Unnamed Mystery (Mid-week Message)

 

Unnamed Mystery

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Sept. 3, 2014

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

   nor your ways my ways, says the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

   so are my ways higher than your ways,

   and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)

I was deeply saddened last month to see in the news the murder of a man whom I had met in my work at the State Department, journalist James Foley.  I was troubled by the murderers’ use of religious language to justify their act of politically motivated terror. 

Karen Armstrong has written that the passage of scripture from Isaiah above,  

“should be written over every pulpit. Because so often we think that God's ways are our ways. God's thoughts are our thoughts. And we created God in our own image and likeness saying, ‘God approves of this. God forbids that. God desires the other.’ This is where some of the worst atrocities of religion have come from … [justifying our] worst hatreds, loathings, and fears.” 

The basic teaching in ancient Biblical monotheism is that you must not make an image of God, worship it, or even speak the name of God aloud with your lips.  This ideal of Judaism makes this point: God is not our personal creature, our possession.  Since we human beings are limited, imperfect creatures of God, any effort by us to express or contain the Divine of necessity will be limited and by definition distort.  Islam also teaches that God is beyond human imagination:

“Say: Who is Master of the heavens and the earth?   

Say: Allah! …

Say: Is one whose sight is blacked out on an equal footing to one with clear vision, or is darkness equal to light? ...

Say: Allah is the creator of all things, and He is the One, the Almighty.” (Qur'an 13:16)

Our ideas about God should challenge us, not affirm our lesser selves.   Compassion for others, not contempt or judgment, should spring from a clear understanding that any understanding on our part is limited.  

We Christians believe that God is most clearly revealed in the person of the historical Jesus of Nazareth.  Such a belief puts limits on any certitude we might we feel in our doctrinal formulations about God and God’s will.  The dialogue between this historical Jesus and the Christ of Faith of the post-Easter Church places bounds on our certitude, and creates a humility in our formulations.  Jesus Christ is not a thing to analyzed, a riddle to be intellectually solved or controlled.   Again, compassion and love are the fruit of a relationship with the Living One, not legalistic exclusion or boundary setting, or the political manipulations of partisans.    

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+