God. It is bewildering, a terrifying mystery story; but somehow fascinating.97
Not all mysteries are fascinating, of course, especially if like this one, they are irresolvable. The exact numeric value of pi is a mystery to which is attached neither tremendum nor fascinans. Those mysteries that most commonly fascinate us are those that we expect with some effort to resolve. They are intellectual challenges—mountains that we set out to conquer, even if only because they are there. They remain fascinating only so long as they simultaneously resist and yield to us. Once they are conquered, we move on to something else. We might wax proudly nostalgic, as we recount the thrills of our victories, but to remember a former mystery is not to face a mystery.
Those of us who have been struck by this apocalyptic vision of God would tell a different story. To be thus God-struck is to face what Kierke-gaard’s pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, points to, when he tells us that the passion of the thinker is to think what cannot be thought.98 This apocalyptic God is an irresolvable, engaging mystery that won’t let us go, that won’t ever let us rest in peace (cf. Ps 139:8 and 1 Pet 3:19). God revealed is God hidden and “how unrestingly active God is in all his creatures, allowing none of them to take a holiday.”99 The engagement of this mystery is absolute. It calls for each of us to stand up to it with her whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, as Wesley never tires of reminding us.100
I am a theologian. The work I do is largely academic and intellectual, the work of words. Just about every day I face the challenge of gathering my thoughts before a classroom of students or a blank computer screen. And I have a lot of thoughts, having read too many books and articles, attended too many lectures, attended to too many seminars, spent too many hours—way too many hours—before movie and television screens and loud speakers, and pondered too long the words and deeds of my family and friends and enemies.101 That means that I have many possessions, intangible though they may be—or at least that’s what I hear. The question for me, then, is only a slightly different version of the one that went through the man of Mark 10, the man whom Jesus loved. “You lack one thing, Craig; go, sell what you own, and give . . . to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mark 10:21, sort of).
Now, I could look at Jesus’ command as an investment opportunity. “Treasure in heaven” sounds like a pretty profitable return. The problem is that when “treasure” gets attached to “heaven,” everything gets upended. “Heaven” is, if anything, elusive.102 “Our Father who art in heaven,” says above all that the God whom Jesus teaches us to address will not be laid hold of.103 “Treasure in heaven” is then a very strange treasure, one I cannot enter into a calculator, one that does not add to my net worth. And so, I’m left, having received the command of Jesus, with an unimaginable promise. It is a heartening promise, that I do gather from the passage; but it is one which I cannot objectify enough to covet. I suspect that even Husserl would have had trouble fixing his gaze on such a treasure.104 I am commanded by Jesus to give up all my property for the sake of a most unsettling impropriety; hardly an alluring proposal. And yet again and again and again the question rings in my ears—“Craig, son of James, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15–17, sort of). And something stirs in me and I want to say, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you” (17).
How do I not go away grieving? How do I feed his sheep? I’m a thinker and not a very good one at that. Am I to become more ignorant than I am already? Am I to become thought-poor? Is this a call to some Jungian sacrificium intellectus?105
How do I not go away grieving? Perhaps the answer—like the yes of a child to the voice of her mother calling her name—rises insolubly before the particular mystery precisely of the evocative gospel. “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:1–2). The mystery before which I am to give up all my intellectual possessions, Paul is saying, is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
But this sacrifice of the intellect—and that is the right, though non-Jungian, phrase—is to be no suicide. The gospel insists that Jesus Christ gives himself to the coming of the “God not of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27), the coming of the living God. The gospel insists that Jesus’ Holy Father, alive in heaven, is made manifest in life. The gospel indeed insists that the forsaken death of the carnal Son makes the Holy Father manifest, but that it does so in the work of the Spirit through the resurrection of his dead and damned body. The gospel insists that it is in his glorified dead and damned body that we, too, are called to move; that it is in that life that we come alive, that we are saved; that there we repeat (derivatively) his life-rhythm of crucifixion/resurrection—through the liturgy of baptism and eucharist—because his body is nothing but the life-rhythm of crucifixion/resurrection.106 The gospel insists that our evenings and mornings become a kind of dance of death . . . swallowed up in life, that resurrection life is so alive that even death is no contrast to it. It is into this liturgy that Peter and I are called. We are called to Jesus’ sheep—standing wide-eyed as they do in this world God so loves—to offer them the food that is precisely this body into which we have been incorporated. We hear, Peter and I, and we may yet believe, that to eat this body is oddly not for it to be incorporated into us, but for us to be incorporated into it—and thus for us to repeat (derivatively) the rhythm of crucifixion/resurrection. It is in this way that we are to live, bodies together in one “living sacrifice,” a thoughtful worship,107 a “renewing of [the] mind,” which defers (Rom 12:1–3), one performed again and again and again, pouring out what is freshly given—as might a spring that gives water only as it is replenished with the gift of unearned rain (John 4:9–14).108 That, it seems to me, is the mystery of the gospel.
As a theologian who would hear and believe, I am indeed to gather my thoughts, but only in order to give them away. Had the Rich Young Ruler not departed grieving, had he indeed followed Jesus, he, too, would have gathered his property, i.e., in order to dispose of it. But doing so is never dropping the ballast of worldly goods in order to soar into some higher “spiritual” realm, i.e., in order to get out. Following the crucified/resurrected Christ is the work of giving away our goods. However, it is performed precisely as an act of plunging into the world, the world hallowed when the carnal body of Christ is glorified in the glorification of the Father on Easter Sunday morning. That is, the glorified carnality of the body of Christ calls out to us, Peter and me. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes, “who . . . emptied himself . . . humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil 2:5–8).109 Therefore, on the day new goods come into our hands, on that day our hands do not become unclean. They are gifted—with a gift that will not become property. And a gift that will not become property is there to be given. To follow Christ is with him perpetually to be emptied (cf. John 4:14).
But how am I, a theologian who has no trouble remembering that he is a human being, to pull this off? “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27). Trust in that, one hears. Yet one hears as well that neither can we trust. If we could, trusting would make us haughty (Ephesians 2). It is more than enough that, when we cannot, we do. When we cannot
