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“Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” –– John 6:68
Some of Jesus’ followers had drifted away, and Jesus turned to ask those disciples still following him, “Do you also wish to go away?” Peter responded with the verse above. It’s not like there were no other options with which Peter could experiment. There are always words that clamoring for your attention. Eight years ago, The Washington Post printed an article which estimated that the internet contained 47 billion webpages, and that it would take 305,500,000,000 pieces of copy paper, 122 million tons, to print it all out. That’s a lot of trees, a great lake of ink, and if you estimate 500 words per single-spaced page, that would be 152,750,000,000,000. That’s a lot of words at your fingertips. When you also consider that the article was written eight years ago, you have to wonder how many times that astronomical number has been multiplied since then.
With words, we explain, describe, picture, posit, compliment, order, direct, compose, insult, promulgate, introduce, inspire, wound, swindle, teach, coerce, beg, characterize, complain, rant, pray, preach, soothe, and comfort. When you are drawn in by a book, an article, a voice, your perspective is easily altered. Novelist Anthony Doerr says, “When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death … You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”
Words have power. So, in that vast universe of words, how do we distill them into meaning? How do we filter out the noise, the misinformation, the fraud, the malignant, or the error? Peter said, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” If, as John’s gospel suggests, “all things came into being” through Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, then perhaps our best hope amidst the chaos and confusion of this world’s words, is to always filter all words through Christ, discern all meaning through Christ, and interpret all voices through Christ. “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
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