Easter-ing Faith ~ Don't and Won't

 

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been give to me. Matthew 28:18

Yesterday, we heard how the disciples, standing right in the very presence of the resurrected Jesus, still had questions.  They still were not quite sure.  Contrast that with Jesus today saying that “all authority.”  There is a completeness to Christ.  In Matthew, Jesus is called, “Emmanuel” meaning, “God with us.”  In the flesh of Jesus, we encounter and experience the Eternal and the human blended wholly (fully/holy) together. 

Yet, like the first disciples, our faith has the ants in the pants of doubt.  This is okay.  But the deeper truth is for us to be clear that Jesus is the Christ…not you or me.  That, yes, we are partners in Christ’s service, but we also don’t, and won’t, have it all figured out. 

Richard Rohr says it this way, “The author of The Cloud of Unknowing is always saying you’ve got to balance your knowing with a willingness not to know. The… brain in itself, is incapable of wisdom (fully knowing). We can’t prove (everything beyond a shadow of a doubt). We can’t measure everything (especially the most important things like love). We can’t convince anyone else that we’re right. What the author says is that first we have to enter the Cloud of Forgetting—to forget all our certitudes, all our labels, all our explanations, just forget them! They are all a waste of time. They are nothing but our ego projecting itself and announcing itself. It has nothing to do with objective reality. If the world doesn’t learn this kind of humility, what we’re calling beginner’s mind, I think we’re in trouble.”

To be sure, this is not exactly the script of the world.  We love certainty and confidence and conviction.  Brian McLaren says, “We prefer a confident lie to an uncertain truth.”  We don’t like ambiguity or cloudiness…we want decisive action…and we want it now.  Never mind those needling doubts in the back of your mind.  Never mind how often as humans we have yell, “Charge”…running right off the cliff like Wiley E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner.  This time, we say pounding the pulpit, we are so much more enlightened than our ancestors and the former versions of ourselves.  After all, we reason, we Googled it and watched a YouTube video and attended that Zoom class last week. 

This verse reminds me that I don’t have it all figured out.  My point of view is a view from a point ~ with all my idiosyncrasies and idolatry ~ my faith and doubts.   When I come to the mountain of an Easter-ing faith remembering this, I stop clinging and start opening my hands to receive what Christ can offer.  May you and I find this prayer posture today as we seek to live our Easter-ing faith.  Amen.