WE need to examine how we understand the word of God. To
be sure, God’s word is not just any word. Neither is God’s word just a
brilliant idea, a practical doctrine, and effective ideology. It’s not
just a strategy, a culture or a lifestyle.
God’s word, of course, can involve all these. But unless
we understand that God’s word is Christ himself, the second person of
the Blessed Trinity, the perfect image and word that the one God has
of his own self, we will miss the real essence and character of God’s
word. It’s this word that would bring us to the fullness of our
humanity.
We need to realize then that the word of God is
inseparable from God himself. That’s because God is so perfect as to
be in absolute simplicity. As such, God has no parts, no different
aspects, no quality or property that is distinct from his very being.
His word and his being are one and the same.
Of course, in our effort to understand and to relate
ourselves to God, we have to make distinctions, since that is how we
think and reason out. We analyze first before we synthesize. But in
God himself, there is no distinction between his being and his word,
between what or who he is, and what he says and does.
That is why we have to seriously take God’s word as spoken
to us through Christ, and now recorded in the Bible through the
instrumentality of inspired human authors, who are recognized as such
by the Magisterium of the Church.
This is the lesson Christ imparted on his disciples and on
us when he talked about the parable of the sower and the seed. (cfr.
Mt 13,1-23) The seed is God’s word as received by the different kinds
of ground, signifying the different attitudes people have toward God’s
word.
There are those that fell on the path, on a rocky ground
and on thorns, all of which obviously did not prosper in their growth.
But the ones that fell on rich soil grew to maturity and bore a lot of
fruit.
We obviously should try to be the rich soil that receives
the seed of God’s word with faith, but an operative faith that not
only listens to God’s words but also acts on them, assimilating them
into our life until they become our life itself, until they so
identify us with Christ that we become “alter Christus,” another
Christ, as we are meant to be.
Let’s always remember Christ telling us, “Whoever keeps my
word will never see death.” (Jn 8,51) These words are not meant to set
aside our human word in whatever mode it may come, whether in a
conversation or in some more serious stuff like our philosophies,
ideologies, sciences, etc. Christ’s words are meant to inspire all our
human words.
We need to develop the proper attitude toward the word of
God as contained in the Bible and authoritatively taught and
transmitted through the Church. Is there faith and piety when we read
and meditate on the gospel, for example? Do we realize that with faith
and piety, whenever we read the gospel it is like listening to Christ
himself?
We have to be wary of our tendency to be so seduced by our
worldly cultures and systems that we fail to discern Christ when we
meditate on the gospels and even when we develop our philosophies and
ideologies.
Christ should be the primary and ultimate object of any
literature that comes our way. That’s because as St. Paul would put
it, “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form and
in Christ you have been brought to fullness.” (Col 2,9) In other
words, the fullness of our humanity can only be achieved through our
full identification with Christ who makes himself available to us
through his word!
No comments:
Post a Comment