Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Preventing Grace

Home
Evangelical
The Word Never Says What You Want To Hear

The Word Never Says What You Want To Hear

Last updated on: November 11, 2018 at 7:10 am by Anne Kennedy

The Word Never Says What You Want To Hear 2018-11-11T07:10:13-04:00 Anne Kennedy

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Below is a basic Christianity 101 talk I gave on Friday to students, some of whom were not sure of the existence of God, some unclear about Jesus, some very new believers. Enjoy!

I have had the dubious honor of teaching six whole children to read. A long time ago, when my oldest was facing down kindergarten, my husband and I thought it would be cool, to, you know, “homeschool.” We are both educated people. I have a masters degree for heaven’s sake. I studied comparative literature as an undergrad. I have written a book. Reading is kind of my thing. So Of Course, of all people, I should be able to teach other people, especially children, who basically don’t even know anything, to read.

So, my first child didn’t read very well until age nine, because I thought that if I just named the letters, and then sharply rebuked her whenever she forgot, she would easily get the point. Whenever she didn’t understand, or would sound out a word carefully and then say something completely different, like c-a-t, puc, I took it personally. ‘Why don’t you love me,’ I would whisper to myself. What’s wrong with you? Gradually I corrected my wrong ideas. And so the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th children read without too much trouble. Then I came to the 6th. And because I am still a bad person, though maybe with better teaching skills, God has afflicted me in the way that I probably deserve most. Here is what happened to me recently.

“H-o-n-o-r-e-d…hon-red…honored…Why does it say honored? I don’t want it to say honored, I want it to say child.” She writhed around in misery for five minutes. “Why does it have to say that,” she said over and over. I sat, baffled. “That’s what it says,” I said. “The person who wrote the book wanted to use the word honored and so he did. When you write a book you can use whichever words you want. But you can’t force this person to use the word honored when he wanted to use the word child.” And so she wept.

And really, in some deep abiding way, we all weep with her. We want the words that we use to be the ones by which all creation is ordered, by which everything makes sense, by which other people live their lives. And why is this? Because words are the way that we make sense of everything. They provide the order and structure of our own minds, of the cosmos itself as we each conceive of it.

And this is as it should be, because we are made in the image of the one who said that The Word is the foundation point for all life, for reality itself. “In the beginning,” writes the Apostle John, “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” He is riffing off those even more ancient words that you might have heard. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” We might argue for a hundred years about how the universe came into being—and when—but here, at the beginning of a book, God takes credit for bringing everything into existence. Then, several millennia later, he says that the way he did it was by speaking, and in the same breath he identifies that speaking as himself. He so closely binds himself to language, to communication, to words, that he says of himself that he is The Word—the word by which all other words can even be formed in the thought and then the mouth.

This is quite a claim. Human language is multifaceted and rich, abundantly complex and filled with nuance and meaning, sound and thought. Even more, it is the center of human life, as necessary as breath and pulse. You have to use language to get food, to drive a car, to have clothes, to be here at this institution, to form relationships, to know yourself. And so, inevitably, human words—though so very strong, strong enough for you to be alive—do break apart under the weight of what they carry. You, as I, have probably had serious and painful breakdowns of communication. You might have said something, but the person you said it to heard something different. You might have written something that got you in trouble. You may have not been able to find the right word at the right moment. You, I hope, have probably met someone you didn’t share a language with, and so stood mute, smiling, hopefully, wanting to be friends, to cross the barrier of yourself, but were unable to. More painful even than that is when words are used to destroy people, when someone says one thing and means the complete opposite, when you find that you have been lied to, when the great power of a word is wielded almost as a weapon by one person against another.

So we might concede that it is very shocking that God would take on the difficulties and inadequacies of human language, would so self-identify with language that he takes the name The Word, and would then leave us with a book of translucently thin pages as the primary way to know him. This seems like an ineffective and even ridiculous way forward.

How many of you have read all the way through the Bible? More than once? How many made a good solid effort? Somewhere along the way you probably got stuck either in Leviticus or one of the Chronicles, or Romans, or Jeremiah—that’s usually my nemesis. By the time you get to the end of the minor prophets, if you go through them without stopping, you will probably have developed a true and irretrievable depression. God is by turns angry, sad, exalting, hopeful, but mostly full of lamentation.

But as you go along, if you are persistent, you will find something else interesting. You will squint your spiritual eyes and begin to find a strange but still out of focus picture. You step back to look at it and it’s like trying to find the actual water lily in a Monet painting. You can make out the rough lines, you can see a real picture emerging, but the details throw you into unknowing confusion. Why would this book be like this? Why would it be so hard? It seems, honestly, like these words that God gives are the worst way for us to know about him.

