During our weekly Bible study we have talked about the fact that some things cannot be explained with words. It tends to come up when we encounter a passage where the words are confusing. We muse about it for a while, and we begin to think that this might be one of those situations that words cannot describe.
Still, we try, because words are the best device we have. If you have ever found yourself in a foreign country where you didn’t understand what anyone was saying, and they didn’t understand you, you know how frustrating it is to not have words. You try gestures, pointing, maybe drawing pictures, but nothing works as well as words.
We sometimes call ourselves people of the book – both Christians and Jews – because we rely on the words of scripture so completely. What would we do without words? And yet we know very well, if we spend enough time in the scriptures, that there are many instances where words can actually lead us astray.
There are a bunch of reasons for this – problems with translation, multiple manuscripts that don’t entirely agree, incomplete manuscripts where words are missing. All of these, but the most significant reason, I believe, is that we are trying to use words to say something that there are actually no words for.
Jesus is doing that all the time. He wants to tell us about heaven, the realm of God. But there are no words adequate to really give us a clear understanding of heaven.
The prophets of the Old Testament had the same challenge, as they tried, repeatedly, to tell the people what God wants them to know. Imagine being given the task of speaking for God. So prophets end up doing really weird stuff. Like the prophet Ahijah, who took his brand new, never yet worn, garment and tore it in 12 pieces, because he wanted to say something about the 12 tribes of Israel. Or Ezekiel, who lay down on his left side for 390 days to demonstrate the length of punishment for the land of Israel – just one of the many weird things Ezekiel did. Sort of like performance art, really.
They say not all art is meant to be beautiful and I believe that’s true. Because not everything that needs to be said is beautiful.
Even when the subject is the kingdom of heaven. To what can the kingdom of heaven be compared? Mustard seed? Yeast? Absurd images, aren’t they?
What is the kingdom of heaven like? This is something we want to know. Those of us who want to dwell in the kingdom, we want to know what we are looking for. What are we hoping for?
In the last chapter, we were with Jesus as he began to call his disciples, saying “follow me” – they abruptly rose, letting go what they held in their hands, and followed him. And then, with these disciples, he began walking all through Galilee, healing the people of their suffering, proclaiming the kingdom of heaven – sometimes with words.
Soon he had accumulated a crowd of people following him, and he sat down on a mountain and began to speak.
Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And on he went, lifting up one truly miserable state after another – the mourning, the meek, the hungry and thirsty – and calling it blessed.
Not every single one would be called miserable, no. I can appreciate merciful, pure in heart, peacemaker – which are all admirable. It’s just that – well, we don’t choose those things too often, do we? We like mercy in theory, but given a choice, nine times out of ten we would choose to see our enemy punished.
And it gets worse.
Blessed are you when people hate you, when they persecute you, when they slander you –
For yours is the kingdom of heaven.
Who can blame us, then, if we believe that only suffering will get us to our eternal reward. Doesn’t that seem like what Jesus is saying?
When I was working as a hospital chaplain years ago, I walked into a patient’s room to say hello. Introduce myself. I could immediately see she was suffering. And she already had a visitor at her bedside. He was a deacon from her church. He struck me as very chipper, high-spirited. He held the hand of this elderly woman who was obviously in pain, and he loudly proclaimed to her – and me, and anyone who happened to be nearby in the hallway – how very fortunate she was because clearly God favored her to give her such suffering. I thought, that is some kind of crackpot theology – also, just bad manners. I think the woman in the bed might have thought so too, although she was as polite as she could be, given the amount of pain she was experiencing.
I promise I won’t ever tell you that God gives you suffering to earn your reward in heaven. I don’t believe that. But it is true, nonetheless, that all of us suffer. We all have pain and hardships, and there is no point in denying it. And I think that fact is closer to what Jesus is saying.
Pain is real. Mourning is real. Injustice is real. And those things are particularly real if you have a kingdom mentality.
Because in the kingdom of heaven, we know the pain of others as we know our own pain. We feel injustice toward others as if we, ourselves, were being treated that way. This way is the kingdom way, where we feel the grief of a child being separated from his parent, where we feel anger when innocent people are knocked to the ground and have pepper spray shot in their faces. Or worse, bullets.
Kingdom people don’t ignore the pain of others. We don’t pat them on the hand and tell them, it’s just God’s way. It’s not God’s way.
God’s way is the way of mercy and justice and grace. Things that are actually hard to say in words – which takes me back where I started. Every word Jesus said about the kingdom of heaven is a metaphor for something that could not be said. Poetry.
Thank God for the gift of poetry. Metaphors. Images that convey things that cannot be said in ordinary prose. Thank God for music, which bypasses the mind’s censors and allows us to just feel something true. And for a tender human touch, which can be a thousand times more powerful than any words we might say. Thank God for all the ways we have to express the goodness of God.
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
