The Ineffable Word

[This sermon was preached on Christmas Day, 2010, at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, Palo Alto] I. How can we speak a word that spoke us first? How can we dare to utter the Word that was with God before anything else existed? How can we speak the verbum ineffabile, the "ineffable Word," as one of the prayers of Advent puts it? Even under God's inspiration, prophets have tried through the ages but only gotten so far; as the Letter to the Hebrews says: In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets. "In partial and various ways"--that means: they grasped only in parts and splinters that one Word through which everything was created: ... through whom he created the universe, who is the refulgence of his glory, the very imprint of his being, and who sustains all things by his mighty word. or with the Gospel of John: All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. The Word of which the Gospel speaks is the Word: it is the last and ultimate word after which nothing else can be said anymore, because everything has been said. But is also the first and only Word, the one Word in which incomprehensible God grasps his very self at once and as a whole, in utter simplicity. All our human conceptions of it remain just that: human conceptions, and conceptions in the plural; they are many thoughts, attempting to find God through the many names, but always missing the One Name, the Word itself. As soon as we have begun to speak, it is already past and has escaped us, because whatever we say, we think and say in time, not in the simplicity of the eternal now. The divine word is indeed ineffable, unspeakable and will forever elude us. It is not surprising then, that people would not grasp it: He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him. II. Already in our own experience we find some things unspeakable: a great love that reduces us to stammering; pain and grief that cannot really be communicated to others; an awesome sight that consigns us to stupefied silence. One response might be to try and express ourselves in art, especially music. After all, in heaven man and angel sing in the presence of the ineffable God, in awe of the Beatific Vision. And the angels sang the Gloria in excelsis at the birth of our Savior. Christians have produced a rich heritage of Christmas Carols in response to the same event; there are probably more hymns for Christmas than for any other liturgical season. Yet even here there seem to be limitations: The pianist Arthur Schnabel once said: "I only play music that is better than one can play it." What he meant by this is not that the music is too difficult for the pianist's fingers, but that even what can be done technically does not really express what this music truly wants to say; the expression will always limp behind the meaning. Or we might think of Beethoven's somewhat gruff comment to a violinist, who had complained that his music was too difficult to play: "What do I care about your silly fiddle, when the Spirit speaks to me!" We can also recall a thought of ancient philosophy, possibly going all the way back to Pythagoras, that there is some kind of a celestial music: the planets in their spheres have orbits of a particular distance and speed, which relates them to each other in a certain mathematical harmony. These relations would be akin to musical pitches, and therefore produce a harmonious sound. However, this celestial music, this music of the heavens is too ethereal to be audible to our ears. And so again: the most sublime and heavenly meanings seem inexpressible to us, even in the beauty of art and music. The Word must remain ineffable. III. Yet, to say that it is an ineffable Word is strange as well. …