WORD AND ACTION ^_[1]

MANIFESTATION OF SIN

1.  The relationship between and action is an intimate one. Recall the prescriptions, one should practice what he preaches and actions speak louder than words. With respect to the Christ of eternity, fully human in all things but sin, word and action dwell in perfect unity:  "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made."  [Jn 1:1-3]  For human beings, word and action are not necessarily the same thing. We are forever making the discovery that what we profess very often conflicts with our actual conduct. To profess publicly the covenant of matrimony--until death do us part^[2]--while privately committing adultery is a grave sin against the omniscient Christ who sees and knows all. The deceit of many adulterers is uncovered, often with terrible repercussions; the first thing to fall is their carefully constructed but worthless house of cards. Whether one gets caught in his shame or not is irrelevant; the truth endures in all circumstances. One may successfully suppress private scandal to the ignorance of his family and community, but he can never deceive God:  "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it? I the Lord search the mind and try the heart, to give to every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings."  [Jer 17:9-10]  The deviation between what a liar professes and how he acts is termed hypocrisy. Whether infrequent or habitual, whether venial or mortal, all sin involves hypocrisy. At the moment of his conception, God places within every man's soul the essential message of the Decalogue  (Ten Commandments)  and animates his conscience with the knowledge of right and wrong. The Natural Law gives man's conscience a voice and empowers it to mediate the authenticity of his interior life and exterior conduct. Whether one is highborn or lowborn, wealthy or poor, educated or uneducated, powerful or weak, young or old, he has recourse to God's Natural Law. Divinity's donation to humanity endows every individual--whether or not one confesses his actions as sin--with the means to discern the fidelity or breach of truth within his soul. Thus God's primordial word dwells in all men, and disposes them to receive his Son as saviour of the world. When a person's conduct offends moral and ethical truth, a gap opens up, a breach or separation as it were, in the unity of his personhood. Some may discern readily that their interior unity is fragmented and act quickly to restore it. Others, entrenched in the things of this world,^[3] may be insensitive to their soul's disruption and unable to express their suffering. This breach registers most acutely in the human conscience as guilt. While guilt is not of itself a sin, it is the manifestation of sin. Guilt is the pain of the injured soul and therefore a measure of the degree to which one has spoken or acted in contravention to the truth. In the absence of reconciliation, guilt may be ignored but never completely suppressed. One's guilt can be so intense that he involuntarily discloses the sin he wishes to remain hidden from the world. When man's conscience cries out in guilt and shame, he reveals to others telltale signs of acute interior disorder. When one's intellect clashes with his will, or both against his flesh, he cannot hide the deterioration of his capacity to love unselfishly, to forgive generously, and to reason clearly:  "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do....Wretched man that I am!"  [Rom 7:19, 24] 

DISCERNMENT AND UNDERSTANDING

2.  The word hypocrisy comes from the Greek language meaning to play a part on stage.  (Gk. hypokrisis)  Whenever we attend a play or view a motion picture, we enter into a polite fiction. We pay the actors to pretend they are someone other than themselves. The words spoken in performance belong to the characters, not to the actors who have assumed their roles. And certainly, we are quite aware that an actor on stage may assume virtues or qualities temporarily that he does not possess in actual life. While this may be the accepted unreal reality of performance art, it is altogether different for the human person in real life. When a human being, in the ordinary course of life, feigns to be what he is not, when he pretends to have faith in what he does not believe, when he affects virtues or qualities he does not possess, he is a hypocrite. In his letter to the Church at Rome, St. Paul offers a perplexing treatment to the question:  "Who will separate us from the love of Christ?"  [Rom 8:35]  Though he asks this question, he does not want the reader to answer it. Not wanting an answer, he responds to it himself, applying, of all things, negative words to a positive spiritual truth. By means of his own reply, Paul infers that the question does not have a answer and indeed should not be answered! Why, then, does he speak these words? Does he challenge us in ways that he, himself, is unwilling or unable to accept? The verb speak comes from the Latin meaning to sprinkle or scatter words.  (Lat. spargere)  Whether in spoken or written form, words are very powerful elements. Language is essential to communicating information, but even more so, ideas are vital for our discernment and understanding. While grappling with compelling issues, thinkers should be mindful that individual words possess an inherent value and profound meaning of their own, especially words which touch on spiritual realities. St. Peter, in the days following the Holy Spirit's outpouring at Pentecost, explains Judas betrayal of Christ to the assembled Christians as a manifestation of God's prophetic Word:  "Brethren, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David, concerning Judas who was guide to those who arrested Jesus."  [Acts 1:16]  The most profound example of word-reality is the reverence with which the ancient Jews accorded the name Yahweh  (Heb. YHWH, "I Am Who Am"). Careless or thoughtless use of Yahweh's name, however, invited serious consequences.^[4] God's name was understood to be so great, so powerful, so majestic that that the simple act of speaking the divine name was sufficient to summon God's awesome Divinity and invoke the fearful prospect of one's own judgment:  "To you it was shown, that you might know that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him. Out of heaven he let you hear his voice, that he might discipline you; and on earth he let you see his great fire, and you heard his words out of the midst of the fire."  [Deu 4:35-36]  Apart from a singular ritualized whisper of the name  Yahweh performed annually by the designated high priest in the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple, this most exalted and personal name of God was never uttered. That actions speak louder than words is a way of saying that content ultimately transcends form. For example, the meaning of one's life is more important than what he can say about it at the present, or for that matter, the sum of what he could say about the whole of his life. Yet, in the plan of God, content and form must complement one another. Our Lord, himself, commented on the power and precision of language:   "I tell you, on the day of judgment men will render account for every careless word they utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned."  [Mt 12:36-37]  Thus the relationship between word and action is indissoluble for the faithful follower of Christ, the Christian who is Roman Catholic. Our Lord underscores the consanguinity of the Father's name to the power of prayer:  "I kept them in thy name, which thou hast given me....and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves."  [Jn 17:12-13] 

