Mysteries (slightly revised)

(4/9)


"God became man." "The Word became flesh." "Incarnation." The words are so familiar to Christians that we become dulled to the astonishing thing they say. The cross shocks and scandalizes and reastonishes, and never more so than in the cry of dereliction, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


I wonder if Fr. Neuhaus put this seeming non sequitur here just to grab our attention. It certainly caught mine. The thing is, it's exactly right to put these two ideas together. These first three phrases happened with the eternal Son's full knowledge of where this miracle would lead. It isn't that the fully human Jesus couldn't have chosen otherwise, it's that God's Son knew in eternity, before the foundation of the world (or, where "before" and "after" have no meaning, for all is now, except that somehow that still implies an element of time which does not exist in eternity if indeed that is more than the "time without end" which may be the best that our time-locked minds can truly grasp), that he did not.  We do not understand how the fully human and fully divine natures of Jesus fit together, do not know "what happened" to the things that God the Son knew in eternity outside of his conception in Mary's womb.  These mysteries are beyond us, not that we should not ponder them.  But that the Incarnation should lead to this dereliction should indeed be a cause for shock, scandal and astonishment for us.

We spoke earlier about the necessity of our speaking about God by analogy. Speaking by analogy, by comparison, can mislead us into thinking there is a smooth correspondence between realities divine and human. But analogy does not mean that there is a neat correspondence between similarities and dissimilarities, that we can gain an approximate and more or less satisfactory understanding of God by reference to our own experience.  No, wherever there is similarity, we discover that the dissimilarity is infinitely greater. - ibid.

I think this final idea was likely borrowed from an earlier writer - St. Augustine, maybe? This seems another non sequitur relative to what comes before it, but again they fit together.  We must get out of our heads the notion that we comprehend God.  The best our finite minds which are bound by time can hope for is the smallest, briefest glimpse of insight into the infinite God who dwells in eternity.  We can never fully understand God, though striving to do so insofar as we are able is a fitting task on which to focus a lifetime of effort.  Some might protest that this would detract from time and effort we should be spending helping our neighbor, when the truth is that our striving to see God more fully always leads us to reach out to our neighbor more than we ever would otherwise.  The Incarnation and the dereliction fit perfectly together in God, even if our understanding of God is insufficient to fully make the connection.

Also, if the most that we can get is a glimpse of God, and that only by analogy, then it must be up to God to reveal Godself to us in the ways which we are able to grasp.  It is fully the work of grace, not of our own understanding nor of our own faith, that delivers us into the presence of God for these brief, astonishing, shocking, scandalous, eternal moments.

And when we cooperate with grace, when we embrace the mystery that is beyond us for all time but will be ours for eternity, we are awestruck.