St Bede of Jarrow

The Northumbrian monk is duped into wasting one of his beautifully-crafted sermons on a row of dumb rocks.

This story about St Bede from the 13th century ‘Golden Legend’ (some five centuries after Bede died) is not attested in earlier sources, and Bede himself has taught us to be wary of taking such stories on trust. On the other hand, it is a very good story, and deserves to be retold.

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Driven out of Northumbria, Bishop Wilfrid goes to the south coast and saves a kingdom from starvation.

In 681 St Wilfrid, exiled from Northumbria by King Ecgfrith, arrived in Sussex, the still-pagan Kingdom of the South Saxons, where he and his monks had an instant impact.

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St Bede says that Christ’s Transfiguration should remind us that we live in two worlds at the same time.

One day, Jesus took three of his closest disciples up a mountain, and there briefly revealed himself to them as he truly is. For St Bede, the 8th century Northumbrian monk, it was a reminder that the light of heaven comes to those whose hearts are in heaven.

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St Bede explains how the Exodus and the Ten Commandments are related to Easter and Whitsuntide.

Just as the Jewish festival of Passover commemorated the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt, so the Feast of Weeks fifty days later commemorated the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. St Bede explains how these two feasts are taken up in the Christian year as Easter and Whit Sunday or Pentecost.

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In the fourth century, Britain’s Christians acquired a taste for watering down the mystery of their message.

When the Roman Emperor Constantine ended decades of persecution for Christians in February 313, those in Britain returned to their churches with simple joy. Yet missionaries to Anglo-Saxon Britain in 597 found a church scattered and plagued by alien beliefs. St Bede blamed a priest from Egypt, Arius, for the startling change.

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The earliest Christians longed to celebrate the resurrection together at Passover, but that was not as easy as it sounds.

To keep Easter together during the Biblical festival of Passover was the shared dream of all the earliest Christian churches. But everyone seemed to have questions about how and when to celebrate the most important feast of the year, and no one seemed to have answers.

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