Because God does want us to know him. He says so, in a whole bunch of places. It’s the drum beat of Ezekiel. “On that day I will cause a horn to spring up for the house of Israel, and I will open your lips among them. Then they will know that I am the LORD.” – Ezekiel 29:21

Indeed, God created us and the world because he wanted us to know him and to trust him. He didn’t want to be known as a cyborg, as a string of computer code, a proposition, a list of facts—he wanted to be known as one friend knows another, as a father is known by his child, as a husband is known by a wife, as a brother is known by a sister. The scriptures are the revelation of himself to human people. The way, when you see someone you want to know, you begin to tell that person some things about you, your name, what kind of person you are, what things you are doing.

And, isn’t it painful when you divulge yourself, reveal yourself, and the person to whom you are speaking rejects you? That has happened to me one or two times. There you have a painful way in to experience God’s own revelation.

He begins with his name—I AM—and who he is—God—and what kind of person he is—faithful, long suffering, merciful, just, the measure and perfection of goodness—and what he is doing—crossing the boundaries of human rebellion and division to restore the friendship of God with humanity. Some of these revelations sound deeply and hauntingly beautiful to our human ears. Some of them are dark and difficult. Some of them sound incomprehensible, troubling, alien. Some of them are plain and easy and comforting. All of them reveal a God who has the desire and the capacity to be known.

Stand back from the text and try looking at it a different way. The more you read it, the more you will see a particular Word emerging.

God, the Word. What did he do? The opposite of everything that you would have done. He left his glory, his power, the beauty of heaven, and came in the most lowly, the poorest, the ugliest circumstances. And he did it so that he could join himself to you, so that you, who are not God, could look at him and know him, could hear his words and understand his voice. He came and took on human language, revealing himself in the most intimate way. And then, by the power of his preaching, and of the witness of the gospels who wrote down what he said and did, thousands of years later many of us have been saved, have been restored to friendship with God.

Examine his life, his words, his character in the gospel as closely as you can, and then go back through the rest of the text and you will find that every single brush stroke, every single strange detail, every single lost waterlily floats out from the page, emerges in the light, comes into a sharp perfect detailed focused lens to show you the Christ, Jesus, the Word.

As you read and listen you will discover that God can use human language, that he is capable of using human language, and that when we do not understand his words in his scriptures it is not because we are too clever, too brilliant, because we know better, but because we are each like my child who weeps when the words on the page do not say what she wants them to say. In other words, they reveal how much I am, and you are, not God.

Because the property of being human, though imbued with the gift of language, is to adore and worship the self. And so all human language is employed in that direction. My words, my thoughts, my intentions are supreme over the created order. I may use them to communicate and bind myself to you, but even more essentially I use them to measure you, and ultimately to measure God.

I used the word weapon earlier. We use words as weapons to destroy each other. God also uses his word, his strong, unbreakable word, as a weapon—a sword is the word used in Hebrews. But the purpose of this weapon is the opposite of our weapons. The Word has the power to divide you, to cut you loose, as surgeon cuts away a deadly disease, away from the very reasons for which you language, to make yourself into God. Its power is not to wound, to destroy you, to bring you into chaos and confusion. It is rather to send you to the feet of the only true remedy, to the Word himself. You find yourself undone, and you turn to Jesus, the true and living Word, and he binds you to himself, he heals all your diseases, he gives you eternal life, he communicates himself to you, he reorders your cosmos. And most importantly of all, by his own word, the word that comes forth from his mouth, he restores you to friendship with him.

Reading the Bible

Just Plain Spiritual

Previous Post

November 9, 2018

7 Saving Takes

Next Post

November 12, 2018 Virtual Church Podcast and Links

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category books Catechesis of the Good Shepherd Children in Conversation culture watch Daily Devotions Demotivations with Anne faith alone for the grandparents GAFCON In conversation with children In the News Kitchen Notes Lambeth Learning Notes Life Going On Men are Human Notes from Home Pictures Reading the Bible Saturday Links Sermons Signs of the Apocalypse The Bad Word Association The Prayer of Jonah Travel Notes Uncategorized Witless Wednesdays Work and the Christian

Select a Month June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 July 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which prophet was exiled to Babylon and saw a vision of four living creatures?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Jeremiah Joel Ezekiel Hosea

Books by This Author Books by Anne Kennedy

See All Titles »