Fr. Rafail Noica: the word and the Word
We show our freedom and our free choice when we respond to God through prayer, when we can say "Amen" to God's call.
I thought of talking about "the word." Maybe I should start with the words of our Savior: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (Matthew 24:35).
What is the word? We are used to considering it as a way to make contact with each other, as a means of exchanging information. But we see that the Scriptures say something else about the word: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1), "The Word became flesh" (John 1:14), "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light" (Genesis 1:3). And everything that God said through the word, was made. I go back to the words of our Savior when He said, "the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life" (John 6:63).
What is the word? How are we to understand it? And I want to connect this word, with God's help, to the notion of culture - the culture of the Spirit. The Scriptures show us that when God made everything else before man, He made it through a single word: "Let there be". But when it came to man, God worked differently: He said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." (Genesis 1:26). And so we understand that man is not a creature like every other creature. We know this not because of our pride but because of the word that God gave to us. And we see how, through the word, God continues to call man, to connect with man. God counsels Adam through the word; when Adam falls, when unlawfulness takes over the whole history of Earth from the Fall until the destruction in Noah's Flood, there comes a moment in history when God again talks to man, giving the Law through the Prophet Moses.
This Law had two goals: to bring man from unlawfulness to lawfulness - we can all understand this; it is the moral law - but also to give a glimpse through that law into what God will do at the "end of time" or better said at the completion of time. The "completion of time" will not happen mainly in a chronological sense but through the incarnation of the Word. Saint Paul says in the Epistle to the Hebrews: "In the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by His Son" (Hebrews 1:1-2). And "His Son" is also called the Word of God: the Word of God comes back now to continue His creation work through the dialogue He conducts with Man, or better said He reconducts it after the separation in Eden through Adam's fall. We can understand the Word as energy - creative energy.
And what is man's word? If man is God's image - God's image which can attain God's likeness - then man's word is also energy. God's word teaches us that through the word of prayer, we can become close to God. Man, through prayer, reaches the highest state of the word, where his word receives the power, in God's Spirit, to create, to some degree, how God created (for example, when Saints perform miracles);. However, man's destiny is not to create a world but to develop this image of God in himself into a perfect likeness. That is how we understand salvation.
How do we understand salvation? In the Church we understand salvation as communion with divine life. God shares His life with man. When man reaches that perfect likeness with God, for example, when man lives glory and insults and shame with the same unwavering divine love, then we have achieved great heights. Why? Because this steadfast love is not part of man's psychological makeup but a divine attribute: God cannot have any enemies. Who can stand against God? He does not waver because He is not increased by the glory we give Him, and neither is He decreased by the impiety we show towards Him. Because He is, and His life is eternal. God is, and He calls us "to be," and to the same eternity He possesses. We have reached great heights when we can live any Christian virtue, understood not in an ethical, moral sense but as obtaining the energy which lives in God Himself.
Here I am getting closer to the idea I wanted to express: what is this energy? It is the Word of God remaining in man (John 6:56, 15:4-5). God tries to touch man through the energy of the word. Man tries to respond to God through the word of prayer. Man shows his freedom and his free choice when he responds to God through prayer, when he can say "Amen" to God, to God's call. But what saves man is, again, not what man does in his powerlessness but what the word of God achieves by dwelling in us.
I would summarize what I've tried to express so far by saying that we understand the word, in its deepest sense, as an energy, and I would like us all to understand this and not stay at the level of information of the word. In the spiritual life, the word is communion, when God talks to man - as Scripture says - through His Only Begotten Son. If you pay attention to the differences between the Old and the New Testaments, there are significant differences in the words they use. The "ethical" Law of the Old Testament is "do this" and "do not do that." You will do something, or you will not do something else - we are limited to a relative "doing." When the Son and Word of God begins to teach humankind, His teaching starts with "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God," "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted," and so on (Matthew 5:3-11). We never see the Savior commanding from on high, as to His slaves, but He takes the commandments of the Old Testament, saying, "You heard that this is written," but He adds, "But I tell you that…." (Mathew 5:21-22, 27-28, 31-32, 33-34, etc.) and He gives the true dimension of the commandments of the Old Testament.
