Sometimes Jesus says or does things that can be pretty difficult to understand.
For instance, there was a time when Jesus had just fed five thousand people. Jesus tries to get away but people follow him. First, he tells them straight out, you're only here because you want more bread. And then he says something strange: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53, ESV).
I want you to hear that the way the crowd heard it. Not like it’s in The Bible, but as something a teacher just said to you when he standing next to you, looking you in the eyes, face-to-face. The result of that assertion was perfectly reasonable: many of Jesus’ disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.
Seeing so many people leave, Jesus turns to the twelve and asks if they want to leave too. Peter answers, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68-69, ESV).
Notice what Peter doesn't say. He doesn't say, oh, of course, eating flesh and drinking blood, which makes perfect sense. He doesn't understand it any better than the ones who left. What he has is something else. He's seen too much. He's heard too much. He knows who Jesus is and what Jesus is like. And for Peter, that’s enough.
I think that's a principle we can actually use in our everyday lives. “Interpret the unclear through the clear.” When something in our Christian faith is hard to understand, whether it's a passage in Scripture or a season in your life, remember who Jesus is, and let that be enough for the moment.
An episode in the Gospel of Matthew provides an example on which to apply this principle. In Matthew 15, a Canaanite woman comes to Jesus begging him to heal her daughter. And Jesus doesn't answer her. Jesus ignores her completely. His disciples ask him to send her away because she won't stop crying out. And when Jesus finally does speak, he says it's not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. The “dogs”!
If you read that as just an incident, stripped of everything else you know, you'd have to ask yourself the hard question: was Jesus being a little bit prejudiced? It’s a reasonable question.
But it's not the whole story. This is a man who spoke openly with a Samaritan woman at a well, a woman with a reputation, at the time of day she chose specifically to avoid people. This is a man who healed the servant of a Roman centurion, an officer in the very army occupying his people. This is a man who stood up in his hometown synagogue and reminded everyone that Elijah was sent to a foreign widow and Elisha healed a foreign general, and they got so angry they tried to throw him off a cliff for saying it. Whatever is going on with the Canaanite woman, it is not that Jesus drew a line with his own people on one side and everyone else on the other. His whole life argues against that reading.
So, what is going on? I'm not going to tell you I've got it fully worked out. Maybe he was testing his disciples, holding up a mirror to their own assumptions about outsiders. Maybe he was drawing out her faith. I don't know for certain and my point in this blog is that we don’t have to.
What is clear is who Jesus is, through the cross and through the resurrection. And whatever he was doing with that woman, we can be certain of this much: it was for love. Greater love has no one than this, that he would lay down his life for his friends. Jesus laid down his life for her too.
Paul runs into a version of this same wall in Romans 11. He's wrestling with what looks, on paper, like a contradiction: how can the Jewish people be, in one sense, enemies of the gospel, and in another sense, still beloved because of what God promised their ancestors? Paul doesn't land on a clean answer. He lands on this instead: “God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all” (Romans 11:32, ESV). Nobody gets to stand ahead of anyone else in line. Everybody depends equally on mercy, which means nobody has to perform their way into it.
And then Paul does something I think is important for us human creatures. He doesn't keep arguing about his case. And he doesn’t get mad because he may not fully understand. He breaks into worship. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Romans 11:33, ESV). It's the same thing that happened to Job when God finally showed up. Job doesn't get his questions answered. He just says, “I spoke without understanding.” God’s presence turns out to be the source of peace and perspective, not a full understanding of his suffering.
Isaiah looked forward to a day when God's house would be, in his words, “a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7, ESV). The invitation had always been open to anyone who wanted in. But Isaiah saw it widening further than anyone expected. And Jesus, risen from the dead, sends his disciples out to all nations, the same phrase, the same promise, now fully opened.
Back to today’s point. Jesus is the exact representation of God, the clearest picture we have of who God is and what God is like. So, when Scripture hands you something strange or difficult to understand — and it will, if you really engage it — you read it through Jesus. You read that passage or incident in the light of the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
And when your own life hands you something you can't make sense of, you can do the same thing.
We all live just fine without understanding everything. Do you understand how DNA replicates? How does the screen on your phone work? How exactly does your body take digest food and turn it into energy that your body can use to power your eyes to read this blog? There's a lot we all live with quite comfortably without understanding it. And it doesn't ruin us.
So, when you run across hard passage of scripture or hard passages in your life, I encourage you to anchor your understanding and your peace in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Confession time for me. I was preaching away on this topic and, on the fly, I offered a simple statement of faith that I thought was recorded directly in the scriptures as an early Christian creed. It’s not, though it’s still an awesome phrase and encapsulates several early creedal statements into one short phrase:
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
This is what we know. Try saying this when you are confused and can’t make sense of a scripture or situation. Try saying this when you are suffering and aren’t sure how much more you can handle.
It covers everything. God’s love for you. Your sin, forgiven. God’s power over all, including death itself. Our bankable hope in Jesus. It’s a phrase worth keeping.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
I don't have to understand everything. I just have to trust who I know Jesus to be.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
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Pastor John Rallison
Redeemer Lutheran Church | Salem, Oregon
https://www.RedeemerSalem.org
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.