Sunday of the Word of God 2026

The Word of God:
a source of hope

Dom Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori OCist
Abbot General of the Cistercian Order

Perhaps the man who best understood the relationship between God’s Word and hope was a pagan, the Roman centurion who, after pleading with Jesus to heal his sick servant, in the face of the Lord’s immediate willingness declared himself unworthy for him to go to his house and said to him, “only say the word and my servant will be healed” (Mt. 8:8). One word from Christ was enough for him to have a sure hope in the salvation He had wrought.

Faith enabled the centurion to understand that what arouses hope in God’s word is that it is, indeed, a word of God, that is, the word that He who makes all things personally addresses our need for salvation and eternal life. Peter also understood this at a time that could have been one of despair because everyone had abandoned the Lord and only a few awkward and insecure disciples remained with Him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn. 6:68). The words of Jesus remained for Peter and his companions as the last thread of hope in a fullness of life they could only hope for from God.

But why and how could Peter’s hope, like that of the centurion, cling to the word of Christ? What gives the word of the Lord this power, this solidity whereby we can surrender to it with the full weight of our lives in danger of sliding into despair, death, nothingness? What enables those who hear this word to recognize that we can surrender to the One who speaks it with total confidence?

This is possible if the word of the Lord reaches the heart not as a promise of something but as a promise of someone, and of someone who loves our lives with an al-powerful love, who can do everything for those who love and trust in Him. Many abandoned Jesus after the bread of life message in the synagogue at Capernaum, saying, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” (Jn. 6:60). How come Jesus’ word was a reason for them to leave when for Peter and the other disciples it was the only reason to stay with Him?

The fact is that the former had heard his word by separating it from its source, Christ himself. Peter and the disciples, on the other hand, could not abstract any word of Jesus from his presence, that is, from their relationship with him, from his friendship. God’s word can be a source of hope if for us God remains the source of the word itself. Only if we hear the word from the voice of the present Word, who looks upon us with love, can it nourish in us an unshakable hope, because it is founded on a presence that never fails.

God’s word is a promise in which not only the one who promises is faithful, but remains included in the promise itself, because Christ promises us himself. “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” (Mt. 28:20). Jesus’ last word, the last promise before he ascends into heaven, is the dddd promise of himself to our lives, not only at the end of time but every day, every moment of our lives.

This indelible link of God’s word with his presence, so radical from the time “the Word became flesh and made his dweling among us” (Jn. 1:14) until he died on the cross for us, is the sense and promise of the entire Old Testament. As when Psalm 27 cries out to the Lord, “if you are silent to me, I shal be like those who go down to the Pit” (Ps. 27:1).

Man has within him the deep, ontological awareness that if God does not speak to him, if God does not create him at every moment with his word, death, the dissolution of life, is inevitable for him, because God creates by saying everything in the Word through whom al things exist (cf. Jn. 1:3).

One can live without listening to the Word who creates him with love, but in this way he or she experiences, as so many do today, an inconsistent life, a dissipated life, escaping from our hands, unable to hold it. Instead, we are given the grace to live by listening, to live ready to listen to the Lord who is constantly at the door of our freedom, knocking and asking to enter. We are granted to live in an infinite friendship by listening to his voice, which cals us to communion with him (cf. Rev. 3:20), thus alowing the Spirit to generate in us and among us a new life, overflowing with hope, not in something, but in God who fulfils the promise of his presence at the very instant his word expresses it.