I think it is clear that the people who make the choices as to what readings are used on a given Sunday ... hope, sometimes more successfully than others, that they form a kind of coherent whole. That is, they give us enough stuff to think about, pray over, as they resonate from each other. And, certainly in today's case that's true, at least for the first and third readings, where we run into an absolutely central religious issue ... That is, people talk about, well, the bumper sticker may do as well as anything ... Remember: "Jesus is the answer." Everybody's seen that bumper sticker. And, of course, the counter bumper sticker is: "What's the question?" And, so what we're talking about is whether religion, precisely, is some kind of repertoire of answers to life's problems. And I think that the second bumper sticker is probably more religiously useful than the first: " ... What is the question?" Because if we're attentive to life there is no end of questions ... Arid it has certainly been one of the great faults of religious people that they leaped far too vigorously and far too quickly into, some people say, an area where they have or will have all the answers.
So we have this reading today from Isaiah, this famous line: "my thoughts are not you're thoughts." And then you get this utterly perplexing situation in this parable from Matthew. The whole point of course is ... : "Where does the mind function?" or, "How does the mind function in matters religious?" In a sense our Fundamentalist brothers and sisters have solved the problem because they say "it doesn't." There was a man who entered the church last year from a Fundamentalist church, who put it to me, he said that he, one of his pastors pointed to his head during one of his sermons and said: "This is your doubt box .... so don't engage it when you're doing religious things. It's dangerous..." It is dangerous ... But then of course we Catholics, at least, pride ourselves on a long tradition of, of the fact that we do believe that the human mind is religiously useful.
So that's what I want to talk about today. To what extent and in what way is it useful? And can we talk about that kind of utility and still preserve what Isaiah and Jesus said. There is some fundamental thing that goes beyond any kind of intellection on our part.
Isaiah sets it up very nicely: "My thoughts are not your thoughts." Well, that's good ... I don't know God and if I'm at all religiously serious, I know that God is ultimately unknowable. So that's safe ... But knowledge is not just God's intelligibility, knowledge has to do with my efforts to understand something. And so, can we look at human life ... and try to talk about God's unknowability ... And I'd like to make sortie proposals today.
The third reading offers the obvious instance, huh? "What's wrong? Life is riot fair." Our head splits against what seems to be an irrational and incoherent situation in which there is a radical injustice here ... in life. And our fundamental sense of fairness, you know, seems to be violated by this ... An incoherence therefore. But I think that if you push that a little bit further something else is in play. At least I find it to be so for me.
If it is true, and I think everybody admits, that the absolute basic drive is to be loved..., to be taken in .... to be accepted. If that is true of all the 5.7 billion of us on this planet at this moment in the whole of humanity ... then something more fundamental than the search for justice and elementary fairness is in play here .... namely the sense that I want to be loved absolutely uniquely and individually .... just for myself. And I think it's not just injustice that's queried here but this story raised the fears that "I'm not gonna be really loved by myself and for myself ... " And so I'd like to propose that one of the great incomprehensibilities of about a Christian life is revealed in this. Namly, the mystery of the Kingdom of God which is that God is going to love all of us so that we may love each other ... How does that work? Humanly, I do not know a single situation in which that works ...
The Smothers Brothers, if anybody remembers them, made great, you know: "Mom always liked you best." And I think that is an absolutely fundamental sense that we have about life ... And so if life does not play out that way, and it certainly does not in this parable, then there is bound to be this sense that something has gone awry... That something doesn't make sense ... God's ways are not our ways ... because it is unimaginable that God would love us in our own uniqueness in such a way to open each of us, not only to God, but to each other.
But I think there's something even deeper afoot here. And here I rely on people like Kierkegaard ... but it seems that in one of his books he makes the point that, I find, resonating in a number of writers. He says: "There are two great fears ... :that absolutely shadow every human existence. One is the fear of dying ... " All right, that sounds safe. " ... The other is the fear of living ... " And by that he meant that living is precisely the movement forward in my life, the breaking out of every prior achievement, every prior sense of security, and into the enormous mysterious risk taking that is alone ... real living.
In other words, I'd like to suggest, first of all that insight is precisely on the mark. It's not just: "I'm afraid of dying .... I'm afraid of really living ... I want to stay in some state of suspended animation: neither quite dead, neither quite alive .... but surviving." And if God is the God of Jesus, then this God wants us to be alive. "... I've come that they may have life,"??????? writer puts into the mouth of Jesus. And so to be pulled by God through life into all kinds of places I don't want to be ... is certainly going to feel as if God, herself, is incomprehensible ... This should not be ... This should not be happening ... This does not make sense.
Finally .... what have I tried to do? I've tried to make some sense of the incomprehensibility of God by starting from the incomprehension of our own human lives. And I think that particular incomprehensibility is made even more specific and clear, even in the Kierkegaardian scheme when we look at the phenomenon of love. Anybody who's been told that they are loved knows what I'm talking about ... Because you both want it ... and you fear it. And the fear takes two very interesting and almost diametrically opposed forms, I suggest to you, at least in my case. One is that: "I really don't deserve this, I really don't deserve to be loved ... And that scares me ... And that's incomprehensible and incoherent ... " But then the other side of the thing is: "I so want to be loved but now what do I have to do, now that I am here?"
That is terrifying and incomprehensible. I mean lets just do it for now: "Okay, you love me? -Good, now let's get on with it ... Oh, no, no, no, no... because nothing can be the same subsequent to that. Nothing can be the same subsequent to that for that opens onto the whole great unknown future where all kinds of things are gonna be asked of me, in the name of love, that I am not particularly anxious to encounter, much less respond to.
So .... I still believe God is beyond conceptualization and imagining. But as a good Roman, a would-be good Roman, I'd like to say that I could use my brain to try to make sense of even incomprehensibility. And to start up, as Aquinas did, with human experience. Aquinas, Augustine .... all those "big guys." That does not solve the problem. The problem is by definition not a problem but a mystery... and therefore ultimately unsoluble. But it at least ought to make me feel more at home in my skin..., in my world, above all .... in this place. Because, I put it to you, it's only in this place that we can even begin to address these questions.
