Saturday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Some thirty years ago, Bill had a conversation with his sister-in-law that he will never forget. They were driving back to Bill’s house after a day visiting museums in Washington, DC when they somehow got onto the topic of certainty and Christianity. Bill’s sister-in-law (I’ll call her Joanne) was absolutely convinced that to be a true Christian, required certainty about the faith. A true Christian, she argued, is someone who understands the central tenets of the faith and knows they are true. It's not enough to be convinced or to be nearly sure or to observe the practices of the faith but have some doubts about this or that doctrinal point. To be a Christian, you have to know. Without certainty, you are failing to commit to the faith. You are sitting on the fence.
Bill wasn’t convinced. Oh, he was persuaded that Christianity has it right—that Jesus is the Son of God, that he was incarnate and became man, that he taught us to love even our enemies and take care of the poor, that he was resurrected, and that his Kingdom will last forever. He had no trouble giving his assent to all of that and more.
But he could not claim that what he took to be true in Christianity was the absolute truth for all time, in all places, and for everyone. There were at least two reasons for Bill’s inability to claim certainty.
One of them had to do with his conviction that we humans are deeply limited in what we can know and that we are deeply flawed—sinners, to be sure. Perhaps especially because he is a historian, Bill is keenly aware of the all-too-many mistakes (some catastrophic) that human beings have made in the name of a truth that seemed absolutely true and incontestable at the time and later turned out to be false. Too often, he will tell you, human beings took action in the name of such truths and people suffered . . . for nothing.
A second and related reason was that to claim that one has the truth about who God is, what God wants of us, who is in God’s favor and who is not, and so forth is to make God very small. It is to transform God who is infinite and beyond our understanding into something we humans can wrap our comparatively tiny intellects around. In this way, we make God manageable. If we can make God smaller all the while making ourselves greater (because we know God’s mind and will), we can imagine that we are on par with God. Maybe we even imagine that we are gods too.
You can, perhaps, hear in these two very different takes on certainty and Christianity the energy that animated this conversation. So, you probably won’t be surprised that it went on for more than two hours.
And I can imagine, if they were there to witness it, the Pharisees clapping enthusiastically and cheering Joanne on. She was fighting the good fight, to be sure! Her argument demonstrated clearly that she is no relativist! Hoorah!
In our reading from Luke’s Gospel today, the Pharisees are none too pleased with Jesus. Here is this formidable figure who is captivating earnest Jews with his message of good news for the poor, the widow, the orphan. Indeed, for all who need forgiveness and seek God’s mercy. People are buying it big time! Indeed, we just read on Thursday the story of Simon Peter, James, John, and others who, having heard Jesus’ teachings, leave their fishing boats on the shore and take off with Jesus. Who knows where he will lead them?
So, the Pharisees are paying attention to this phenom known as Jesus. And what they witness in the story before us today is deeply disturbing to them. Everyone knows what the rules of the sabbath are. They are old, and they are sacred. And they are God-given. You can’t just ignore them or, worse yet, flaunt them. To be among the faithful, you have to follow them. Obedience to these and other rules is essential to one’s faith.
So what is Jesus doing by allowing his followers to snack away on the sabbath? The Pharisees must have been stunned. Does Jesus fail to understand what is at stake here? God’s rules are not just any rules. They make it possible for human beings to know God’s will and to live in accordance with it. Moreover, obedience to such rules shows God and everyone else that you have heard God’s commands, that you (thereby) know God’s will, and that you abide by it.
By contrast, if it’s okay to break this sacred rule, is it okay to break others? Indeed, if it’s okay to break this sacred rule then are any rules sacred any longer? Do the so-called faithful get to pick and choose which of God’s rules or truths to follow? And if one of God’s rules becomes inconvenient because one happens to be hungry or in a hurry or up against a deadline or in a bad mood or who knows what, can one just bag it and still claim to be faithful?
In short, by allowing his followers to snack on the sabbath, is Jesus embracing a relativist position on God’s rules that undermines faith in the truth of God?
Jesus says no. He is God. He’ll make the rules and the rulings. And they might surprise us now and again. Jesus is trying to teach us, I think, that if we think we know God’s mind, we need to think again. Truth is, it’s much too big for us to know. Instead of aiming to know, our task is to aim to listen. What is God saying today? Is it what we expect? Is it something new? Is something breaking in, like the Good News, to teach us something we can’t anticipate? Like forgiveness for us and for our neighbor?
So, what about that conversation between Joanne and Bill? After two hours, Joanne was as convinced about the necessity of certainty for Christian faith as ever. As far as Bill could tell, his arguments had had no significant impact on her. Then, a few years later, dramatic life events tore up her world, and suddenly certainty vanished. She didn’t know anything with certainty anymore. It was, to say the least, a very dark time in her life.
And then God took her completely by surprise. God showed up in ways should could not have anticipated and to this day struggles to attempt to describe. And she quite unexpectedly experienced the mystery of faith and God’s unfathomable grace and mercy.
Dear Lord, I desire to know you but not to put you in a box. Help me to curb the temptation to think that I know your will. Give me humility that I might be available to your mystery. Amen.
—Susan Trollinger