God’s Great Lengths
At the heart of the gospel, there is a Mystery — this being the life of, the death of, the resurrection of, and the promised coming of Christ. In short, it is the words found in our Communion liturgy, described as the Mystery of Faith:
“Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”
To speak for a moment to those who may lack the theological understanding of what constitutes a Mystery — there is a difference, in the language of the Church, between a Mystery and a puzzle. A puzzle is solvable, it has a solution. It has an end. It can be observed and admired for its craft and created-ness. A Mystery is something more, something transcendent, something with no end, something which cannot be fully understood, articulated, or reasoned out. To consider it in relation to God it is, as Pseudo-Dionysius phrased it, “the inscrutable One [who] is out of the reach of every rational process… the inexpressible Good.. this Source of all unity… Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech,”[1] — in short, it is the God who surpasses understanding and yet who is both wholly present and wholly transcendent, knowing us better than we know ourselves (and if that seems confusing, don’t worry, you’re catching on).
Thomas’* encounter with Christ is one of those which, like all of the narratives about Christ, communicates something about the Mystery of Jesus’ character to us; in this case, that Christ is willing to go the extra mile and is even willing, perhaps, to prove himself.
This both should and shouldn’t surprise us. It should surprise us in that it appears that God operates in such a way that challenges don’t prove that much of a threat. It shouldn’t surprise us in that God’s being questioned, tested, and challenged is a common trend throughout the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures, from Gideon’s almost comical twice-requested test of God (Jdg 6:36–40) to Abraham’s bargaining for the sake of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 18:16–33), the character of God is one that seems willing to be tested, to be pushed, God seems all too willing to go beyond what is expected and to surprise those caught up in the experience of God.
In his interaction with Thomas, Christ doesn’t appear frustrated or upset at the strange demand, rather he seems ready to go through with it, prepared to go beyond the expectation. This seems a funny scene to me as I can’t help but imagine that Thomas was willing to believe the moment Christ appeared but instead Jesus, again almost echoing that scene with Gideon, pushes Thomas to follow through on his own (now probably ridiculous-seeming) demand.
The Mystery of Faith is found in the actions of Christ, found in the words, found in each aspect of how Christ lived in the world. Christ reveals the Mystery of the experience of God in that he always seems willing to go beyond. To go past where we expect him to go. We observe this and we wonder at it, but we will never fully understand it.
We can only pursue it.
To Greater Lengths
A neighbor had recently begun showing up to our small town church, low-income and clearly in trouble, naturally the women at the church had made their attempt at hospitality; offering her some of the food they’d made and trying to make her feel welcome. When she took it and left with another plate in tow for her son she’d neglected to offer the appropriate gratitude and had instead slipped off without much to say thus bringing down the ire that one has not experienced until they have angered a group of church ladies.
“She just seemed so ungrateful, pastor!”
We tend to have these unwritten expectations in regards to human behavior and when someone breaks those unwritten rules — when they lack the required gratitude or don’t respond as we tend to become upset. It didn't take long for the unspoken rejection to build and for our neighbor to disassociate herself from the church, disappearing as quickly as she’d come. I still feel a sense of failure for this.
Looking back towards the example of Christ, towards his actions revealing the Mystery of God’s love we find a God who gave without expectation. Who gifted us with Christ’s presence, with Christ’s life, and even with the full outpouring of his life and the victory over the grave. All of these are gifts given fully, given without expectation of return. All of these, like Jesus’ invitation to Thomas, come without an expected return, without an unwritten demand.
As the Church, our key task is to be imitators of Christ. To be the hands and feet, the Body of Christ at work in the world. God is Mystery. God is transcendent. God is ever-present. We seek to be more like Christ, to be guided towards that sense of Christain perfection (or as we Methodists call it, Sanctification), we seek to go that extra mile in hopes that we might even (through the Spirit’s guidance) surprise ourselves. We work towards moving to those places unknown, unkempt, at times even unsafe; not with the expectation of reward, but rather with the knowledge that this is what Christ does and it is what we, as imitators of Christ, are to do.
God, open our hearts to the vulnerable. To the hurting. That in them especially we might see you, we might seek to serve you, not out of some vain expectation of reward but out of love and compassion rooted in your example. You know the limits we want to go, push us beyond them. You know where we want to draw our lines, obscure those patterns and replace them instead with your guiding arrows, pointing us ever onward towards your mission field to meet you where you already reside; not that we might bring you with us but that we might meet you where you are. Amen.
*Complaints as to the unfair honorific of “Doubting” in relation to Thomas are as numerous as sermons about him, for this reason, I thought it best to skip over the (at this point almost liturgical) clarification for the sake of brevity.
[1] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Classics of Western Spirituality: Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, translated by Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist Press, 1987, 49–50.
