From One Language to Many Languages to One True Language

The confusion of the languages at the tower of Babel must have been distressing and comical at the same time. Languages all changing in an instant as a result of man trying to storm heaven on his own terms. All of a sudden, two men hefting a large stone could no longer coordinate their actions. No doubt they shouted at each other, but that didn’t help at all. They would have to drop the stone eventually. They could not hold on to the stone until they worked it all out. Two foremen discussing the building plans suddenly thrust into utter confusion. Pointing and shouting to no avail. They get angrier and angrier before they stormed away from one another. Sooner or later they all had to find someone that spoke like they did. We are not told how many languages were imposed on mankind in this episode, but it surely was more than a few. But how would they have gotten their act together to assemble into groups speaking the same language? Who could organize such an endeavor without a common language?

It is likely that God had imposed the same language upon families, family groups, and clans of relatives. The Bible does not say it happened that way, however, but the tower of Babel episode is placed among genealogies in the book of Genesis. That these genealogies all span seamlessly across the Babel event suggests the this did not confuse husbands and wives, parents and children, and so on. Family cohesiveness was maintained for the sake of mankind despite the arrogance of trying to take heaven on our own terms. It would have been cruel for husband and wife to suddenly speak different languages. Even more cruel for mothers and children not being able to communicate.

The whole purpose of God in confusing the languages of mankind was to prevent us from reiterating the same sin of Adam and Eve: wanting to be like God. Man had lost sight of being a creature made by an all-powerful and all-wise Creator. Adam and Eve knew this better than anyone else since they walked and talked with God. Until they didn’t. They were exiled from the Garden of Eden and yet somehow mankind learned nothing from this episode. If Adam and Eve were barred from an earthly paradise, what hubris to assume that a heavenly paradise could be obtained by doing an end run around God. Adam and Eve began with direct access to God but lost it. Their offspring at the tower Babel didn’t start with this blessing. Nor do we.

It is no surprise that we are just as prone to cross the line between creature and Creator, seeking what does not pertain to us. They tried to storm heaven with a tower – doomed to fail from the outset – and mankind tries to wield god-like power. Power over nature. Power over one another. Power over life itself. Like the Tower of Babel, this too is doomed to fail from the outset. Just consider the folly of creating a new virus designed to infect humans. What could go right with that? Look at the suffering and death wrought by monkeying around with things beyond our understanding and beyond our control. Nature laughs at us. God shakes His head in disgust. We won’t learn from Covid any more than the people at Babel heeded the lessons from Adam and Eve’s folly.

We play god to our own detriment while God offers us Himself in the Holy Spirit. We cannot become gods like Adam and Eve wanted, but we can become tabernacles of God the Spirit. We cannot build and innovate our way into heaven like they tried to do at Babel, but we have become citizens of heaven and can even come to reside there by having the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Thanks to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and His continued outpouring through the sacraments, we can have our deepest and otherwise unobtainable desires fulfilled. Not on our terms but on God’s terms. Not on our timetable but all in God’s time. Not by our efforts but by God’s unmerited gift to us. Not in this world that we have messed up and continue to mess up but in the world to come.

And unlike Babel, we won’t have to search for others that speak our language. No, God searched for us, found us, and invited us to join His family – the Church – through baptism. The new universal language, if we choose to speak it and if we bother to hear it, is that of love. It is the language that ought to be spoken because it most certainly is the language of heaven.

—Fr Booth