Verbo

Last month I stopped in at my alma mater to see old friends and teachers.  I waited outside my old professor’s office for half an hour, while she finished up a tutoring session with a struggling freshman. 

“Find the verb . . . is that the verb?”  Over and over she asked him questions about subjects and verbs and conjunctions and prepositions.  To him, it was probably a perfunctory yet useless exercise required to be a sophomore—like an embarrassing fraternity initiation.

I don’t think in terms of parts of speech any more—it all being automatic now.  It’s just math (a subject plus a verb equals a sentence), and I don’t even need to use my fingers to count.

I didn’t think much of what I overheard until yesterday at church.  I was trying to make it through the Spanish sermon without the usual ear translator.  I had my new bilingual Bible in my lap, sitting next to my wife with her bilingual brain.

The pastor was talking about John chapter one and Christ’s entry into our world.  I tuned out of the sermon when I read the Spanish version of the first verse, confused by the absence of a word I knew should be in there.  In Spanish, the word for “word” is palabra, but palabra was missing from the Spanish column on my page.

Leaning into my wife’s shoulder, I pointed to the word in its place: verbo.  She nodded in the “Yeah, so?” wifely way. 

I gave her the church-is-going finger twirl that meant we’d pick up the discussion after church.  In the car on the way home I asked her about the imposter word.  “What does verbo mean in Spanish—I mean, what does it mean in English?”

“What do you mean, ‘What does it mean?’  Drop the ‘o.’”

“Verb?”

“Yeah, what’d you think it meant?”

And now the epiphany.

God sent his Son as not just any word but a verb.  Not only the subject of our worship or the conjunction of eternity, He is a God that is and does and will do.  He makes meaning of all subjects, all objects.  He gives them life and motion and context.  He is the shortest complete English sentence [I am.] and the infinite dictionary of being.

So, Jesus came to earth to be, to live, to change the sentence of history.  Christ was a verb that dwelt among us, the Word that showed us how to be, how to act, how to connect ourselves with the other objects of His affection.

In so doing Christ redeemed fragments, incomplete parts—allowing them to be made into something new, something whole.  In joining all the pieces together with him, we are all put together to create a compound, complex compilation of parts much greater than our sum, now the product and vehicle of His message. And he made the whole thing easy to diagram.

He did so in a word, divinely almost flippant—like when Genesis simply says that “He created the stars also.”  He illustrates it in so many pictures, including mundane parts of speech.  And while the original Greek doesn’t give the exact same interpretation into English as it does into Espanol, God may have had multiple reasons for the tower of Babel—if only to have a romantic language like Spanish to remind us of how the whole Emmanuel incarnation functions.

© 2003: nonymous, ink.
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