BILLTESKA

Suppose I were to announce to you: the dolgy are otstavly. Would you consider this very good news? Important at all? No. It would be meaningless to you: nonsense syllables with no content.

That is God’s problem in trying to communicate to us. Every word that proceeds out of the Divine Mouth is not necessarily intelligible to us. The gulf is too great. So, God has to find a way to speak to us in terms that we can understand. Or at least begin to understand. So, God communicated with the ancient Hebrews through their story of liberation from bondage in Egypt.

Part of that story included the long journey through the desert after they actually escaped. The journey of a whole generation, in which none of the original escapees made it to the Promised Land: only their offspring. But God cared for them and led them and protected them on the way. One of the central ways God saved them was by providing them food when they were starving. This became the occasion for a very interesting lesson.

God did not provide ordinary food, but something they had never seen before. They called it manna and believed that it had floated down out of the sky. God informed them that there was a purpose for this strange sustenance: so that they would know that human beings are not sustained, even in their physical lives, by physical nourishment only (by bread alone) but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. And the Manna represented these Divine Words. The Israelites heard this, and figured they had better pay attention to everything written down in Holy Scripture. That’s pretty much what it meant for them. God spoke many “words” to Moses, and he wrote them down in the Pentateuch. And we had better pay attention.

God has another problem in communicating with us: although what God is trying to communicate to us does not change, we change. Societies and whole cultures change: get born, grow up, get old and die. All flesh is as grass, whose flower fadeth, but the Word of the Lord endureth forever. So God speaks to one culture in its full flower of receptivity, but then it dies out, leaving a record of the Word as God spoke it to them and then new societies and cultures come along and try to take in the all-important Word, but it is sometimes unintelligible – or it turns out to mean to them something very far removed from what it first meant. A lot of this is because our human concerns vary from age to age. For example, the ancient Hebrews were mostly concerned with the survival of the tribe. How do we perpetuate ourselves as God’s chosen? They were not particularly concerned with individual survival of biological death, but with the eternal prosperity of the Children of Israel. They had a deal: we’ll obey Your law and You will defend us.

But gradually, their concerns changed, until at the time of Jesus, people were much more concerned about their transgressions and their eternal destiny as individuals. Plenty of them also looked for a communal deliverance from real, historical oppression. But the paradigm was shifting. By the time the Gospel of John was written, the hope for political deliverance from Rome had been crushed. The Temple has been destroyed, its sacred vessels carried off to Rome, its worship gone forever.

What would replace it? Who was the heir of the Hebrew religious tradition? John wrote in the middle of this controversy. He places Jesus in conflict with those he calls the Jews and portrays Him as addressing His remarks to certain others John refers to as the People. Now, of course, if the scene were really Jerusalem at the time of Jesus all the people would have been Jews, unless it simply meant the residents of Judæa. But 90 years later, when John was actually writing, I think it is safe to say that the Jews stood for rabbinic Jews of the diaspora throughout the Roman Empire, the people who were related to the Pharisees of the New Testament. And those called the People stood for the non-Jewish general population of the Roman Empire, among whom this Greek-speaking Evangelist lived and for whom he wrote His mystical Gospel about eternal life and union with God in Jesus Christ, the Word of God.

Clearly, this passage identifies Jesus with the Manna from heaven. Deuteronomy already identified that bread from heaven as the Word of the Lord. John found this useful, because educated pagans would have understood this kind of language. From Stoic philosophy they already knew about something called the Divine Logos. It would be very good news indeed to hear that this Logos had been made flesh and dwelt among us, as John wrote in his Prologue. So the Manna is the Word that comes from God’s mouth, and Jesus is that Word. Furthermore, the Living, Incarnate Word is mystically present in the Bread of the Eucharist and whoever eats it will live forever. This was intelligible. It fit the way John’s contemporaries thought about religious matters. On the other hand, if he were to have told them, “Hey, all dolgy are otstavly.” He would not have gotten very far. It’s not just that the words are gibberish. Even in translation they would not have meant much to pagan Greco-Romans.

