Welcome to Babel
From an outside perspective, language can be a tool for isolation. Michaela McGuigan explorers God’s uniting love.
It was late one night during my freshers fortnight when one of the people in my corridor turned to me and asked in all seriousness, “Are you in the IRA?”. My reply was an indignant and disbelieving “No!” amazed that because I’m Northern Irish and Catholic it had been safe to assume I was in the IRA.
Little was I aware that this was merely the first of many ‘harmless’ misunderstandings. Throughout my first year and particularly the first term, I came up against the language and cultural differences which I had not anticipated on the basis that I thought I spoke the same language as nearly everybody else. Time and time again, something I said would be met with puzzled looks and I would have to explain something that I had not previously realised was a Northern Irish term. Worse still was the patronising but well-intentioned “ooh” or “that’s so cute!” I received when I said anything like “wee” or “grand”. I had great admiration for those students who did not speak English as their first language. Despite the fact that I taught myself to say certain words so that other people could understand them and my friends got used to the way that I spoke and could understand most of what I was saying, to me it appeared that in some way the effects of Babel were still going strong.
I have heard it said by fellow Catholics that we are not the best at memorising Biblical passages, and while I do not want to blame the fact that I am Catholic for this, I have to concede that in my case this is true. My biblical knowledge does not extend far beyond what I learnt in school and whatever has stuck in my mind from hearing it in Mass. I am even more ashamed to admit that out of that which I know and remember there is even less which I could claim to understand. This is something which holds particularly true when it comes to the Old Testament. However, one story from the Old Testament which has always intrigued me, particularly since coming to university, is the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) and how it came to be that people spoke different languages. I have to admit that on first reading I did not understand or very much like this story. I saw this seemingly vengeful God that I saw as characteristic of the Old Testament, the same angry God who flooded the earth, saving only Noah and his family. God’s actions to me seemed harsh, particularly after I had spent a year learning to some small degree what it was like not to be understood, “Come let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they cannot understand one another”.
The only way I can reconcile this to the loving God in the New Testament is to believe that this may have been not only to punish the people for their pride- “ ‘Come’ they said ‘let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top reaching heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves, so that we do not get scattered all over the world’” -but also to rescue them from their pride and teach them to respect and worship the Lord instead of themselves and their own power.
While I have always had difficulty with the story of Babel, I have always liked the event I see as the New Testament answer to the events at Babel. In the account of the Pentecost (Acts 2:1–13) it describes how the apostles were able to overcome the language barrier to spread the good news, “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak different languages as the Spirit give them power to express themselves.” Christ’s death and resurrection has absolved our sins and through the Holy Spirit broken down the language and cultural barriers put up by man’s sins at Babel so that God’s word can be spread to all nations.
I have always loved the message about the universality of the Lord’s Word that is seen throughout Acts and in Jesus’ Commission, “Go out to the whole world: proclaim the Gospel to all Creation” (Matthew 28 verse 19). God’s word is not meant to be divisive and fought over. Too often the opponents of religion and especially Christianity claim that it causes conflict and wars, but this is simply not what God’s Word is about. True Christianity through Christ’s death and resurrection, means that language and cultural barriers and anything that separates people simply do not matter anymore.