“Blah, Blah, Blah. Why can’t He just talk plainly?”

9 May 2024   John 16:16-20  

“We do not know what He is talking about.”  John 16:18

Blah, Blah, Blah. That is almost exactly what the Greek says.

The more polite rendering is, “We don’t know what He is talking about”(John 16:18).

The most common Greek verb meaning “to say” is lego. When, however, the disciples were talking together about what Jesus meant when he said, “A little while and you will no longer see Me, and again a little while and you will see Me,” the verb they used was laleo, which means “to babble,” or “to prattle,” generally to speak unintelligibly. The disciples got a little frustrated sometimes with Jesus’ tendency to speak in a code they couldn’t understand. They wanted Him to speak plainly (cf. 16:29), and not in His apocalyptic circumlocutions. Laleo even has a reduplicated syllable that appears to mean the same thing we mean when we say, “Blah, Blah, Blah.” It means we don’t know what someone is talking about. It means we are a little frustrated that people are choosing words that cloud their meaning.

“Blah, Blah, Blah. Get to the point!”

We don’t know what He is talking about.

Keep in mind that these are the people who had spent the previous three years with Jesus, had seen Him heal hundreds of people, feed thousands, cast out demons who were scared to death of Him. They had heard Him teach, and Had tutorials on all His parables. And even they did not understand what He was talking about when He said, “A little while and you will no longer see me….”

“Blah, Blah, Blah. Why can’t He just talk plainly?”

Apparently it takes more than just sitting at Jesus actual feet and hearing Him teach for three years, and seeing His actual earthly signs and wonders to understand everything He means. Apparently it takes the Resurrection, and then seven weeks more of sitting at Jesus’ risen feet learning what that means. But even that isn’t enough. Apparently it takes several centuries of resisting heresies, and thinking through controversies about how Jesus can be fully human and fully divine. Apparently it takes families extended through time, whole neighborhoods extended through time, forming and reforming people in their intellects, their habits, and their relationships to really understand what Jesus is talking about. Apparently it takes people with gigantic intellects to pull it all together, and then present it in a way that ordinary people can understand, gigantic minds and souls like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Sienna, and Teresa of Avila, and then whole squadrons of people who are willing to read and understand their work, each one of them gathering faithful platoons of people to listen and learn.

Which is to say, it apparently takes the Church to understand what Jesus is talking about. Apparently the Church understood that from the beginning, for starting on the day of Pentecost itself, one of the marks of the Church was that the faithful “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

The reason why there are over 5000 New Testament texts preserved from antiquity, the reason why there is more documentary evidence about Jesus than any other person from antiquity by far, is that the Church was serious about praying, thinking, reading, writing, and knowing what Jesus was talking about.

That kind of seriousness is what it still takes to know what Jesus is talking about. Serious Churches, serious parishes understand that.