Eternal words

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” (Mk 13,31)

With these words that came from the lips of Christ, we now know where we can get hold of eternity while still here on earth. It’s in believing his words, no matter how mysterious and too fantastic they may sound to us.

We need to echo that response of St. Peter who, when asked if the apostles would also go away from Christ when he talked about himself as the bread of life, said: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.” (Jn 6,68)

 Let’s convince ourselves more deeply and more consistently that it is in God’s words, and now in ours, no matter how brilliant and reasonable they may sound, that we can arrive at what truly is important to us — our eternal heavenly bliss, and not just some worldly goal.

Our tendency is to supplant God’s words with our own, as if our own words can just spring to us without springing first of all from God, the origin of words and  everything connected to them — our   communications, our education, our knowledge, etc. We distort that basic reality by thinking we can just use words fully by our own criteria.

In fact, we call the second person of the Blessed Trinity not only as the Son of God, but also the very word of God, the Divine Word, because he is the entirety of God’s self-knowledge and the pattern of the whole creation, his work “ad extra,” outside of himself.

 He is the very standard of truth, goodness, beauty, justice, and all virtues and values by which we measure ourselves. And yet we can corrupt that reality by practically making ourselves as the norm and measure of these virtues and values.

God’s words enable us to understand everything in the best way. The Letter the Hebrews says so: “The word of God is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two-edged sword; and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” (4,12)

That God is the origin and goal of truth, goodness, etc. is a fundamental truth that is often taken for granted now. And so, right at the very foundation of our daily activity and communications, we already have a big gap, like a congenital defect, that likely will become worse as we go on with our daily routine that unavoidably uses words.

This is the condition that will increasingly alienate us from God, keeping us in some kind of cocoon, making us increasingly oblivious to God’s words and will. Things can be so bad that we can consider God’s words not only as irrelevant and out of touch with what we call reality, but also hostile to our very own humanity, our own freedom.

This is what we see around. That is why instead of communication, we often have miscommunication; instead of information, misinformation; instead of charitable conversations, we have gossips, calumnies and detractions.

The many forms of modern and powerful modern information technologies have also increased our confusion and temptations and sin. They are like the modern Tower of Babel, throwing us into so many different languages and mind-frames that we now don’t understand and care for one another.

In fact, these days we can frequently witness explosions of rage in the discussions of what we call hot button issues. Verbal abuse has become an epidemic, clearly showing that our use of words has been detached from God whose essence is charity.

Right now, many people are accusing others in indulging what they call as mere talking points. They refer to the clever use of words and rhetoric to make them appear knowledgeable and competent, if not to deceive others, twisting facts and data, etc.

They know how to be politically correct, which means that they only use worldly criteria, or social and political norms, not the criteria from God or from our faith, in their use of words.

In normal times, there is nothing wrong with being politically correct because that attitude usually reflects deeper religious values. But these days, things have become so bad that to be politically correct is almost synonymous to being foxy and sly, and being so is not anymore a negative trait. It’s has become today’s virtue.

We have to return to the eternal words of God. We need to go back to the gospel, to the doctrine of our faith, and live it.

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