How many languages does Jesus
speak? On earth he spoke his local dialect,
a version of Aramaic, and we can be quite sure he read and spoke Hebrew; maybe
some Greek, a little Latin. (English, in case you are wondering, was still five
centuries in the future.)
Then, after his Resurrection,
Jesus ascended into Heaven, and there he is, in his new body, surrounded by people
from ‘every nation, tribe, people and language.’ (Rev. 7:9) How does he communicate with them all? Well,
Jesus is God, after all, so, we can imagine with some certainty that he knows
every language. But, what about the rest
of the ‘great multitude.’ They praise
God on the Throne with thousands upon thousands of voices in thousands of ancient
and modern tongues. While the Father, Son and Holy Spirit can understand the cacophony
of words and songs, can the people understand each other? Is there a language
of heaven, or does everyone retain their own language which they knew on this
Old Earth?
There is, as you know, this
odd little story tucked in Genesis in which the LORD intentionally confuses the
one language of the people of the earth into many languages. (Genesis 11:1-9)
This in turn causes the people to scatter around the world. The rest, as they say, is history.
We live in a world which has
many ways to speak all sorts of threats, hate, war. Wars and rumors of war will
never cease on this Old Earth. Even if we all understood each other’s languages,
we will not all ‘understand’ each other, our fears, our anger, our territorialism. We try, most of the time, to speak
diplomatically, translating words as best we can to help us know what we are
trying to say and why we are trying to say it, but we are not very good at it,
speaking generally of the human race.
And yet, one day, there we
will all be. The people we mocked, detested,
hated even, gathered around the Throne waving palm branches in our white robes. And then, at last, while we may not be
speaking the same languages, we will finally understand each other, why we each
and all exist.
“Thy will be done on earth as
it is in heaven.”
Amen.
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