Why do I say "the true dimension"? In the Law of the Old Testament, He talked to us through prophets; in the New Testament, He Himself talks to us. The Old Testament had been a preparation for man to understand God at least a little. And how can we understand God? And indeed, how can we, since the Scriptures also say that the human mind cannot encompass God because God's thoughts are higher than the human thoughts, as the heavens are higher than the earth (Isaiah 55:8-9). And so it was given to man to understand God through the experience of obedience. Man was given at first an ethical code through Moses, through the Ten Commandments. And through this man learns not to lie, not to steal, and so on - that is, man learns that God does not want us liars, murderers, and so on, because God Himself is not a liar, nor a thief, nor a murderer, etc.
But we don't find life in this ethical code because what man is looking for, what he is thirsty for, is, after all, life. And how often do we hear these days, "Yes, but I want to live too" - which is generally used to justify a libertine life. And I hope I will not lead you astray if I tell you that, in some sense, man is right when he says this because, and I quote the words of the Savior: "Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man" (Mark 2:27). Sabbath, that is to say, "rest," meaning fulfillment. But I say this because, even in sin, man often betrays his longing for his true destiny, which is life.
And in what sense is man right? Man is looking for life. Something in man is looking not for what man imagines to be good -- either by misunderstanding God's word, or forced by his neighbor, or on a straight path, or going astray -- but, when everything is said and done, it is looking for life; this is the sense in which man is right. The Scriptures don't talk about something better or something worse, but they talk everywhere about life (John 10:10). And Christ's words to us are not about superior ethics, but, as God Himself, about "the eternal life" (John 6:68) - that is to say, about what He wanted to impart to us through the Law of the Old Testament as well, where He was "stumbling" on the one hand against the imperfection of the prophets, and on the other hand against the helplessness of the human thought to rise to a more subtle, more elevated, and thus more true, spiritual understanding.
Even in the Old Testament, in the Ten Commandments, God says to humankind: "Be holy, because I am Holy" (Leviticus 19:2). He doesn't say: "Be holy because it is good, it is admirable," but "Because I am Holy!" And God is He Who speaks thus to Moses. He revealed to Moses that "I AM". God is The One That Is. And He wants man "to be" as well. He imparts something to man in the beginning, and to the extent that man allows himself to partake in the word of God, he finds God in this word - as life energy.
Even in the Old Testament, we see in prophets and other saints that they found this life energy. They weren't just moral people; they were people in whom and to whom the Spirit could talk, people through whom God revealed to humankind different stages - let's call them - for man to get close to God again, that is to say a return to the state preceding the fall of Adam, who, in Eden, strayed away from God.
But the greatest closeness is in His Christ, in His Anointed One, His Son, His Word. In Christ, we don't have God talking through the power or the helplessness of a prophet, who is a man like we are, with some faults, as we see in the Old Testament; but He Himself talks to us, and the word is different. The word is more comforting than the Law of the Old Testament because it is the word of life, the word of creative energy - if man receives and allows this word to dwell in him.
What do I mean by that? We start at a level similar to the one in the Old Testament, a moral one if we don't understand anything else. We start not to do this, not do that, actions that "they say are bad." We start, maybe, to allow the Spirit to trigger in us a blaze of life, and to understand then through our own experience what life is, where life is -- this "what" and "where" being a quality; we start to feel the sweetness of all that is contained in a godly life, and through this sweetness, we can distinguish the bitterness even in what seemed attractive before, in what is called sin. And maybe this is the start of some new understanding.
The mystery of salvation is in man's partaking of the word of God, when man also allows God to partake of him. It is a reciprocal opening. And I repeat, this word is not at the level of information or morality, which is only a first step, a primitive level of nearness to God - but one where we can allow, so to speak, the Spirit of God to impart something to us, and this partaking or communion will lead man farther, and this "farther" doesn't have a limit, it leads to the complete identity of man with God.
I wanted to share something about the word through all these thoughts - a bit convoluted. The word as partaking or communion, not as information. This is a different level, where the word has a different energy.
From a conference titled “The Word of God, The Culture of the Spirit” held in Alba Iulia, Romania, 1994.