How should our words be? The perfect example of our words is our Savior, Jesus Christ. He spoke with his life. He spoke with his deeds. He spoke through his teaching, which we learn from the Gospel and the proclamation of the Apostles.
All this is very fine, but the question is: how do we apply this Word in our everyday life? We need constant translation to understand Our Lord for ourselves during our lifetime, and then to proclaim Him in our society through our life’s example, deeds, and words.
We must learn God’s language so His Word comes to life in ours. We must learn His vocabulary and become familiar with His grammar; then we will be able to speak God.
We must be careful not to strip this language of its divine content and to empty the Word of God of its original selfhood—the reality of the Only Begotten Son becoming man. We must not exchange this Word for the meanings dear to our flat and materialistic culture of death, where all difference between evil and good is erased to create a semblance of innocence, a shortsighted belief in recreating an earthly paradise exactly, which poisons the concept of free choice and free will with a negligent understanding of a purposeless happiness of our fallen nature.
Imprisoned in human words, we build, brick by brick, an understanding that is easily domesticated, taming the powerful call of God’s voice beneath human prudence and its false peace. We engrave the cross of Our Lord everywhere, only not to pick it up on our own shoulders. We translate the preaching of Christ, emptying it of its divine sap and filling it with beautiful ideas and appealing desires, lacking the savory salt of God’s goodness. We make ourselves believe that what is sweet to human taste is sweet to God as well.
Our words must carry the Word of God, because through the power of the sacrament of Baptism, we received the power to be announcers of God’s own good news and preachers of His Word. That’s the way to become temples where God resides and true interpreters of His Word. We are not going to discount and devalue the divine power of that Word through the restricted faith of human virtues. We are not going to extinguish the bright hope that Word brought to this world by turning it into a distant lighthouse; on the contrary, we are going to carry that hope in our words and spread it every time we speak. We are not going to exchange the eternal goodness that feeds the flame of divine love for the apathetic coldness of our fallen human desires. We are going to keep God’s Word uncontaminated so that it may set us afire and engulf this world.