|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
According to Buddhist tradition, after the Buddha attained enlightenment, he decided to remain silent. Assuming no one would take him seriously or that that he couldn't teach enlightenment to other people even if he wanted to, he decided to keep his understanding to himself.
When others asked him to teach the Buddha responded, "This Dharma which I have realized is indeed profound, difficult to perceive, difficult to comprehend, tranquil, exalted, not within the sphere of logic, subtle....If I were to teach this Dharma, the others would not understand me." This Dharma, the Buddha said, "goes against the stream." It is said only after the god Brahma implored him three times did the Buddha agree to teach. When I read the gospels, I get the impression that Jesus found it difficult to convey his teaching to other people. I get the impression that Jesus experienced God and God's creation--that Jesus experienced reality--in ways that differed from many of his contemporaries, in ways that were unfamiliar to them. In one respect, Jesus' message was very simple--love, forgive, serve, pray, be faithful, humble yourself, and remain attentive. But in another respect, Jesus' message was, like the Buddha's, profound, difficult to perceive, difficult to comprehend, tranquil, exalted, not within the sphere of logic, subtle, and against the stream. It seems to me the challenge Jesus faced was how to use familiar words and concepts to convey a reality that was unfamiliar to people, how to use words and concepts people knew to explain a reality people didn't know, or most profoundly, how to use words and concepts people could define to point to a reality that was ultimately indefinable. In meeting this challenge, Jesus often stretched the meaning of familiar words and concepts, sometimes to absurd lengths, in his attempt to stretch people's minds and transform people's minds so they could see, understand, accept, respond to, and live into this new reality. The results of his efforts were mixed. His message clicked or resonated with some people, others found him too confusing or misunderstood him, and still others were scandalized by his use of words and accused him of blasphemy. In Jesus' time and place, people were familiar with words and concepts like messiah, king, kingdom of God, resurrection, the age to come, and eternal life. These familiar words and concepts conveyed particular meanings to his contemporaries and they set up certain expectations in their minds. Even if some people didn't believe in a particular concept, like the Sadducees not believing in resurrection, they were still familiar with its meaning. But when Jesus used these familiar words and concepts, he did so in ways that challenged their conventional definitions and confounded the usual expectations. He distorted their familiar meanings in ways that turned them inside or transformed them into their opposite. For example, when Jesus claims to be the messiah and then announces the messiah will be crucified this shocks his contemporaries because it so thoroughly contradicts their expectation that the messiah will be victorious over Israel's enemies. How can the messiah liberate his people from Rome if Rome crucifies him? It made no sense, in the familiar sense. Jesus redefined the very meaning of the messiah in an attempt to open people to a new reality, one to which they were unfamiliar. He did the same with the term kingdom of God. He used this familiar concept in ways that were unfamiliar, in a manner that confounded people's typical expectations regarding what it was, when it would be, and for whom it would be, in his attempt to open their eyes and ears, their hearts and minds to an unfamiliar reality. I suspect Jesus did the same with concepts like resurrection and the age to come. Many of Jesus' contemporaries held some kind of belief in resurrection. Some believed in the resurrection of righteous Israelites, others believed in the resurrection of both righteous and unrighteous Israelites, but only Israelites, while still others believed in the resurrection of all people who would then be subject to the judgment of Israel's God. Some believed in resurrection in a bodily form, while others believed in resurrection in a transformed body, resurrection without a body, resurrection on earth, or resurrection in paradise. Though the details differed, what most of these beliefs had in common was the notion that the resurrection of the dead would occur at the consummation or fulfillment of history. At the end of this age, Israel's God would destroy evil and begin a new age--the age to come or the kingdom of God--and raise the dead to a new life within this new age. The Sadducees, a group of aristocratic men from whom the High Priest was chosen, did not believe in resurrection. In an effort to trip Jesus up and make him look foolish, some Sadducees ask Jesus a question regarding how the Law of Moses will be applied after people are resurrected in the age to come. They pose an elaborate and tricky marriage scenario involving a wife and her many husbands, the type of scenario religious legal scholars in Jesus' day would have argued about until the end of time. Many who hear the question probably think, "hmmm, good question, how will that work?" But Jesus dispatches the question quickly saying the Law of Moses regarding