When Words Become Works

Have you ever received a text message that said, “I love you,” but felt hollow reading it? Perhaps it came from someone whose actions had, over time, drained those three words of their weight. And have you ever, on the other hand, watched someone quietly show up for you in a hard moment, with no speech or announcement of their intentions, and felt the message received louder than any sermon?

We know, deep in our bones, that words and works are meant to belong to each other. When they don’t, something in us cracks. When they do, something in us heals.

Saint Augustine noticed this too, though he was looking not at ordinary human speech but at the person of Jesus Christ.

In his Tractates on the Gospel of John, Augustine offers a startling little formula: in Christ, “the words are works, and the works are words” (Tractates on the Gospel of John, 24.2).

Everything Jesus says accomplishes something. Everything Jesus does communicates something.

There is no gap between his speaking and his acting, because he is himself the eternal Word made flesh. In him, saying and doing are one movement.

To understand why this matters, we need to go a little deeper.

 

The Word Who Does Not Merely Talk

The Gospel of John opens with a claim that is so deep you could probably spend your entire life thinking about it and never grasp it fully: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

The Greek term is Logos. In Greek philosophy it meant reason, order, and the animating principle of reality. However, in Hebrew thought the word drew on the phrase of the dabar YHWH, the “word of the Lord,” which never returns empty.

In Genesis, God speaks and things come into being. "Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). The utterance and the reality are inseparable. God’s word does not describe creation; it is creation happening.

Our words do this only in a limited way. I cannot speak to water and turn it into dry land. I cannot speak to a dog and turn it into a cat. My words have some degree of influence over reality, but they cannot change the essence of a thing.

God speaks, though, not as a creature but as the Creator whose words are the very building blocks of reality, of all existence. That's because God is existence itself, so His Words are emanations of His very being.

When John identifies Jesus as this Word, he is not composing sentimental poetry. It's a beautiful text of Scripture, but it's so much more than that.

He is saying that the very speech-act of God has taken on flesh and walked among us. Which means that when Jesus opens his mouth, we are not hearing mere commentary about God’s activity. He is not merely informing us about truth; He is speaking truth into existence. When He speaks, we hear the Creator speak again. And things happen. Things change. What he says becomes true and exists: because He is being and truth.

This is what Augustine saw. Preaching on the miracle at Cana, where Jesus turns water into wine, Augustine reminds his listeners that the same Christ who transformed the water is also the one through whom every vine each year turns rainwater into wine through the slow work of roots and sunlight.

Think about that. Jesus is actually doing something, instantly, that happens naturally already. Albeit through an orchestrated process that was designed by the Architect of the Universe.

The miracle simply reveals that He is the Architect, He is the mater of creation. He can re-write the "code" of Creation because He's the one who has the access key. What Jesus does at Cana is, in a compressed and visible form, what the Word has always done.

Then Augustine draws his conclusion: the miracles of Christ are not merely show to give his teaching credibility. They are teaching. And his teachings are not commentary on his miracles. They are miracles.

 

Words That Do Things

Consider what happens when Jesus speaks in the Gospels.

To a paralyzed man lowered through a roof he says, ”Son, your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5).

The scribes are scandalized because they understand, rightly, that only God can forgive sins. You could almost imagine Jesus snickering a little and saying, "Yes, that's exactly the point!"

Jesus does not simply announce forgiveness the way a meteorologist announces the weather he's seen on his radar. His words do the forgiving. And to prove that the forgiving actually happened in the speaking, so that the scribes might realize the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins (that He is the Creator), he adds, "Stand up, take your mat and go to your home" (Mark 2:11).

And the man stands up, takes up his mat, and returns home. The visible work confirms the invisible work already accomplished in the word.

To a storm on the Sea of Galilee he says, "Peace! Be still!" (Mark 4:39). The wind does not consider his advice and weigh its options. The sea does not decide if it will comply. They obey, because the word of Christ is not information about peace but establishes peace.

To a corpse four days in the tomb he says, "Lazarus, come out!" (John 11:43). And Lazarus walks out of the tomb.

These are not stories of a teacher who happened also to work wonders. They are windows into the nature of the Word himself: when he speaks, reality reorders itself around what He has said.

 

Works That Speak

The reverse is just as true. Jesus’ actions are never mute. They are always saying something, always revealing something about who God is and what God is doing.

When Jesus touches a leper, something forbidden by the purity codes of Israel, an act that should have rendered him ceremonially unclean, the touch itself proclaims something incredible.

It says, in effect, that the contagion runs the other way now. Holiness is more infectious than defilement. Grace overcomes uncleanness rather than the reverse. He does not need to explain this in a lecture, or with power-point slides, or through a debate. The touch does the teaching. It is the lecture.

When he washes the feet of his disciples, he is preaching a sermon about servant leadership, about the inversion of worldly hierarchies, about the shape of divine love. And he says so. "For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you" (John 13:15).

The example is the message. The washing is the word.

When he multiplies loaves for a hungry crowd, he is not merely feeding stomachs. He is speaking, through the multiplication of bread and fish, that God always provides. He is foreshadowing, teaching, of a coming banquet that will be celebrated in the Kingdom of God; he's foreshadowing his own body that will soon be broken and given.

John understands this. It's no mistake that he places the great “Bread of Life” discourse immediately after the feeding of the crowd, because what He says in John 6 is simply the "teaching" that speaks what the miracle was meant to teach.

