When God is Most Mysterious

Giving credit where it is due, William Willimon inspired this column with a lecture at the 2009 Festival of Homiletics.

I will pass on some marital advice, but be forewarned.  It comes from a strange 19^th century theologian named Søren Kierkegaard.  Kierkegaard would publish views, and then under a pseudonym publish opposing views.  He wasn’t being dishonest, but believed life in its essence is ironic and often contradictory.  He once had issues with a satirical newspaper and dared the editors to satirize him.  When they did, he felt mistreated.

And then there is this:  he never married.  He proposed once to a beautiful woman named Regine Olsen and she said “Yes.”  But then he decided that he had too melancholy a disposition to be a good husband and so, months later, broke off the engagement.

Yet even with those flimsy qualifications, he said one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard about marriage in his book Either/Or:  “The key to a happy marriage is for two people to live together without stifling the mystery of one another.”

That’s good.  I don’t care if it was an unmarried man who said that.  I wouldn’t care if it was Ike Turner who said that.  That is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read about keeping a marriage vital:  “The key to a happy marriage is for two people to live together without stifling the mystery of one another.”

Does this mean hiding from a spouse one’s earnings or spending; or being vague about what one does when one goes out at night or holding back and not being vulnerable to the other; not allowing the other glimpses in those parts of you that you are afraid or embarrassed for those-you-know-casually to see?

No, no, and no!  That behavior is the opposite of what Kierkegaard meant.  He was saying that intimacy deepens mystery.  It is when one thinks that he or she fully knows another that intimacy is lost.

How would you like these phrases to be the sweet nothings said in your ear?  “You always . . .,” “You never . . .” When we define another like this – even when we don’t say it, but think it – we turn a “You” into an “It.”  We reduce the other into someone we can be certain of.  But certitude is the enemy of intimacy.

I’ll get at what I think Kierkegaard is saying another way.  I’ll tell you two people many claim to know inside and out:  Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.  Most have never met either one of them, but they have figured them out.  The political game of slapping defining labels on candidates is not done to explore issues.  It is done so candidates will be dismissed or embraced, maybe even despises or adored, and maybe even condemned or worshipped.  It is cheap, intellectually shallow, and morally irresponsible, but it is effective and it makes people feel powerful as those who have figured candidates out.

Any significant relationship – a marriage, a friendship, a parent/child relationship – can play the same political game.  To define another is to deny another mystery and even, in a way, life.  Shakespeare’s Othello wanted to be certain about his wife’s fidelity, so he killed her so she could not remain a mystery to him.

I’ll tell you a book that refuses to surrender the mystery, and that’s the Bible.  That comment in itself is ironic because people through the ages have quoted the Bible to explain their certainties.  But the God of the Bible stubbornly refuses to be defined.  Notice those places in the Bible where God is revealed.

God creates Adam and Eve as conversation partners.  They have “down time” with God.  They and God chat.  And yet, what is the one thing God will not allow them?  Full knowledge.  Certitude.  They are not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and know what God knows.

Jump to Moses.  Moses hears what many wish they heard; the voice of God telling him what to do.  “Take off your sandals because you are on Holy Ground!”  “Go to the Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go!”  “I’ll give you the words.”  “I’ll give you a helper in Aaron.”  God goes on and on.  Yet, the voice is from a bush that illumines but will not burn out.  God reveals without giving God’s self away.

Jump to Job.  Job loses everything; his possessions, his health, his children; and he keeps calling on God to explain why.  Finally, God speaks to Job . . . from a whirlwind!  God speaks out of the whirlwind giving Job a dizzying tour of creation that increases the mystery.  And God never answers Job’s questions.

What is going on here?  John Calvin “spoke of the hiddenness of God whereby we encounter God in a hidden, obscure fashion, while we await the full, radiant revelation which is Christ.”  Martin Luther does him one better.  He says that God is most revealed “In that moment when God stands immediately before us as the despised man, Christ.  God is most hidden, most obscure, most difficult to understand, precisely at those times when we discover God most vividly and most directly.”[1]  When is God most mysterious?  When God is most revealed!

How mystifying is the bush that burns without being consumed.  How unsettling is a wind that spins as a whirlwind.  How intriguing is a man who speaks in parables and won’t fully explain himself.  Sometimes we would like some certainty, to nail God down on something.

Only that was tried, wasn’t it.  The opposite of faith is not doubt.  The opposite of faith is certainty, and that is death.  Jesus most reveals God in revealing more deeply God’s mystery.  It is in mystery that we live in faith and are saved.