The opening sentences of any book have to be crafted with great care; they set the tone for what follows. And when it comes to autobiography, the opening sentences have an even greater importance:

I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight.

You will recognise that as coming from Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, and within seconds we know we are in the hands of a master storyteller - in this case, one who is telling the story of his own life, with romantic flourish and bravura.

Compare it with this, the opening sentences of Douglas Hurd's memoirs:

We thought at the time we lived an ordinary life in an extraordinary place. Going back there, I can see now that this semicircle of downland is not extraordinary, just pleasant, as many landscapes in England are pleasant.

The language is measured, steady, unforced. They are the words of a man who is not out to grab attention. He is going to bring a fine and balanced judgment to things.

And now, my third example:

He was guilty. There was no doubt about that. He was only eight or nine years old, but guilty he certainly was. He had remained silent and, in consequence, the gardener's boy got the blame.

Those are the opening lines of the autobiography of the theologian, Harry Williams. In fact he's not describing himself but the memory of a story read to him by his mother. Nevertheless, it's revealing - and, again, deliberately selected.

This may be a slightly odd way to begin an address on Maundy Thursday, but let me explain why I've done so. A few days ago I was reading Adam Sisman's biography of Wordsworth and Coleridge. It's the story of the friendship and interrelated lives of the two late eighteenth-century poets. In that book I came across a statement which stopped me in my tracks. It said that the word 'autobiography' was not invented until the first decade of the nineteenth century, that is, sometime between 1800 and 1810. Well, the word may not have been invented until then but certainly before that date men, like Lord Herbert of Chirbury, in the seventeenth century, and Clarendon, had written about their lives, had written their autobiographies. And much, much earlier, in the late fourth century, Augustine had written his powerful autobiography, known as Confessions.

What each of those authors does, whether it be Augustine in the fourth century or Douglas Hurd in the twenty-first, is to shape their material. They choose what to highlight and what to omit - none of us would do any different - but what the most insightful autobiographies do is highlight certain aspects of the life, so as to reveal or keep secret other parts. A good biography is a work of art, requiring discipline, skill and a compassionate judgment.

Well, we can read Laurie Lee, and Douglas Hurd, and Harry Williams, and William Wordsworth's Prelude, and, through their writings, get some glimpse of who they are. Now a question: why hasn't God written His autobiography? It's an awkward, naive question, verging on the ridiculous - but the very asking of it, naive and primitively innocent though it may seem, raises some very interesting issues.

I can imagine some of your responses:

But He has written it, hasn't He, in the works of Creation? Look on the sunset, a rose, a spider's web bedecked with dew, the ocean - and there, for those with eyes to see, is the autobiography of the Creator.

Yet others will want to argue that the closest we shall ever get to an autobiography of God is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ - a biography, of course, not written down by Himself and therefore, strictly speaking, not an autobiography at all, but placed into the hands of others, like Mark and Matthew, Luke and John.

And it's this that I find so illuminating and so deeply, deeply, humbling because whilst, of course, I believe that God was in Christ, the fact remains that He was so self-effacing, so self-emptying, that He trusted His Word to a few writers and a handful of friends, and wrote not a word about Himself.

Now let me push this a bit further: God not only entrusted His very life and purpose to others all those centuries ago, He continues to do the same now. He does not write His own story which we are then required to discover and decipher, as though it were written in a foreign language, He asks us to continue to write His story for Him and with Him. It is a massive, daunting and terrifying task, because we are asked to help Him write that story not only in the words of our sermons, our articles and our prayers, but in our very lives. Like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, we are called to be co-authors; the Word entrusts Himself to our words.

It is a dangerous exercise for God - think how often we shall, as it were, get God wrong - but it's also a dangerous exercise for ourselves, for we are all too prone to mistake our own egos and our own agendas for God's. God does not write His own autobiography, therefore; instead, thousands upon thousands of biographies are written, in which His infinite beauty and truth are mediated through our finite ineptitude and partial sightedness.

Do not, please, misunderstand me. I am not talking about rewriting the life of Christ. I am not suggesting for one moment that we can each say what we want - quite the opposite. Preaching and teaching the Word of God should make us tremble, because the beauty, the truth, the holiness, the utter humility and grace of the divine, are placed into our hands and into our minds and on our lips. Given such a holy task, how can we undertake it?

There is a beautiful phrase in the Book of Common Prayer, in the prayer for the Church, which says this:

And to all thy people give thy heavenly grace ... that, with meek heart and due reverence, they may hear, and receive thy holy Word ...

Now I recognise that the phrase ahead of that one prays that

... all Bishops and Curates ... may both by their life and doctrine set forth thy true and lively Word ...

and it could be argued that the prayer suggests that the clergy preach and the congregation merely and obediently respond 'with meek heart and due reverence'. I want to argue that those of us called to preach, called to teach, can only do so if we learn meekness of heart and if we learn 'due reverence' and if we learn to 'receive' the holy Word.

It is an astonishing thing that God has done: to place Himself in our hands as bread. It is an astonishing thing that He places Himself in our hearts and minds and on our lips through His Word - and then He commits Himself to us that He might be made known.

Whilst this requires of us a profound humility, it also requires courage, thankfulness and joy; courage that, after prayer and deep thoughtfulness, we may so preach and teach, that Christ himself is truly made known; thankfulness that in His loving wisdom, God, who knows all our weaknesses, nevertheless uses us (us, of all people); and joy, because in calling us to this task, we are playing a tiny part in God's outpouring and reconciling action in the world and because, through our preaching and teaching, we ourselves are invited to share new and old truths about God through Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, all of this: all our words, all our thoughts, all our teaching, will be taken up to the Godhead and there be renewed, redeemed, made whole. But, for the moment, on this earth, we are called by God to preach and teach His Word; we can, and must, kneel before Him, praying with all our heart that He will use us to speak His life to the world.

© Christopher William Herbert, 2007