To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
After 2000 years the language of the Gospels has become so familiar to our hearing that it may lack its original punch. I mean, when you hear the phrase “words of eternal life” does it ring a bell? Or does it go in one ear and out the other? “Words of eternal life” – what does it mean? I struggle with that as much as you – and of late I get a better sense of “words of eternal life” if I read it as “wake-up calls”, words that snap us out of our slumber; that present us with a wider mental range, energy, vitality.
To illustrate, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there is the episode where Huckleberry and the runaway black slave Jim get swept apart, Huck in his canoe and Jim on their raft, during a foggy night. Both call out to each other, but as Huck says: “I couldn’t tell nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don’t look natural nor sound natural in a fog.” Eventually he falls asleep until things cleared and he found Jim’s raft – with Jim sitting up asleep.
As Jim wakes up he is surprised to see Huck; he thought he had drowned. So Huck pretends they were never separated, that he had been on the raft all the time, that Jim must have been dreaming – and Jim allows maybe Huck is right. But Huck keeps toying condescendingly with Jim, asks him how come there’s leaves and other trash scattered on the raft (picked up during a close call with an island). And Huck says, “Jim looked at the trash, and then . . . looked at me steady, without ever smiling, and said, ‘What do dey stan’ for? I’s gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los’ . . . En when I wake up en fine you back agin’, all safe en soun’, de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo’ foot I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin’ ‘bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ‘em ashamed.’ Huck’s response? “It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back.” It took Huck fifteen minutes before he could . . . humble himself before Jim – “but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither.”
Wouldn’t you say Jim spoke “words of eternal life”, words that cracked open the unconscious racism of a 19th century Missouri boy and allowed him access to a new life of respect, of serious regard for another – that life for a lot of people is no joke?
I had a similar experience (they come in all shapes and sizes). As a matter-of-fact conservative Catholic seminarian home on vacation in 1954, I was watching the now famous McCarthy hearings with my baptismal godfather, Marty Giangola – shipyard worker, burly fellow, whose lunch sandwiches had to be spicy enough to make him weep. He had every Caruso record. Of course, what with McCarthy’s crusade against hidden communists in government, as a Catholic I went along with my tribe. “Go get ‘em, Joe!” That is, until Marty, after a long silence, pointed to McCarthy and said, “That guy is a fascist.” What? I did a double take. “Our guy” was a fascist? To be brief, whatever McCarthy was: patriot, defender of freedom to some, bully to others – Marty’s words jettisoned me out of a fixed frame of mind, make me wonder, think about possibilities I could not have considered if a man I respected had not spoken with such conviction. My mind has been much more mobile, curious ever since. That’s the effect, in a much more profound sense, Jesus’ words have on people: they are wake-up calls, words of eternal life, permanent vitality.