By the way, it is not gibberish, but Russian, and it means “all debts are cancelled.” By which we understand the forgiveness of sins. But that was not a particular concern of the ancient pagans. Their concern was what was going to happen to them after they died. So John concentrated on the assurance that the meaning of the Manna is eternal life, and Jesus is the Guarantor. This was also of interest only to some of the more Hellenized Rabbinic Jews of the Roman Diaspora, but most of them were more interested in maintaining their identity as God’s Chosen Israel, now that the Temple was gone. Hence John’s polemical rebuke:

In other words, your old religious paradigm about being the Chosen People and a Light to the Gentiles only goes so far, and it’s fine as far as it goes. But it is not much help to these gentiles. The sacred bread that you ate in the wilderness did not bring anybody everlasting life. At least part of the controversy was a result of a divergence in ways of seeing the world, and the human predicament. For the Jews, the problem was sin and righteousness and keeping faith with the deal they had with God. The concern of gentile Christians, increasingly, was mystical union with God through Baptism and the Eucharist. Yes, God had spoken in the Desert; His Word was in the Manna. But times and cultures had changed. Who needs that kind of Manna? And now God has spoken again. Now we can see that Manna was an antetype of the Eucharist, the Bread whoso eateth shall never die.

Nowadays, if you go up to somebody and tell them “Hey Have I got good news for you! Your sins are forgiven and you are going to live forever! All you have to do is eat some of this!” You are just as likely as not to get a bewildered stare: “Are you crazy?” “What sins?” or “Why would I even want to live forever?” Or something like that. The old proclamation doesn’t always address contemporary concerns. Although it remains true, it can be devoid of meaning, like announcing dolgy are otstavly. Mere translation doesn’t fix the problem. It is an answer to a question that hasn’t been asked. The life-giving Manna has to be consumed on the spot, in the time and place it was provided. It cannot be saved for tomorrow. In fact, according to the story, God punishes those who try to hoard it for the future.

Nevertheless, the human religious impulse is to do just that, some of the Manna was reported to be enshrined in the Ark, which was very nearly the opposite of its purpose. Certainly it had no nutritive power from generation to generation. Like the Manna that had to be renewed from day to day, the treasures of God’s communication with us have to be renewed from culture to culture. Simply preserving them, even translating the messages as faithfully as we can, will not do.

Every word. So there must be more than one. God speaks more than one word. And we are to live by every one of them. God speaks to humanity more than once. Maybe that means, as the Israelites thought, that God utters many commandments pursuant to His Covenant with the Chosen People. Maybe it means that Jesus is the True Bread Which Comes Down from Heaven: the Manna, the ultimate Word to come out of the mouth of God. But maybe the multiplicity of words form God’s mouth means that God speaks to each culture and generation in ways they can understand. So that they can hear that dolgy are otstavly and understand on their own terms the terrifically good news not only in their own language but in their own mentality ~ their worldview, their paradigm, their whole way of thinking.

The Word of God is the Only-begotten Son, eternally begotten of the Father, Who was incarnate of the Virgin Mary. He is the Word that comes out of the mouth of God. Present in the Manna. He is the True Bread that comes down from Heaven, the Bread of our altars, unto eternal life for those who eat this flesh. But this truth does not have to mean that the Word comes only once, only in one place and one time and one culture.

As we are nourished by this one incarnate Word, so are we nourished by every Word that comes from the mouth of God, wherever these Words are to be found and heard. In our time, which sometimes seems to have more than its share of curses, there is at least one peculiar blessing: we are able to hear that Word and recognize that Divine Manna from heaven in many hitherto unknown languages and alien symbol-systems. Perhaps we are ready – for the first time in human history – to begin really to live by every Word that comes out of the mouth of God.