Paradox

Mark 10:35-45

October 21, 2012

God is God, and we are not.  This is not, I suspect, a controversial statement.  We may all confess that we sometimes forget this, but most of us, I’m guessing, would readily admit that understanding that we are not God is essential to understanding our place in this world and our purpose in life. 

In our bible study Friday afternoon, we read a passage from Job – another of the lectionary readings for this Sunday – and this was the WHOLE point.  God is God, and we are not.  Job confronts God, after God inflicted him with unimaginable suffering, demanding to know why, and God responds to Job by asking rhetorically, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” and “Have you commanded the morning since your days began?” or “Can you send forth lightening?”.  In other words, “hey! Who’s God here?!” God is God and we are not.  Pretty uncontroversial.

The problem is, Jesus really complicates this.  It’s complicated because we don’t say, “God is God and Jesus is not.”  In fact, we say Jesus is fully divine.  Jesus is God-in-flesh.  And, we don’t say, “Jesus is human and we are not.”  In fact, we say Jesus is fully human; flesh and blood like you and me.  But if Jesus is God and Jesus is human and we are human, then how can it be true that God is God and we are not God?  It seems like the transitive properties of mathematics don’t quite apply. 

In general, we move seamlessly between talking about Jesus as a picture of who God is and Jesus as a model for our lives.  Think about that for a second.  Jesus reveals who God is.  Jesus is, we say fairly comfortably and often, God.  But Jesus also serves as the example of how a human being should live.  Jesus is a human being calling us to his way of life.  The distance between God and us is vast, but when you put Jesus in the picture, something happens to that distance – it doesn’t exactly go away, but it doesn’t look so vast anymore.

Reinhold Niebuhr was a Christian theologian, and he is famous, in part, for the observation that being a Christian means being comfortable with paradox.  A paradox is something that seems self contradictory, but on closer inspection reveals a certain truth that reconciles the conflicting opposites.  The classic paradox is that God is all loving, yet created a world in which evil exists.  Or God is sovereign, all-powerful, all-knowing, but human beings have free will.  Jesus as fully human and fully divine – a paradox to be sure.  Everywhere he looked Niebuhr saw paradox.  Whenever he tried to do theology, he struggled with paradox.  And he said if we are not comfortable with paradox, we will have a tough time growing in our faith.

Well, for the most part, I can honestly say, I’m not all that comfortable with paradox – especially when it comes to God.  I don’t like my images of God to contradict each other.  And I’m not the only one.

How do I know this?  Because I choose hymns every week.  Our hymnals are FULL of hymns about God being God and us being “not God.”  Our hymnals sing of God’s power, might, authority.  God is king, ruler, lord.  God is worthy of our praise and adoration.  Immortal, Invisible, God only wise.  Praise to the Lord the Almighty the king of creation.  You know them well.

These hymns are without paradox.  God is God:  Strong, fierce, mighty, powerful, alone to be praised, glorified, and, when necessary, ready to loose the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword, as the battle hymn goes.

To the degree that Jesus reveals something about the character and heart of God, rather than or in addition to being a model for human behavior, this picture we get of God in this passage this morning does not match any hymn written about the nature and character of God in our hymnal – trust me, I looked.

Jesus, in the gospel of Mark, every step of the way rejects power, authority, glory, and praise.  Jesus talks about greatness not in terms of immortality, but death.  Jesus talks not of sitting on thrones, but of service.  Jesus turns the wisdom of the world on its head – the first shall be last and the last first.  Jesus is vulnerable.  Jesus sits at the disciples feet.  Jesus comes not to be served but to serve.  Jesus …God dies on a cross, not as a king in battle.  I’m here to tell you that’s it’s hard to find those hymns that sing of God’s service to us.  Or the hymn that talks about God being the least and the last. 

Images matter.  They really matter.  Even unconsciously we equate the ideal person with our image of God.  Feminists taught us that when our image of God is male, we tend to elevate men above women.  When God is a powerful king, we begin to think this is the ideal for humans as well.  This is what’s happening for James and John, I think.  It’s only natural that they want to sit in the glory of Jesus – that’s god-like.  Glory, praise, honor…think about how often we use these words when talking about God.  Why would we blame the disciples, much less ourselves, for thinking that being close to God means being close to glory, praise and honor?

But part of what the paradox of God as servant and God as king does is help us rethink what true power is.  It helps us see that there are different kinds of power in this world – power that comes through force, coercion, oppression, control, authority; and power that comes from giving oneself to others, sacrifice, compassion, service, forgiveness.  All of these things can be powerful – but when we sing of the power of God, the stories of Jesus – at least as we have them in the gospel of Mark – should immediately evoke in us the idea of power that comes through service, not through authority and demanding allegiance.

