Puzzling Paradoxes

What do you do when you come across some words of Jesus which just don't compute in your mind? When he says things that sound completely contrary and contradictory that make no sense? What do you do when the teachings of Jesus seem upside down, inside out, and back to front?

You have basically three choices. You can let them cause you to become a skeptic. You can side with those who are looking for any excuse at all to say, "See, I told you so. This Jesus speaks nonsense. He must have had some mental issues, times when he was literally out of his mind."

If you did not want to go that far you might say, "Well, Jesus may be on to something but it is beyond me, and only a Bible scholar would be able to learn what he means." So you just set it all aside and concentrate on the teachings that are easy to grasp. You might even go so far as to leave the Bible to the experts who have been trained to understand it. Unfortunately this leaves you out when it comes to knowing and appreciating the mind and gospel of Christ.

But there is a third way to handle the mysterious sayings of Jesus. Not to let them offend your intelligence, not to assign them to the scholars, but to probe their meaning for yourself. You begin to do that by learning how Jesus thought and taught. In western culture like ours, abstractions, reason and logic are the basis of our knowledge. The culture of the Hebrews in the days of Jesus was quite different. In their culture knowledge was the product of pictures, stories, analogies, riddles, enigmas, and paradoxes. We like to know how things work, which is why western civilization, tracing its origins to Greece and Rome, led to breakthroughs in science and technology. Eastern culture was and is quite different. It does not ask the question how but the question why. Purpose is what matters, not methods.

For example, if we were talking about Noah's ark, westerners like us would ask, Did the ark really exist? Can we find it? Hebrews would not be concerned about finding it but asking about its purpose. They would want to know why God picked eight people and protected them from drowning in a world wide flood. Not a question about means but purpose.

The sayings we will examine are rightly called paradoxes. At first we see only a contradiction. But contradictions have a way of being compatible when they are linked together. Two things are held together in opposition, but yet in a strange way they are pointing to a new truth.

Here is a paradox to illustrate my point. "The only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history." Which is correct? Both are. When we fail to learn from history we set ourselves up to repeat it. There is something about paradox which clamors for us to listen. As the British theologian G.K. Chesterton said, "Paradox is truth standing on its head trying to get our attention."[1

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Another noted scholar, A. W. Tozer, seems to delight in the nonsensical side of the Christian faith: "A Christian is an odd number: He feels supreme love for one whom he has never seen, empties himself in order to be full, admits he is wrong so he can be declared right, is stronger when he is weakest, richest when he is poorest. He dies so he can live, forsakes in order to have, gives away so he can keep, sees the invisible, hears the inaudible, and knows that which surpasses knowledge."[2]

Yet even if we could get out of our Western mindset and think as an ancient Hebrew, we would still miss the meaning of what Jesus had to say. One critical factor remains for us to consider, perhaps the most important of all is this: the identity of the speaker. As we read the words of Jesus we need to remember who he is. He is no less than God in the flesh. This man is speaking with the full authority of God the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible. He came down from heaven to earth and was made man. Nothing could be more mind boggling, but yet we can say it is true.

When you do open yourself to such thinking you are then ready to admit, "Well, no wonder I cannot comprehend fully. No one can. No one should try. The mind of Christ is the mind of God. By definition, therefore, Jesus' words must be beyond total human understanding."

In fact, God actually said so, speaking through the prophet Isaiah.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."(Isaiah 55:8,9)

As I ponder those words I can't help but think to myself, "Of course, Why would I dare to want God's truth to cooped up in narrow confines of my limited human understanding? I want and welcome mystery and riddle and enigma and conundrum and paradox". I am not being anti intellectual in saying that, just stating my trust in God. I want Him to be beyond my grasp. A God I can understand is not God but only an idol, not the Maker of heaven and earth, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

If some of the teachings of Jesus seem hard and difficult let's rejoice and be glad that we have the right Jesus, the one who could say "I am the way, the life and the truth." If this Jesus speaks in paradoxes and radical reversals, that is consistent with the unique person he is.

Jesus Christ founded a movement which literally "turned the world upside down."( Acts.17:6) He came to teach us that when we seek first the rule of God in our lives, we are to expect some radical reversals. Jesus did not come into the world to say that everything is basically OK but a few adjustments to the world's way of thinking are in order.

By no means. What the world needs is to look at the way things are and compare them with what God says they ought to be. Our normal is actually abnormal, and even subnormal. Christ came to give us not a better normal but a new normal which was not actually new but simply new to us. It was the old and original normal. It is the normal where we align ourselves with God's norm, His definition of what He had in mind in making human beings.."

What would such a life really look like? It would mean some radical changes. It would mean being counter cultural, taking our cues from Jesus, not from other people, not from majority thinking. It would mean playing out our lives not to the crowd but to the Audience of One, the God we see revealed to us in Jesus Christ. It would mean praying "thy kingdom come" and honestly adding the words, "my kingdom go." It would mean thinking with a Biblical viewpoint about right and wrong, good and evil, true and false, trivial and worthwhile. It would mean leaving no loopholes, tolerating no compromises, but going all out and all in with a "whatever it takes" desire to follow Jesus.

Dave Ramsey, the personal finance expert, would call that a makeover. Jesus would call it a takeover. In any case it would be a changeover. Some things would turn upside down, others would turn inside out and back to front. No matter. What counts is that we please the God who gave us life and breath and everything else. What counts is having a life which in His view is a life turned right side up.