The Word in the People's Tongue

Forty four years after he was buried, men came with shovels to dig up John Wycliffe's bones. They burned what they found, and they threw the ashes into a river. Think about that. The man had been dead for nearly half a century, and still the powers of his age were afraid of him. They could not silence what he had set loose, so they tried to scatter the dust of the one who began it.

John Wycliffe lived in fourteenth century England, long before Luther, long before Calvin, long before anyone dreamed of a Reformation. He was an Oxford scholar, one of the sharpest minds of his day, a theologian whose lectures filled halls. Later ages would call him the Morning Star of the Reformation, the first faint light before a dawn he would never see. But in his own time he was simply a priest with a burden that would not let him rest. He looked at the church around him, at its wealth, its political power, its proud claims, and he held all of it up against one measure. Scripture. The word of God, he said, stands above every bishop and every pope. And ordinary people had a right to hear it in their own tongue.

That was the heart of it. In Wycliffe's England, the Bible was locked in Latin, the language of scholars and clergy. The ploughman in the field could not read it. The mother at her hearth could not read it. The word that was meant to form a whole people was kept behind a wall of learning, and Wycliffe could not bear it. Why should the bread of life be served only to those who already sat at the high table? So out from his circle came English Scripture, carried by hand, copied by candlelight, passed from one hungry reader to the next. His followers were mocked with a nickname, Lollards, mutterers, babblers. They wore it and kept going. They preached in the fields. They read aloud to people who had never heard a single verse in words they understood.

And the danger was real. To put the Bible in the people's tongue was, to the authorities, to hand fire to children. The Lollards were hunted. Some were silenced. Some were burned. Wycliffe himself was spared the flames of his lifetime. A stroke took him in 1384, at his church in Lutterworth, while the Latin words of the Mass were being spoken near him. He died in his bed. But his enemies were not finished. Decades later the Council of Constance condemned him, and the order went out to dig up his bones and burn them. So they did. And an old chronicler remembered it like this. They cast his ashes into the little river Swift, and the brook carried them to the Avon, and the Avon to the sea. As if to say that what they tried to destroy had only been spread wider.

Wycliffe was no lone rebel inventing his own religion. He did not say, my Bible, my opinion, my rule. He said the church itself must kneel beneath the word of God, popes and scholars and ploughmen alike, all of them under the one text. That was his quarrel with corrupt power, and it was a humble quarrel as well as a brave one. He saw what the prophets saw long before him, that holy words can become a cover for greed, and that God's voice will judge even those who claim to speak for him.

His light was not the full daylight. He only signalled that morning was coming. But the word he set loose in the people's tongue could not be buried, could not be burned, could not be drowned in any river. Human power can scatter a man's ashes on the water. It cannot call back the word of God once the people have heard it.