ON A JOURNEY: Meditations on God in daily life
September 5, 2003
"Looking up to heaven, Jesus sighed and said to the deaf man,
'Ephphatha,' that is, 'Be opened.'
And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly."
(Mark 7.34-35, from the Gospel for Sunday)

By Tom Ehrich

My first exposure to other languages was learning to sing Latin - unless the relentless "Disney-speak" of the "Mickey Mouse Club" counts as a foreign tongue.

Then I studied Latin and classical Greek, dabbled in French, sang in Spanish, lasted one college semester in Russian, dodged Greek and Hebrew in seminary, and came out of my formal education deaf and dumb in all tongues except English. If God and the other guy didn't speak English, I was sunk.
I am not alone, of course. Americans are notorious for being mono-lingual, except for immigrants who started elsewhere.

Now our company is offering consulting and training in a dozen countries. In our functional deafness, it is hard even to plan effectively, much less to do technical instruction.

Then there is faith. I grew up assuming that God spoke proper English of the 16th Century. Maybe God tolerated Latin, too. Now we learn that Jesus spoke Aramaic. He quoted scriptures from a contemporary rendition of ancient Hebrew, written originally with all consonants and no vowels, leaving exact meanings to a translator's guesswork.

The record of Jesus' life and subsequent events was written in Koine Greek, a second language for most Biblical writers. Paul, for instance, wrote poor Greek and tended to invent words. The most ancient manuscripts present this Greek in all-capitals with no division into words. The manuscripts are fragmentary and corrupted by poor transcribing.

It is almost laughable when fundamentalist preachers wax literal about King James Version passages, which were 17th Century translations of dubious manuscripts written in dead languages. We're a long way from reality here.
Does it matter? Yes and no. If we assume that God favors our tongue and hears only our prayers, then, yes, it does matter, for we are fools lost in pride. If we assume that we can discern the literal will of God by reading weak translations of dubious manuscripts written in dead languages and on the basis of our interpretations deny life, freedom, dignity and respect to other people, then, yes, it does matter, for we are venturing into evil. Much of what passes for "Bible knowledge" these days is little more than self-protective moralizing grounded in phony scholarship.

But let's assume that God is nimble and dedicated enough to hear our minority tongue, as well as more prevalent tongues like Spanish and Mandarin. Let's assume that God heard Abraham speak in his pre-Hebrew tongue, and that when Jesus lifted his eyes to heaven and spoke in sigh and Aramaic, God responded in love. Let's assume that God grasped the differences between the elementary Greek of Paul and the finer Greek of John. Let's assume that God didn't huff off when Roman prelates demanded Latin, or when Luther demanded German, or when  Cranmer rewrote prayers in a language that a "sceptred isle" could hear.

Let's assume that God is like the parent who can hear a child's meaning without words. Let's assume that God is like the lover who sees more in eyes and touch than in halting phrases. Let's assume that God reaches out to us in whatever ways we can receive, sometimes in words, but more often in sighs too deep for words, in songs of the heart, in that assurance and comfort which bypass the intellect and go straight to the soul.

Then, no, it doesn't matter if I speak English and another speaks to the same God in Arabic. What matters is that we try: try to listen, try to speak, and try to respect the stranger. Then we will learn that God is much larger than our books and interpretations, that God has a word for every soul to hear, and if I hear one thing and you hear another, that may be only proof of God's amazing love.