When the Israelites heard the first word of the Law in the Ten Commandments, so the old rabbinical story goes, they swooned. Their souls left them. So the word returned to God and cried out, "O Sovereign of the Universe, you live eternally and your Law lives eternally. But you have sent me to the dead. They are all dead!" Thereupon God had mercy and made his word more palatable.1 God told a story.
Our sacred story for today said that they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. Long before, Jesus had said to his disciples, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away."
At the end of the conflict stories in Mark Jesus left the Temple for the last time. Sitting on the Mount of Olives, looking down at the Temple, he told his friends of the new temple, which would bring in God's time and the new heaven and earth. "Listen!" Mark told his congregation. Listen to the shaking of the foundations. Nothing is permanent. Everything is change. Heaven and earth will pass away. Mark was writing his words to a community that had finally revolted against the Roman rule and had failed, to a community trying to make sense out of a chaotic world. The temple where God resided and ruled had been destroyed. The revolt was a defeat. All that remained were a few at Masada awaiting their death. To this community Jesus' words created a new world, connecting life with God beyond the Temple, in the world here and now, and they asked, and continue to ask, for a response. "Whose words will you follow?"
There is a war of myths. The Roman government has its myth. The revolutionaries have their myth. The temple priests have theirs. It is true, as well, today. Madison Avenue has its myth: "Buy! Buy!" Big business has its myth: "Money is power!" The government of the United States has its myth: "My country right or wrong." Because a myth is the story by which we live, out of which we act, it is a sustaining story. Jesus' words tell us of a loving, generous Parent who forgives, preparing a banquet for our return. They tell of an enemy who helped heal another by pulling him out of the ditch, of a Shepherd who hunted for the little, lonely, and lost, a Creator who sends rain on the just and the unjust, and counts each hair of our head.
Jesus' words invited his hearers to hear and see in a radically new way, for sacred stories have that power, the power to change a person and a people at their very roots. And Jesus was in his word, inviting us to dwell in his word. Jesus was the Word. Words are symbols. They mean more than they say. They are rich in meaning. The poet wrote, "I am evading a definition. If it is defined, it will be fixed and it must not be fixed ... To fix it is to put an end to it" (Wallace Stevens).
Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, the light, the door, the vine, the shepherd," as a storyteller who spoke in symbols. I believe in their reality. Most poets, preachers, and "profess-ers" of faith do. "A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words." In the speaking and writing of words, they are given life. They become what they express, as God sent out God's word to do what it was meant to do.
Words are our stumbling, inarticulate, sometimes amazing way of expressing what we feel and think about invisible, eternal realities, the world of the spirit. Yet, just as we are one in body and soul, so the worlds of spirit and of flesh are intertwined.
Words provide a way by which to see. They have the possibility of making our meaning. The poet W. H. Auden once said that poets write because they like "hanging around words."
Sometimes
the writer
of words,
restless and
divinely discontent,
Jacob-like
struggles with
these angelic creatures
until they name.
Sometimes
the writer stands aside
waiting,
listening
for what they
have to say.
And sometimes
patiently,
gently,the writer leads them
as a flock
beside still waters.
The disciples believed because of the words of Jesus and of scripture. Faith is believing in God. The poet Robert Frost was once asked what made him think he could write a poem. He simply "believed in it." He said that the most creative thing of a child, a man, or a woman was to believe in a thing. Because the disciples believed, they carried Jesus' words into the world, and they have never passed away.
Jesus' words touched the deep places of his hearers' heart. His hands touched their bodies, their eyes and ears, as he healed and blessed them, and with his touch and his words said, "I am here."
God has a "word" for each of us: "Agnes, feed my sheep. Philip, love one another. Bradley, follow me." And when we "eat" and enflesh God's words, they come alive among and within us. "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." They will be a part of you as long as you exist -- which is forever. Praise be to God! Amen and Amen!
1. Rosemary Haughton, Tales from Eternity (New York: Seabury, 1973).