Frederick Buechner, on “The Gospel as Tragedy”:
The preaching of the Gospel is a telling of the truth or the putting of a sort of frame of words around the silence that is truth because truth in the sense of fullness, of the way things are, can at best be only pointed to by the language of poetry—of metaphor, image, symbol—as it is used in the prophets of the Old Testament and elsewhere. Before the Gospel is a word, it is silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we see it not for what at various times we call it—meaningless or meaningful, absurd, beautiful—but for what it truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery. The silence of Jesus in answer to Pilate’s question about truth seems such a presenting as does also in a way the silence of the television news with the sound turned off—the real news is what we see and feel, not what Walter Cronkite tells us—or the silence the Psalmist means when he says, “Be silent and know that I am God.” In each case it is a silence that demands to be heard because it is a presented silence . . . the silence that [our] words are born out of and that [our] words break and that [our] words are swallowed up by.