Documents are very important to us in daily life - a passport or some identification of who we are. So are the documents that have come down to us through the centuries, such as Magna Carta and the legal basis of our present day institutions. Religions also have their literature which have become, as it were, foundation documents, detailing the insights and commands of their founders. So it has sometimes been said that Christians also live under the authority of the Scriptures of the Hebrew bible and the New Testament. There is some truth in that. We need these irreplaceable sayings and narratives of the Jewish background and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and the letters of his early disciples. But it is only a half truth. The title of this letter, taken from the sayings of Jesus in the Matthaean sermon on the mount, implies that Christians really live under the loving authority of Jesus. "... But I say to you love your enemies ..." Documents, however venerable and important, are links to the past - to my date of birth, to Jesus' life lived in Palestine two millennia ago. But the fact is that the New Testament documents point us to a living person, to the risen Lord and not to the past as such. What is important about my passport is that I am here to be recognised. What is important about the New Testament documents is that Jesus is the person who is with us and to whom we owe allegiance before God.

Links to a person, either human or divine, are subject to our own vulnerability as persons in daily life. One couldn't lay the foundations of English society simply on links, say, to Alfred the Great. We are linked in society under laws which safeguard both the functions of the state and our own personal freedom and privacy. What is confusing is that the Christian movement - one in which allegiance is due by his disciples to the risen Lord - has also necessarily evolved into an institution. And we all know the chequered history of the church throughout the centuries. So as well as allegiance to Jesus we are also under the laws of the church. There need be no conflict in that. But we need to be clear that the foundation documents of Christianity are simply irreplaceable evidence from the early years of the Christian movement and its background in the history of Israel, and no more. They are the happy treasure ground both of the ordinary Christian and the scholars who in the past two hundred years have unlocked some of the puzzles in this ancient literature.

The fact is, however, that the church has always found it difficult to allow that we need to balance a veneration for the literature of the Scriptures and our allegiance to the risen Lord who is with us. Some of the most denigrating struggles have occurred in the history of the church over the place of Scripture. It is a mark of our vulnerability that, as Christians, we have rarely been able openly to witness to our allegiance to the present, risen Lord. The early Christian martyrs are the exception. There were no documents available to which they could point to as evidence.They died confessing not the biblical records but rather Jesus as Lord. By contrast many of the 16th century and later conflicts have been over the place and authority of the bible. While refusing the authority of the papacy there was a turn towards the authority of Scripture. Either way our common humanity seems to require some security. Let us acknowledge that the beginning of the printing of the bible by Gutenberg in Saxony as long ago as 1455 has been a turning point in making the evidence for the Christian communities widely available. But it has also had the unintended effect of making Christianity a 'religion' of the book and Jesus a figure in the past. Truth in the authority of the risen Lord in my life is not easily come by!

One of the most important changes in the recent Common Worship of the Church of England lies in the opening sentence in the Eucharist - 'The Lord is here.' It has taken 1600 odd years for that to happen! So it is important for all of us to spell out what that means in terms of faith and practice. We are challenged today to seek ways in our worship and life as Christians to witness to the living Lord who is with us. It will often mean a re-think of traditional ideas and of dogmatic assertions which belong to earlier crises in the history of the church. But why not? We have nothing to lose and much to regain in our discipleship as Christians.