‘My words shall not pass away’

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

THESE were spoken by Christ, clearly telling us how important and indispensable his words are to us. (cfr. Lk 12,33) They are living words that while spoken ages ago will always give us something new. As one saint would put it, Christ’s words are both old and new.

To be sure, Christ’s words are not just an idea, a doctrine, an ideology. They are not just a strategy, a culture or a lifestyle. Of course, Christ’s words can involve all these, but unless we understand Christ’s word as God himself, the God who became man to reveal to us all that we need to know, all that we need to do to be God’s image and likeness as God wants us to be, we would miss the real essence and character of Christ’s word.

We have to realize that the word of God cannot be separated from God himself. That’s because God is so perfect as to be in absolute simplicity. As such, God has no parts, no aspects, no quality or property that are distinct from his very being. His word and his being are just one. There is no distinction at all in him.

Of course, from our point of view, we cannot help but to describe God according to our own terms and ways that cannot help but make distinctions between the essence of a being and its properties and qualities. But in himself, God does not have distinction between his essence and the properties that we attribute to him.

Of course, this is a mystery, a supernatural truth that our reason cannot fully fathom. That is why we need to have a strong faith to be able to accept this truth. And once we accept by faith the absolute unity between God and his word, then we will realize that reading and meditating on the gospel is actually having a living encounter with God through Christ.

That is why, St. Jerome, a father of the Church, once said that to read the Scripture is to converse with God—“If you pray, you speak with the Spouse. If you read, it is he who speaks to you,” he said.

We have to realize that we need to be guided by God’s words rather than by our own thoughts, reasoning and estimations of things. No matter how brilliant and clever we are, we can only go so far in understanding things in this world, many of which are very mysterious to us.

We have to develop a fondness for the words of God. This we can do as long as we exert due effort and continually ask, with humility, for the grace of God. Without these requirements, we can easily be swept away by the many alluring ideologies in the world.

It’s when we listen and live by God’s words that we attain our human and Christian maturity. And as St. Paul would say, we would then be like infants no longer, “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of the people in their deceitful scheming.” (Eph 4,14)

It’s important that we spend time developing a liking and an intimacy with the words of God. We have to read and meditate on them daily, and use them as the spirit behind all events, activities and concerns that we have during the day.

We have to understand that God’s words are not meant to give us the technical solutions to our problems. They are meant to be the soul and the spirit of all our concerns and activities.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com