Paradox - the phenomenon of holding two truth that are
in tension with each other. The Christian Way is full of them.
That's OK - it's not a problem. Indeed it is exactly what we should
expect and hope for. As I often remind my patients and church family, we
are complicated, life is complicated and God is very complex. So if we found
that Christianity was simple, with clear answers for every life-issue and
theological itch, we ought to be suspicious that the faith might be phony,
contrived and manufactured. Instead what we find is that this complex God
reveals Himself into our complexity and the complexity of life, in some very
simple ways, while leaving some areas of our experience complex. This
feels very real to me and encourages me to trust this God in the areas of
thought and experience that I find complicated.
When I think about just how complex God is across space and time, and how
limited my capacity to understand and comprehend is, I must conclude that there
will be much about God and this life and universe that He has created, that I
would not understand. To expect that I would understand everything would
be the height of arrogance and foolishness. So, we arrive at our starting point
- there is paradox in a mature and reasonable (reasoning) faith.
One such paradox I have been thinking about recently is the exclusivity
and inclusivity of Jesus. Just how wide is this Jesus and just how
narrow? In the book of Ephesians in the New Testament of the Bible, Paul,
inspired by the Holy Spirit writes "… that Christ may dwell in your hearts
through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend
with all the saints what is the breadth
and length and height and depth, that surpasses knowledge, that you may be
filled with all the fullness of God. (Chapter 3 verses 17 to 19, emphasis
added by me). So this Jesus
is very wide, tall and deep – or at least His love is. And since God IS love (1 John 4:8) we can
think that the Scripture tells us that Jesus is wide. This supported and rounded out by dozens of
references in scripture to the broad invitation that God offers to all people,
peoples, or all cultures and times to come to a live-saving relationship with
Him (e.g. John 3:16, 2 Peter 3:9, 1 Timothy 2:1-4 etc.)
At the same time Jesus’ words, captured by
Matthew (Matthew 7:13-14) say “Enter
by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to
destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate
is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find
it are few.” So this wide Jesus offers a narrow gate and a
steep/hard road? What is this gate and
road exactly? The answers seems to be in
the most well-known of Jesus’ saying that are exclusive: (John 14:6, my
emphasis added) “ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me””. Taking
the context into account and other interpretive guidelines, I think it is
reasonable to put these two statements next to each other and conclude that Jesus
is presenting Himself as the narrow and exclusive gateway, and His truth and
life as the steep/hard path that leads to God The Father.
So we have a universally broad invitation
to a deep, broad and tall life of God’s love that must thread through a narrow
gate (Jesus) and along a steep and hard path.
Paradox.
This
is not some esoteric theological clever observation, fodder for some
intellectually impressive sermon. It’s
where the rubber meets the road. As I
pray with a devoted, faithful and kind Muslim patient in hospital, who clearly
has a long and steady love for God, resulting in the fruits of the Spirit
(love, joy, kindness, faithfulness, self-control etc.) in advance of many
Christians, I am confronted with the broad call of the Holy Spirit (Google ‘prevenient
grace’ dear reader) that calls all people to faith in God through Christ. Yet is this dear person experiencing the life
of Christ without ever knowing it, or Him, explicitly? Can God be saving people
in other faith traditions without their conscious identification with the name
of Yeshua (Jesus), the Messiah (Christ)?
I then ponder how many western modern Christians are saved by the blood
of Christ with scant understanding of His Jewishness, or the depth of substitutionary
atonement. Worse, I then ponder how many
‘Christians ‘ believe they are saved without ever deeply laying down their
lives and submitting to the Lordship of Christ, but rather saying a one-time prayer
and then tipping the hat to Jesus as a sort of passing admiration for the rest
of their life. It’s complex.
So what are we
left with? A loving God, who through His
own merits and efforts has opened a Way for us to live with Him in the
contentment and peace of our original design – with Him reigning at the center
of who we are (individually and collectively).
This Way is the cross and blood of Jesus Christ, exclusively. The safest, most assured way to have such a
restored life is to explicitly acknowledge Jesus as Lord, and His death as the
way out of our sin, shame and alienation from God; to claim His resurrection as
our promised freedom from death, through death and suffering, into forever-life
with God and each other. There may be
ways in which the broad grace and love of God reaches some, but this is the
narrow gate, and that’s the Way I will walk, now and always. The truth I understand I will embrace and respond
to. The paradoxes…I leave those at Jesus
feet as a work-in-progress.
