Today's reading from Joel speaks of God paying back Tyre and Sidon and Philistia because they have hurt Judah. Many passages in the Bible speak of God punishing, of God judging, and some of these passages present a picture of God that sounds almost petulant.
I think that most of us want a nice, clear, coherent picture of God, so most of us selectively read the Bible, finding those texts that fit the picture we have settled on. And considering the high levels of biblical illiteracy among Christians, many people's picture of God is cobbled together from a tiny number of texts and from popular notions of what God or Jesus is like.
Earlier this week I heard Walter Brueggemann speak of how rabbis treat the Hebrew Scriptures as something "thick, layered, and conflicted." Such a notion necessarily means that Scripture doesn't always have a clear, obvious meaning, that its meaning emerges as one wrestles with the layers and conflicts within it.
It strikes me that many of us try to project a picture of ourselves that is clear and coherent is the same way we do with God. We like to keep hidden certain facets of our selves. Most of us have a fair amount of messiness sloshing around inside of us. But we often admit it to no one, sometimes not even ourselves. Of course others sometimes know a person who is quite different from the image we have of ourselves.
I'm not saying that God necessarily has the same sort of internal messiness that we do, but I wonder if our aversion to such things doesn't make it difficult for us to wrestle with the messy picture of God that the Bible presents. Conversely, how much richer might our faith become if we would actually wrestle with the thick, layered, conflicted picture that the Bible gives us, and see what blessings might emerge.
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Incompleteness and ambiguity; the two towers of textual analysis, loom over our mostly hapless efforts to understand God through what is written. Yet, an encompassing whole is fundamental to our concept of God as a thing.
ReplyDeleteOur brains are wired to create abstractions, like 'the chicken or the egg', or petals of a flower unfolding from within, ad infinitum. We get some purchase on the mystery in this way.
I get some solace by allowing for the 'worm within the rose', and making peace with the partiality and temporality of my understanding.
We want to live our lives consistently with "God's Plan"; by a code of behavior, but even that impulse is corrupted by it's origins in deeper motives for individual survival, to prevail over the competition, and to find places in the Tribe and Family.
I so appreciate the opportunities you present to return to the well of mystery, through allegory, and the wealth of biblical study and history.
By engaging in these wrestling matches, we come away stronger for the next match, and more fit to live in keeping with God's ineffable intentions.
Once upon a time..."
ReplyDeleteLong, long ago..."
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...
...What am I, a watch? It's a story!..."