They Don't Get It

One of the most consistent characteristics of people in the Bible is thick-headedness. They don’t get it. Again and again people misunderstand what God is trying to do, and repeatedly they have to be told that they’re on the wrong track. As a result, the Bible is full of questions – not pat answers to every problem, as some would have us believe.
 

I take heart in that. I think life is also full of questions, not answers, and I’m relieved when I see Bible people muddling about the same way that I sometimes do. It’s reassuring when they don’t get it. It’s true to life.

 I do admit that sometimes it’s not quite so evident that the biblical questions are the same as our questions. Take Sunday’s reading from the first book of Samuel, for example. After all the celebrations we’ve seen of Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, it’s rather odd to encounter a long rant from Samuel about how bad kings are. Even God appears to whine about his being rejected because the people want a king. Of course, Samuel wasn’t thinking about Queen Elizabeth. This was written after the reign of King Solomon, he of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines and thirty thousand laborers and twelve thousand horses. No wonder Samuel spent so much energy warning the people of Israel about what was to come! He knew that with all that wealth, God would fade into the background. We see that even today – motorboats and golf courses and a big deck with a swimming pool make us forget that everything, including life itself, is a gift from God.

 
Even the people around Jesus didn’t get it. In Sunday’s reading, the religious leaders accuse Jesus of being in league with the devil rather than God. Jesus’ family thinks he’s out of his mind. They’d like him to live a nice, stable life as the village carpenter, building houses and marrying someone with a better reputation than Mary Magdalene. Instead, Jesus is surrounded by low-life types and pays no attention to proper mealtimes. Worse yet, he rejects the whole kit and caboodle of relatives and claims that the low-lifes are his family.
 
The one person who really did seem to get it was Paul the Apostle, but even he was on the wrong track for the first part of his life. The chief problem with Paul is that when he finally did get it, he was so smart that nobody could understand what he was talking about.
 
So if the ones around Jesus didn’t get it, and we still don’t get it, where does that leave us? In the dark? I don’t think so. Just because we are full of questions doesn’t mean that there aren’t answers. It means that the answers aren’t simple. And the whole point of Jesus Christ coming to earth was to provide a light to shine in that darkness.
 
For some reason, even though we humans intrinsically know that the light of Christ is where joy and life and answers are, we still choose to walk toward the darkness and the obscurity it brings. We think that we will be better off with something other than God leading us, whether a king or wealth or anything else we can idolize. We have questions because we cannot see with God’s eyes and God’s understanding. We yearn for the answers that only God can provide, but paradoxically seek them from sources other than God.
 
That’s why we have the Bible. It’s a witness to the questioning, a witness to the continued attempts by God to draw us toward him. Yes, it is something that was written long ago about people who lived very different lives from us. Yet humanity has not changed that much. We still wander off; we still fail to seek the God who is seeking us. We still yearn for answers. We still spend our lives forgetting and relearning that our hearts will be restless until they rest in God.
 
And so we continue on the journey, sometimes walking away from God, sometimes walking toward him. A lot of the time we don’t get it. But then there are those moments of sheer grace when God penetrates our thick heads and light flows in. Those are the moments to live for. May we always be open to that grace and that light. May we continue to question and to be restless, until that day when we, too, can rest our hearts in God.
 

[Pentecost 3: 1 Samuel 8:4-20; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35.]