In this passage, Jesus identifies explicitly how power works in the world of his day.  He says look at the kings and rulers of this world: “they lord it over them.  They are tyrants,” he says.  “But not so among you.”  Your “king,” your “ruler,” does not lord it over you.  Your “king” does not take power.  Your “king” gives it away, kneels at your feet and washes them.

Jesus is being deliberately subversive when he identifies the power system.  He is not saying: leave the power to me, or even to God: you are slaves!  He’s saying we all become slaves.  You serve no king, no God, yet you serve everyone, and in that you serve God.  A paradox. 

Generally, when faced with this paradox, we fall back on something less complicated.  We keep God great – powerful, mighty, omnipotent.  We believe God is in control – can fix things – makes all things happen.  And we tend to take some comfort in this.  Then, we’ll talk of Jesus as showing us how to serve, but not as God-in-flesh serving us.  We’ll talk of Jesus healing people, reaching out to the lowly, but we still insist on calling him “Lord,” with no hint of irony. 

But, when God’s power is unmitigated, un-nuanced, and like that of an earthly king, you end up with the God of war and battle.  I love West Wing.  Really, to an embarrassing degree, love it.  I have seen most of the shows many times.  This is the show with the fictional president of the United States, Jed Bartlet…played by Martin Sheen.    When the series first began, you learn quickly that many people – including some of his own administration – are worried that because Bartlet never served in the military, and they aren’t sure he will be ready to be commander in Chief when the time came. They worried he wouldn’t have the strength or stomach for making hard decisions about use of violence. 

In like the second episode, an American plane was shot down, and he had to decide how to respond.  After meeting with the chiefs and commanders and his own chief of staff, they were all worried he was soft.  The episode ends in the oval office with Bartlet and his Chief of Staff.  After saying very little for a long time, the president looks at his chief of staff and says, “I am not frightened.  I’m gonna blow them off the face of the earth with the fury of God’s own thunder.”

Foreign policy based on a very particular image of God.  Injustice demands the fury of God’s judgment.  It’s certainly biblical.  Certainly not unlike our many images of God’s power.  And our real live presidents may not have Aaron Sorkin writing for them when they are putting together foreign policy, but if you think foreign policy in our country is not affected by our images of God, you haven’t sung the Battle Hymn of the Republic lately. 

As we seek to be faithful people, I want to suggest that in part it means finding ways to manifest in our lives the character and heart of God.  We are not God – it’s true.  But we seek to know God as best we can so we can try and embody God’s heart and character with our lives.  So, it behooves us to spend some real time thinking about and articulating what we believe about God.  And the author of Mark reminds us to get beyond the basic answers of: God’s Powerful, almighty, and king.  If that is all of who God is, then we would be faithful if we held power over others, asked others to serve us, and were almighty.  Yet that doesn’t seem to be the way of life to which Jesus – God incarnate – calls us.

The paradox of Jesus – being both fully divine and fully human – is not one we will resolve soon or once and for all.  But when I look at what we know of his life through the authors of our scriptures, it seems to me he was fully and beautifully human because his life reflected the heart and character of God – which he seemed to believe had a lot to do with healing, compassion, nonviolence, service, and eating with people nobody liked. 

I also know that the paradox of God being all powerful, king of kings and lord almighty – not us! – while at the same time being the one who comes not to be served but to serve, not to reign over others but to die on a cross – that paradox is not easily solved either.  The image of God we have from Job, for example, is important…if we forget that God is God and we are not, then we will misunderstand our relationship to the universe.  And there is deep truth in God being a powerful force of creation, a force that can sustain the entire universe.  I believe God transcends me, us, and humanity.  God is not just the sum of the parts.

But when I look at the life of Jesus, I wonder if one thing we learn is that God is not a person, endowed with great power.  Rather God is what happens when a person who could take and wield power chooses instead to love and serve others.  That is powerful – it has an impact that can almost not be measured.  We see this kind of power in the lives of people like Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Oscar Romero.  These are not people that led countries, amassed armies under them, controlled people’s lives.  These are people who seemed to live out the heart of God that we see in the life of Jesus, and somehow never once mistook who they were for the creator God.

Jesus fought the notion of himself as a king the entire gospel of Mark, and in the end we are still tempted to put a big fat crown on him.  The only crown Jesus ever wore was a crown of thorns…and it was a joke. They were mocking him.  If we are living out the heart of God, we will not be adorned with crowns, sit on thrones, or be bathed in glory.  We will serve others.  We will give up power in order to not wield it over others.  We will kneel in front of our friends and enemies and wash their feet.  It may not fit our image of the great, mighty, kingly God, but Jesus didn’t seem to fit this image either.  Amen.