Power of the Words

“Come, follow me“ Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”(Mark 1:17)

Jesus talked to Simon and Andrew who were casting fishing net like this, “follow me”. This is surely the first incident that Jesus spoke to the person. You know Jesus spoke. Jesus, the Son of God, spoke to the man with a human voice.

Do you know when human beings have started to talk? For this, we might need archeological help, but actually we don’t have to know exact date. Instead we could get a little bit of information from a newborn baby. The most important thing for a newborn baby thrown just out of mother’s body is to breathe as well as to cry for his life. Before that time the baby might not need these basic things inside of the womb, because it should be provided every possible things for sustaining his life through a navel string. But baby’s crying is not a word yet. The baby’s crying shows only that he is breathing and his vocal cord is functioning normally. When I observe newborn babies in my church, I could see that it takes a lot of time for them to start talking. Some hasty parents seem to believe that their kids have begun talking with them, even though babies still need more time in order to start talking.

Why is it so hard to learn to speak? It is because speaking is an experience of life existence. Speaking is a life phenomenon that does not happen when he exists by himself and that only it could happen when he recognizes the existence of other beings. So the newborn baby cannot talk because of lack of recognition. Of course even it could be very hard for him to activate his vocal cord. And then when he can recognize his mother and father, he learns to speak. The more objects he could recognize, the more vocabularies the baby could use, and his speech skill improves very fast.

We do not know when anthropoids, our ancestor, started speaking; probably the use of language could not be that long like newborn babies. Probably even they started talking, it might take such a long time before it improved like modern language with abundant vocabularies. Sometimes we could see people who like to train a chimpanzee to talk, but the result seems to be very insignificant, because chimpanzee does not have a deep understanding about existence. Since I am not a linguist, I think I should get back to the text in the Bible.

Actually Jesus spoke to Simon Brothers. This could be happening routinely, but also it is a great encounter. That means that between Jesus and Simon Brothers some great things had started to happen. The words of Jesus began to have a new meaning for their lives. It is an existential power of the word.

Everyday we live talking to each other. But most of our talking could be like garbage. It is much possible for lots of speaking from lots of preachers including me could be garbage. Why? It is because there is no existential power in their words. In order to show him off we call friends and try to persuade them without existential power in our words. Think about it carefully. What kind of words did we speak out of our mouth today? With life and truth, hope and power of love did we talk in our speaking? Just like Jesus did to Simon Brothers?

Christianity had lost the power of the words from some time ago. The world does not have any attention to the words from the church. Our words having life could never sound strange to the worldly people, but instead our words seem to have so much of our greed. Think about it. Does Christians’ opinion to oppose minority religious group, who insist alternative public service to keep their peace-oriented faith, have life in their words? I don’t want to talk about these things in details in here.

Urgently we need like that encounter of words, what Jesus did to Simon Brothers. This encounter does not require complicated theological reasoning. It depends upon that our spirit is open to the spirit of truth or not. Or open to the spirit of love. Can I say one more word? This is upon relationship with the Holy Spirit. That is the relationship with the spirit of life. The core of this event is an open heart to the spirit of Truth, not a close heart for himself. Since Jesus is that person who was in accord with the Holy Spirit, his words could be an event to save human beings.

Did my explanation sound too ideological? The conclusion is concrete like this: “Think carefully before you talk”.

Lord. Hope our talking could be related with the spirit of life. Amen.