deeper and deeper into a relationship of trust, mutual understanding, and love with the living, ever-present, as yet invisible Jesus Christ.
And, as so often in the Gospel of John, there is still more, something almost unimaginably wonderful, which brings us back to the Word of Christ dwelling in us richly. John is above all the Gospel of indwelling. And it is not only about the words of Jesus Christ indwelling us. It is about Jesus Christ himself, the Word of God in person. Think of the parable of the vine in Chapter 15: ‘Abide/dwell in me, as I abide/dwell in you’ (v.4). [Do we ever fathom the meaning of that little word ‘in’ in John?] But think above all of the culminating prayer of Jesus in Chapter 17.
In the course of spending over twenty years writing a commentary on the Gospel of John (some of those years while worshipping here), I slowly came to regard this as the richest and most profound chapter in the Bible, and the most important for our time. It is what Jesus, in his final prayer at the Last Supper pours out to his Father as his ultimate desire for us, a desire for us to be utterly at one, in trust and love, with himself and his Father, and with each other, for the sake of the world God loves.
I am going to conclude by simply reading the the final verses of the prayer, in which Jesus explicitly prays for us who have come to trust in him through trusting the word of his first disciples.
But before I do that I just want to draw your attention to the book at the very end of your handout, published this month, Twelve Habits for Peacemakers: A Christian Wisdom of Reconciliation. It is a book that was above all inspired by this prayer of Jesus, and it opens up practical ways in which we can be formed by the Bible as we desire what Jesus desires for us—peace, truth, joy, glory, and, above all, love, that ‘basic, all-purpose garment’.
Jesus prays:
17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.
20 "I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe/trust/have faith in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe/trust/have faith that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24 Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
25 "Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. 26 I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” - that is, indwelling us.
Amen.
Handout - Colossians 3:12-17 Three Ways
New Revised Standard Version
12 Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 13 Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect
harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
The Message
12 So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline.
13 Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you.
14 And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It's your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.
15 Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness.
16 Let the Word of Christ - the Message - have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God!
17 Let every detail in your lives - words, actions, whatever - be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.
King James Version
Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.
Further reading: David F. Ford, The Gospel of John. A Theological Commentary (2021);
Meeting God in John: A Companion for Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Beyond (2024); and (edited with Gregory Ryan, Sarah Snyder and Robert Leigh) Twelve Habits for Peacemakers: A Christian Wisdom of Reconciliation (2026).