This year's 'Word of God Sunday', which will be celebrated in St Peter’s Basilica in the presence of Pope Francis on Sunday 21 January 2024, the motto chosen is taken from the Gospel of St John: "Remain in my Word" (John 8,31).
‘Open Their Hearts’ is the title of Pope
Francis’s motu proprio establishing Word of God Sunday. Let us savor the scene
where Jesus appeared to his disciples, opened their hearts, and helped them
understand the Bible. In commemoration of Word of God Sunday, the Pope hopes
that you will once again open the Bible anew and open your heart to the image
of Jesus within it.
A journalist for the Catholic Times in its recent issue gives us some thoughts on the Word of God Sunday.
She often meets believers living a religious life by diligently engaging with the Word through reading or copying
the Bible. A person who has read the entire Bible more than 100 times including
transcription, a person who participated in a reading group and heard the
entire Bible from others despite being visually impaired, a person who worked
as a volunteer at a Bible club as a couple and said that they only talked about
the Bible at the dinner table, etc. … .
What impressed her the most was the elderly man
who said he had read the Bible over 100 times. He, who had a cheerful
personality and was good at telling stories, said: "If you just open the Bible,
Jesus says ‘love’ and ‘loving,’ so how can you hate people?" What they all had
in common was the inner power that the Word has when it seeps into their lives.
In celebration of Word of God Sunday, we looked into the life of Saint Jerome, who left us the Vulgate Bible. A saint who can be called a ‘man of the Bible’ emphasizes the importance of the Word in living as a Christian. We encourage them to ‘never let the Bible fall from their hands’ and to ‘read the Bible often and learn everything they can while doing their best.’ He accepted the Bible as the Word of God.
The interpretation
is that the enormous amount of translations, research on the Bible text, and
writing of many Bible commentaries came from such confidence and faith in the
Bible.
One-third of the world's population is familiar with the Bible and believes that it is the Word of God we have many others that know about the Bible and some times do a better job in doing what it teaches.