CLOSING THE BREACH

3.  The Epistle of James comments on the fidelity which must characterize word and action, and discloses that God, "who knows the hearts of all men"  [Acts 1:24], will judge shepherds more strictly than their sheep:  "Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness.  Look at the ships also; though they are so great and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs.  So the tongue is a little member and boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire."  [Jam 3:1,4-6]  The fathers of the early Church and their apostolic communities took to heart the consistent teaching of God's Word in the Old and New Testaments. Perverse words express perverse morals; conversely, to purify thought and language is to purify behavior. Through the centuries, Christian leaders denounced many dismaying aspects of their own societies. Throughout his papacy, Pope John Paul II has steadfastly rejected any attempt of culture to advance formal values apart from or in the absence of moral values. When man lusts after the sound of his own voice, he joins the company of demons. If politicians or actors could create truth merely by the manipulation of words and ideas--recall the mesmerizing effect of Adolph Hitler on the vast crowds of Germans at Nuremberg and its devastating consequences--the cross is a monstrous fraud and the principalities and powers and the "world rulers of this present darkness"  [Eph 6:12] have triumphed.  Returning to the form of Paul's question--"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" [Rom 8:35]--let us affirm its spiritual integrity. Yes, his words invoke challenge and defiance, but he did not intend them to be divisive or to offend Divine Truth. Here, Paul employs a literary device to help his readers appreciate the cosmic significance of salvation. The rhetorical question--an interrogatory that replies to itself--presumes that the listener knows the answer. Rhetorical questions serve to highlight an anthropological reality: that profound mysteries remain beyond man's grasp, essence and existence he can never manipulate, absolutes he can never change, and questions he can never answer. True to his missionary aim, St. Paul's gospel rhetoric directs the believer to place his trust in God alone. The Holy Spirit invites us to experience the positive spiritual power inherent in Paul's remarkable litany of negative words^[5]:  "For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."  [Rom 8:38-39]  Things are not always what they appear to be. Paul's question-without-answer and his litany of negatives voice a triumphant hymn for the weary worker, the suffering slave, the fisherman, the artist, and men and women of every nation and walk of life: We are not mere winners, we are conquerors.  "In all these things," declares St. Paul, "we are more than conquerors,  through him who loved us."  [Rom 8:37]  Are all things always what they appear to be? Are all things black or white, all or nothing? It is not hypocrisy to be simultaneously a sinner--albeit repentant and contrite--and one who asks to receive Holy Communion which is food for sinners. Sacrilege, the ultimate hypocrisy, is committed by one who receives Holy Communion while unrepentant of grave sin and scornful of sacramental forgiveness. And let us not be judged as an enemy of God because we scorned him through neglect and cold-hearted indifference. Since Adam was driven away from the Garden of Eden to plow and Eve to suffer the pains of childbirth, it is the norm of human life that reward must follow hard work. One must acknowledge God to believe in the power of God's Word; he must be consecrated by God to testify that God's Word is the Truth.  [cf. Jn 17:17; 1Jn 4:12-15]  Are you doing all you can--"in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit"--to close the breach between word and deed? To bring into unity the person you are and the person God means you to be?