Consider what is taught at the cross itself! "When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he" (John 8:28).

The crucifixion is a declaration articulated through His body, with wood, nails, and blood. It says everything the Sermon on the Mount teaches about loving our enemies; it embodies the teaching of the parable about the Father running to meet His prodigal son. It embodies what the prophets foretold about a Servant who bears our griefs. But it says it in the only language finally adequate to the message: the language of self-gift. Which is to say, the cross is the most visible, embodied, teaching of all that "God is love" (1 John 4:8). What John later writes, He knew chiefly because Jesus taught it on the cross.

 

Why This Matters for Faith

There is a temptation, especially for those of us who love reading and studying theology, to treat Jesus primarily as a teacher whose ideas we must master and comprehend.

There is an opposite temptation, especially for those of us drawn to service and action, to treat Jesus primarily as an example whose deeds we imitate.

Augustine’s insight cuts across both extremes. What we tend to pull apart, Jesus holds together. In Christ, we cannot separate the teacher from the doer, the doctrine from the drama, the word from the work.

This has enormous implications for how we read the Gospels. When Jesus stills a storm, we should not race past the miracle to extract a “spiritual lesson,” as though the physical event were merely some kind of fable.

The miracle is the lesson, embodied.

Nor should we, on the other hand, focus so intently on the historical fact of the miracle that we miss its communicative truth.

Every action of Christ is a Scripture written in flesh. Every word of Christ is a wonder performed in speech.

It also matters for how we understand the faith today. When a man called and ordained to do it, vested in Christ's authority (as His representative) speaks over bread and wine, it becomes what Jesus said. Because Jesus' words do not merely communicate in symbols, they establish reality. This isn't magic, it's not ancient superstition. It's reality.

Because the risen Christ continues to speak works and to work words in his Body. What is said is done, and what is done is said.

 

The Contemplative Dimension

This concept also has implications on how we read the Bible. I've written before about the practice of lectio divina, (divine reading). I'm actually re-writing my Genesis commentary now to embody this kind of approach to the text, more like a "guide" to praying lectio divina with the text than as mere commentary.

In this ancient practice, we read a passage of Scripture slowly, chewing on it like a cow chews its cud (the word in Hebrew for "meditate" is the word that means exactly that), listening for the word within the word. But if Augustine is right, then lectio on the Gospels means more than analyzing what Jesus said.

It means letting his actions speak too. It means sitting with the way he looked at the rich young man before he answered him. It means noticing that he wept before he raised Lazarus. It means asking what his silence before Pilate proclaimed.

The contemplative learns, over years, to listen to Christ with more than the ears. She learns to watch him, and to hear his watching.

She learns that when he stretches out his arms on the cross, this is not the interruption of his teaching ministry but its climax and summation. Every parable he ever told was pointing here. Every miracle he ever worked was ultimately about this.

 

Practical Applications

How, then, do we live in the light of this?

First, read the Gospels differently this week. Choose one Gospel passage, perhaps the healing of the man born blind in John 9, or the calming of the storm in Mark 4, and read it twice. The first time, notice what Jesus says. The second time, notice what Jesus does. Then ask: how are the words and the works saying the same thing? What is Christ communicating through the whole event?

Second, examine the gap in your own life between words and works. This is where Augustine’s insight becomes deeply personal. Because we, too, are called to be little words of God in the world. Saint James meant exactly this when he said: "But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves” (James 1:22). Where in your life do your words say one thing while your works say another? Where do you tell your children they are loved but withhold your attention? Where do you profess faith on Sunday but replace it with anxiety once the work week begins? The healing of this wound, represented by the gap between "saying" and "doing," is a lifelong work of grace, but naming it is the first step.

Third, let your works begin to speak. You do not always have to explain yourself. If you are trying to live the Gospel, your actions will begin to proclaim it, sometimes more powerfully than any conversation could. A visit to a lonely relative, a bill quietly paid for someone in need, a decision to forgive when everyone expected you to retaliate. These are sermons preached without a pulpit. They are little imitations of the Word made flesh, whose every gesture was good news. And we can do that, too, because we are the image-bearers of God, we are the body of Christ. What He does through us still speaks. What He says through us can still do, too.

Fourth, listen to Christ’s works as words. When you receive Communion, don't just think of it as "nice" recollection, as information about something that happened a long time ago. Think instead about what Christ means to say, what He is telling you, and how He is changing you by putting Himself into you, literally! When you receive absolution, when you are forgiven of your sins, don't take it as mere information. Embrace it as a real change, a real repair, a real healing. When you encounter something beautiful, be it sunrise, a piece of music, our the face of your spouse, or the laugh of your child, do not merely enjoy it. Ask what Word is being spoken through this work, through this little miracle God gave you.

 

The Word Still Speaking

The Word made flesh has not stopped speaking. He speaks still in the Scriptures, in the sacraments, in the Church, in the poor, in the prayer of the heart. And he speaks and acts as He always did: with words that are work, and work that is a word.

To live as a Christian is to be caught up in this seamless divine communication, to become, however haltingly, a person whose own words begin to accomplish something and whose own actions begin to mean something. It is to be spoken, and to speak, in the language of the Word himself.

May our lives, little by little, become sentences worthy of Him.