Unknowing

Luke 20: 27-28 (Short version)
Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus. Jesus said to them, ‘Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die any more, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.’

In the longer version of this Gospel, the Sadducees went through a whole rigmarole about 7 brothers, each one marrying the same widow as the previous brother died. Their question was, to which brother would the widow be married in the resurrection? They were obviously trying to trap Jesus because they didn’t even believe in the resurrection. There is a whole wonderful message in this Gospel about life and resurrection but I’m going to look at something a bit more obscure yet is something that does have an impact on our resurrected lives and on how we relate to God. 

The Sadducees may not have believed in life after death but many others of the Jewish leadership did and there would have been many debates amongst themselves over questions such as the one the Sadducees posed to Jesus. It made me wonder how the Pharisees would have answered the question, a question that rose out of the human proclivity to make God – and therefore the afterlife – look a lot like us and a reflection of our experience of life here on earth.

The following is a favorite little folk tale of mine:  

A saint was once given the gift of speaking the language of the ants. He approached one ant, who seemed the scholarly type, and asked, "What is the Almighty like? Is he in any way similar to the ant?"
Said the ant scholar, "The Almighty? Certainly not! We ants, you see, have only one sting. But the Almighty, he has two!"
When the saint asked the ant scholar what heaven was like, he solemnly replied, "There we shall be just like him, having two stings each, only smaller ones."
A bitter controversy rages among ant religious schools of thought as to where exactly the second sting will be located in the heavenly body of the ant.

The first time I heard this I laughed out loud because I know that in the past I have been as certain of the Almighty’s characteristics as that little scholarly ant was. 

Be honest with yourself. Do you not believe deep down that God has much the same opinions as you do? When you think about your perceptions of God, of the spiritual life and of what will happen in the afterlife, do you not see God as a lot like us only bigger – maybe with two stings instead of one? If you were to accept that you actually have no idea what God is like, where would you be? If you suddenly said to yourself, “I have no clue. We have no clue,” what would you be left with? Most of what we surmise about God is based on what we know about ourselves and on our experiences of the world and when we understand that even all of humanity’s vast history of experience is about as useful in personally knowing who God really is as an ant’s experience, it’s a little overwhelming to realize how small we really are and how little we really know.  

But we carry on like the ants believing in a God that is just like us only bigger and more powerful. It would seem that according to common perception God has an ego that needs to be right, needs to be respected, needs to be continually validated by our recognition and praise and needs to be in full control. Just like us. 

God doesn’t need any of these things. Anytime we are called in scripture to offer praise, recognition, obedience, respect and love to God it is for our benefit, not his. The call to trust and to live and grow in faith is not a call to a subservience that will keep us safe from a hard task-master; it is a call for us to enter through a gateway to a place called the Kingdom, a place that is wider, deeper, higher and more full of life than we could ever imagine. It is a call to discover that our God is not just ‘out there’; he is ‘in here’. It is a call to understand that Christ’s birth, death, resurrection and new life wasn’t just a one time event that brought us to salvation; it is the full journey of every present moment of every committed follower of the Good News. There is no separation between our lives and Christ’s. 

We need to stop making God look just like us, shake off all those limiting human attributes we assign to God (especially the part that assigns God an ego or a false self) and begin a journey of unknowing. Really, not knowing anything is the absolute best place to start. We spend much of our lives accumulating knowledge about God and this is a good foundation but at some point we need to let all that head knowledge go and begin to seek the gates of the Kingdom, gates that only exist in the heart. Words and head knowledge will not move us through those gates. Only love and desire will open those gates and usher us into the Kingdom where God waits to dance with us. 

That’s right. Dance. Think of a waltz with two individuals meshed together into one graceful and flowing movement. It looks like like each one is fully aware of what the next step should be but there is always one who is leading. In a good dance relationship the partner who is being led has such trust in the one leading and follows so well that the two might as well be a single entity.

How can we dance with God if we keep a distance between him and us? How can we dance in full partnership if we insist on seeing ourselves as related to him but completely separated from him? How can we dance if we don’t see ourselves as worthy enough to be held by him?

Those Sadducees (and Pharisees) were very learned men. Jesus was saying to them that all their knowledge and surmising would, in the end, not take them through the door to resurrected life. God is not the God of the dead but of the living and we are the children of the resurrection. God is unknowable by our limited minds.

But he is completely danceable in our hearts.