marriage will not apply in the age to come because resurrected people will not marry. This is more than a clever answer to silence some sly Sadducees. This is shocking news. Rather than being the final and ultimate fulfillment of the Law of Moses, as many expect, the age to come will be so different that the Law of Moses, at least in some cases, will no longer apply. People who are resurrected in the age to come will not perfectly obey the Law of Moses, as many expect, because the Law of Moses will be, at least in part, obsolete and unnecessary. Jesus silences the Sadducees by affirming a reality he calls resurrection. A nearby scribe praises Jesus, possibly for silencing some Sadducees he doesn't like or because what Jesus just said clicked or resonated, but the reality Jesus described did not conform to what most people expected in the age to come. I confess that I don't know exactly what Jesus means when he uses words like resurrection, the age to come, or kingdom of God. It is hard enough trying to understand how his contemporaries typically understood these words. It is far harder trying to understand what Jesus meant by them, or to see the reality to which he is pointing when he uses words familiar to his contemporaries in unfamiliar ways. Words or concepts like resurrection, the age to come, or kingdom of God are not words or concepts I either believe in or don't believe in so much as words and concepts that confront me and stretch my mind. What does it mean when Jesus says in the age to come our bodies will be like angels and we will no longer be subject to death? Are we to take this literally? Is it metaphor? Is it in an afterlife experience? Is it life on earth completely transformed beyond recognition? I neither believe nor disbelieve these words. Rather, I allow them to undermine my attachment to the familiar world as I know it, and to open me to the possibility that a reality unfamiliar to me exists and that a future I cannot imagine is possible. There is in my life a deep tension that exists between what I have come to believe about God, and the awareness that God utterly transcends my ability to know God. Perhaps you feel this tension as well. It is difficult to articulate. There is something about God that has become familiar to me because of Jesus, because of the Bible, because of the church, because of other faith traditions, and because of my own experience, but I sense deeply that there is far more about God that remains unfamiliar to me. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld's famous quote, I sense there are things about God I don't even know I don't know. As a person of faith, I have a degree of certainty about God, yet I live with a large dose of uncertainty regarding God as well. I know God as love, but I also sense that God as love transcends the human capacity to love. The human desire to love and be loved, the human capacity to give and receive love, points us in the direction of God, opens us to God, and is a means through which we experience God's presence. But I sense that God transcends human love, and that God as love cannot be reduced to what we know as human love. While confessing that there is much about God that is unfamiliar to me, one of the central tenets of my faith is that God is constantly and continuously seeking to break through to me to familiarize me with the unfamiliar. God is constantly and continuously seeking to open my eyes, my ears, my heart, and my mind to a new reality with which I am currently unfamiliar. God is seeking to lead me from a way of life with which I am familiar to a way of life with which I am unfamiliar. This is the whole meaning of the biblical term metanoia that is so central to the gospels--change of heart, or more profoundly, change of orientation. One could argue this is the whole Biblical drama in a nutshell. This sense that God is seeking to open me to a reality and a future I cannot now imagine is what drives my prayer life and meditation. This is what drives my ministry. This is the subtext of nearly every sermon I preach--the spiritual necessity of remaining open to the God who is still speaking, and still shedding light upon us, and still drawing us unfinished creatures into a new reality, the likes of which I can't claim to fully understand, but which I glimpse whenever I see love, justice, and righteousness at work, whenever I see mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation, whenever I see open-mindedness and open-heartedness. One of the things that I appreciate the most about this church is that I can get up here in the pulpit and say, "I don't really know what Jesus is talking about when he talks about resurrection or the kingdom of God." And folks in the pew say, "thank God, cause if he don't know...." But it is a certain type of not knowing, and I think many of us share it. It is a type of not knowing that comes with deep faith and openness. We know just enough to trust Jesus and to keep following him even if we don't know exactly where he is leading us. We know just enough to know that what we don't know will be revealed to us as we follow in the way of Jesus. So let us celebrate what we do know, and let us remain radically open to our own uncertainty and to that which is still unfamiliar because it is there that we will discover God, ourselves, one another, and God's creation in a fresh, new way. |
