On this Martin Luther King Jr holiday weekend, I wish
you all a greater commitment to social justice, and both the COURAGE and the
PATIENCE needed to accomplish justice. Courage is necessary, of course, to
address the difficult and painful issues of racism, sexism, homophobia,
religious intolerance and the narrow nationalism that wants to isolate
ourselves and exclude others. Patience is needed to resist the temptation to
short-circuit the long and painful work of Justice and instead turn to violence
in order to speed it up. So we all need both Courage to address issues, and
Patience to hang in there and not given to violence.
Recently, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof
had an interview with the New Archbishop of Newark, NJ, Cardinal Joseph Tobin.
Since the interview occurred shortly before Christmas, Kristof asked Cardinal
Tobin about Catholic belief in the virgin birth of Jesus. Cardinal Tobin’s
answer, as reported in the New York Times, was concise: “The most mind-boggling miracle is the incarnation. We believe that the Creator of the Universe
became one of us. If you accept that,
then there are a lot of other things that don’t seem to be quite as
unbelievable. It is not a magic show. All of the miracles were pointing toward
who God is, and who this carpenter from Nazareth really was.” (12/24/17)
Well, that is a good answer. But it is brief. I would
like, over the next several weeks, to try to unpack this mystery of the
Incarnation (and Virgin Birth) a little. As a mystery it will not be fully
explained, but hopefully we can come to better, fuller, more mature, and deeper
understanding of this mystery so central to our faith.
But first we need to lay some groundwork. To begin, we
need to ask what kind of knowledge we are looking for. After all, the Virgin
Birth (VB) is a mystery. A mystery, by definition, is unknown. If we knew it,
it wouldn’t be a mystery!
Well, religious mysteries are not like murder
mysteries. Murder mysteries need to be solved. Who did the dastardly deed? Once
you (or Miss Marple, or Perry Mason, or Hercule Poirot) solves the mystery,
reveal the identity of the murder, it is over.
It is no longer a mystery. We say it has been “solved.” But the mysteries
of faith are not like that. We do not solve them. Rather, they help make sense
out of, and give purpose to, our lives. The mystery solves (or heals) us. The
mystery helps us make sense out of the puzzle that is our life.
So the “solution” of the religious mystery is not a
once-and-for-all answer, but rather a deeper insight into our relationship with
God, with other people, or with our self. And that is an ongoing kind of
process, or better a dance, that we engage in all of our life, going deeper and
deeper, hopefully, into the mystery that more and more explains us.
The great Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner, once stated
that “The incomprehensibility of God is
the blessedness of man.” I liked that saying so much that forty years ago I
put that on the holy card of my ordination. What Rahner is saying is that with
our infinite openness as human persons, with an infinite capacity to receive
truth, beauty and love, the worst thing that could happen to us is that we
become filled up, fully satiated. That would be the death of us as persons. But
God can never be exhausted, never be totally comprehended, never fully boxed in
and wrapped up, totally understood and explained. Instead, for all eternity, we
will go deeper and deeper into the mystery of God and there will ALWAYS be
more. We will never have God totally figured out, and so will always be excited
to learn new things, to be grabbed by new expressions of beauty, to be ever
deeper and more fully in love.
So the knowledge we are looking for is not simply an
intellectual answer, but rather a deeper appreciation of Truth, the Truth that
comprehends us.
Next time: facts and truths.
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