Describing Martin as “the author of many other books that I know and appreciate,” Pope Francis said: “Father James has the perspective of a person who has fallen in love with the Word of God.”
“As I read the careful arguments and exegeses of the biblical scholars he cites, it made me wonder how often we manage to approach Scripture with the ‘hunger’ of a person who knows that that word really is the Word of God,” the pope wrote.
“The fact that God ‘speaks’ should give us a little jolt each and every day. The Bible truly is the nourishment we need to handle our lives. It’s the ‘love letter’ that God has sent — since long ago — to men and women living in every time and place.”
Engaging with the Bible daily, the pope wrote, helps “us grasp the extent to which Scripture is a living body, an open book, a vibrant witness to a God that is not dead and buried on the dusty shelves of history.”
The Christian faith, Francis wrote, is a comingling of “the divine and the human — never one without the other,” thanks to the incarnation of Jesus as a man. Jesus, who described himself as “the resurrection and the life,” made eternal life possible even for sinners.
“All of us, then, are Lazarus. Rooting himself firmly in the Ignatian tradition, Father Martin brings us directly into the story of this friend of Jesus. We’re his friends, too — ’dead’ as we sometimes are on account of our sins, our failings and infidelities, the despondency that discourages us and crushes our spirits. Jesus is hardly afraid to get close to us — even when we ‘reek’ like a dead body that’s been buried for three days,” the pope wrote.
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