This week, we Christians will be commemorating the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. The Passion and Death of Jesus is the passion and death of the Word of God. For three full years, Jesus went around proclaiming the Gospel. His Word was heard all through Galilee and the neighboring villages. Since the beginning He declared in a powerful way: “Today, this word is fulfilled in your hearing”! And since the beginning He and His Word were rejected, challenged, ridiculed, until they were nailed to the Cross and silenced.

This is typical of our culture. Never has the air we breathe been so filled with words: we have gone digital to have a multitude of radio stations transmitting 24 hours a day; the satellite has made hundreds of TV stations with all those talk shows available; the personalized mobile phones sending billions of messages and phone calls…. Isn’t it strange how waves are carrying so many words and yet the Word of God is silenced? Is there any other word used and abused more than the Word of God? In a pluralistic and relativistic culture, the Word of God has become like the word of all other gods (not that there is any other god!). Isn’t it this the cause for so much indifference and doubt in the Word of God? Never has the Word of God been so much diffused as today (remember, the Bible has been the most printed and sold book in the world!), there are very few houses where there is no copy of the Bible. Yet, who opens it? Who reads it? Who prays the Word of God? And who lives it? Rendering the Word of God ineffective and irrelevant, is like condemning it to silence, or like killing it.

On the third day, Jesus rose from the death. Therefore we wait in joyful hope for a comeback of the Word of God in our culture. Don’t you think we need it?