After his second major feature (the critically acclaimed 21 Grams) director Alejandro González Iñárritu has brought a modern-day parable to the screen in Babel—a story (or rather, four stories) of the pain, misunderstanding and confusion of man’s unwillingness and oft inability to cross the cultural divide.

It got me thinking about the movie’s namesake …

The Hebrew scriptures first introduced the world to the legend of Babel. In it, ancient man was united by one language and one self-serving goal. As the story goes, they began building a great tower in a place called Babel as the crowning achievement of their own aggrandizement. Perhaps fearful of their stagnation and arrogance, God humbled them by miraculously dividing their one language into several thus separating them into smaller cultural groups. The miracle of Babel was the immediate introduction of the inevitable hurdle of language and culture, thus saving mankind from its delusion that it had “arrived� and that uniformity was heaven on earth.

Flash forward thousands of years to another story. One from the Christian scriptures in which a small band of Jesus’ followers huddle together in the second floor room of a house in Jerusalem. They pray and wait for a gift, promised by Jesus himself, that will give them the power to take his message into the world. What comes is a strong wind and in it, fiery tongues that set upon each of them, temporarily enabling them to speak other languages. As they poured out from that room into the streets of Jerusalem the story of their good news hurdled the cultural divide. The miracle was not that all of Jerusalem suddenly spoke the same language (a return to Babel) but that their was a version of the story of heaven for every language, every culture. Perhaps it was a sign to all that heaven on earth need not be homogenous to be unifying. Perhaps it meant the Kingdom of Heaven was big enough to reach every language, every culture, every human, where they were. Perhaps diversity looks more like God than we had anticipated. Perhaps the the Kingdom of Heaven is more about a journey than a destination.

Of course there were the detractors. Mostly among the religious, the pious, those longing for safety, stability and the comfort of status quo. Forever hiding in their tiny homogenous worlds as a disguise and an excuse for their own apathy. Always staying, never going, always building towers, never crossing borders. Those who’s hearts were not burning with tongues of fire to go into the world and spread the message were those who didn’t understand the message. They were convinced that the disciples were insane, or drunk, or possessed. While the world received the good news of the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven to earth, they heard nothing but babel.

Nothing hurts my ears more than the language of those those who’ve “arrived.� Using and abusing words and ideas that they (and we all) have little understanding of. Shared ignorance and shared misery, all in the name of purity, stability and self-justification. I have a dear friend who says that the gospel is at it purest only when it is moving, when it is being translated from one context to the next. I agree.

Don’t give me a world where we know it all. Give me a world where we know less tomorrow than we thought we did yesterday. Don’t give me a life where all the roads are mapped. Give me a life that is traveling forward into the unknown. Don’t give me the stability of concrete foundations. Give me the stability of a ship at sea. Give me a glimpse of God that is hidden in the “other� instead of my same old face in the mirror. Then, you’ll be speaking my language.