mystery and paradox
Mystery. Paradox. Wonder. Awe. Call it what you want, but it is missing from most of our teaching and congregations.
As a teacher of the Bible, I have often succumbed to the temptation to think that my job every weekend is to take the vastness and mystery of God in Scripture and break it into nice, thirty-five-minute, bite-sized, understandable chunks. Most of the time, it seems like a pretty noble undertaking. There has developed around the teaching profession a whole industry designed to help us in this process. We have books of illustrations, ready-for-pulpit Internet sermons, and books and DVDs on a whole range of issues. We have Bible answer men and women, apologetic Web sites to answer our toughest questions, and sermon manuals that plan an entire year of teachings for us.
On the whole, I have been very grateful for all the help. But something significant has been missing.
Mystery. Paradox. Wonder. Awe. Call it what you want, but it is missing from most of our teaching and congregations. As Marva Dawn puts it:
The most critical issue facing Christians is not abortion, pornography, the disintegration of the family, moral absolutes, MTV, drugs, racism, sexuality, or school prayer. The critical issue today is dullness. We have lost our astonishment. The Good News is no longer life changing. It is life enhancing. Jesus doesn’t change people into wide-eyed radicals anymore; He changes them into nice people.
One of the core assumptions of the whole teaching endeavor is that it is the teacher’s job to remove mystery. If you want to know God’s will, here are three easy steps. Want a healthy marriage? Here are five proven principles. Need to know why God allows suffering? Here are a couple of pat answers.
This whole sermon industry has developed to do our thinking for us. And in the process, we have taken much of the inscrutable, gigantic, and mysterious word of God and attempted to make it all palatable to the masses.
Most congregations expect this. People come to the church for answers, not more questions. But, ironically enough, raising questions was central to the teaching ministry of Jesus. In the Gospels, Jesus was quite happy to raise more questions than he answered, and often, on the whole, he didn’t directly answer the questions posed him.
Instead of removing mystery, God seems to introduce and reinforce it. Instead of alleviating tension, Jesus liked to increase it.
Erre, Mike. (2006). The Jesus of Suburbia: Have We Tamed the Son of God to Fit Our Lifestyle? W Publishing Group: Nashville.