The Meanings Of The Word Of God Series

Monday of 32nd Week in Course

Verbum Domini

God’s word to us today is strong and admonitory. Seek wisdom–which means seek the will of God–and follow after it. Don’t think you can hide from God. The spirit of God is everywhere, and knows everything we think or say. Don’t lead others, especially the innocent, into sin. It would be better for such a one to be drowned in the ocean–Mafia-style–with a concrete slab around his neck. But God’s word doesn’t sound like that of a novice deputy sheriff. It’s more like dad telling us to straighten up for our own good. Indeed, God is only telling us about His law because disobeying that Law just leads to our misery and tragedy. Wisdom is a kindly spirit, because God is a God of love, only looking for our good.

The Old Testament speaks of Wisdom almost like a divine person. St. John takes this tendency one step further when he tells us that what the OT calls Wisdom, we call the Word of God, the Logos. The Word was with God, and the Word was–and is–God. God does not only want to have a dialogue with us, He wants to participate in that dialogue from both ends. The Word became flesh and lived among us. This is the same Word that was present in the beginning, when the world was made from nothing.

The Holy Father, in Verbum Domini, tells us that “God was never without his Logos. The Word exists before creation. Consequently at the heart of the divine life there is communion, there is absolute gift.”

“God makes himself known to us as a mystery of infinite love in which the Father eternally utters his Word in the Holy Spirit. Consequently the Word, who from the beginning is with God and is God, reveals God himself in the dialogue of love between the divine persons, and invites us to share in that love. Created in the image and likeness of the God who is love, we can thus understand ourselves only in accepting the Word and in [total obedience] to the work of the Holy Spirit. In the light of the revelation made by God’s Word, the enigma of the human condition is definitively clarified.”

Now what does the term “Word of God” really mean. As is often with human speech, our language does not easily come to terms with the mystery. The Synod refers to the word of God as a kind of symphony–one word has multiple layers of meaning. The expression “word of God” refers to God’s self-communication.

First, the Logos, the Word of God, is the Second person of the Blessed Trinity, the person we call Jesus, the God-man. This is true God, begotten by the Father outside time, in eternity, not created by God. He is, as our Creed will say in a few weeks, consubstantial with the Father. There is no difference in substance–in nature–between the Father and the Son, but they are distinct persons.

‘But this same Word, Saint John tells us, “became flesh” (Jn 1:14); hence Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, is truly the Word of God who has become consubstantial with us. Thus the expression “word of God” here refers to the person of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of the Father, made man.’

Second, through the Spirit of God, the Word of God has been manifest to the world. This happened primarily in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, where the Logos became human. But God has also spoken His word as words, utterances of the prophets and the Law, and of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, and His disciples. ‘God’s word is thus spoken throughout the history of salvation, and most fully in the mystery of the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son of God.’ This is the preached word of God. Some of this living tradition, these living words, were set down in what we call the NT. ‘All this helps us to see that, while in the Church we greatly venerate the sacred Scriptures, the Christian faith is not a “religion of the book”: Christianity is the “religion of the word of God”, not of “a written and mute word, but of the incarnate and living Word”[19] Consequently the Scripture is to be proclaimed, heard, read, received and experienced as the word of God, in the stream of the apostolic Tradition from which it is inseparable.’