I Don’t Get It

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By Kay Woike

Soren Kierkegaard tells a parable of ducks waddling off to duck church to hear the duck preacher. The duck preacher spoke eloquently of how God had given the ducks wings with which to fly. With these wings there was nowhere the ducks could not go, there was no God-given task the ducks could not accomplish. With those wings they could soar into the presence of God himself. Shouts of “Amen” were quacked throughout the duck congregation. At the conclusion of the service the ducks left, commenting on what a wonderful message they had heard and waddled back home to life as usual.

Too often we worshipers walk away from worship as we walked in - unchallenged and unchanged. We hear what is said, but somehow it doesn’t sink in. Inattention, old habits, resistance of various sorts get in the way of real hearing. Occasionally, though, in the midst of worship, something happens. Unrehearsed. Unplanned. Someone’s eyes are opened to a deeper awareness of the grandeur of God by the majesty of the music. For the first time, the love and mercy of Christ touches a person’s heart. Someone recognizes her life story in the Scripture lesson read. Someone hears in the sermon, as if for the first time, God’s call, and a new commitment is made. We wonder why such happenings occur there but not here; why one person has a profound experience while another is not moved at all. It’s as if a mysterious force has been at work in one but not the other.

The central character in this week’s Old Testament text is Isaiah. Isaiah was a young man who was part of the elite of the court of Jerusalem during the monarchy. For Jewish people at that time the king was all-important, not just politically but in religious life . He was the divinely appointed intermediary between God and the people. Faith in God was tied up with devotion to the king. Isaiah 6 carefully informs us that what is about to be described took place the year King Uzziah died. Some of you are old enough to remember the day President Kenedy was killed. The impact of a king’s death would have been like the disorienting effect Kennedy’s death had on our country - but more so. All Jerusalem was shaken to the core.

Isaiah goes to the Temple chapel and where he had seen priests and even the king before, he now receives a vision of the heavenly throne room: he saw cherubim and seraphim and heard them singing. He is filled with awe and humility. In his grief he was suddenly comforted: God is the real king. “My eyes have seen the king, the Lord of Hosts,” he declares. He is so overwhelmed by the majesty and holiness of God, that when God asks for a spokesperson: “Whom will I send? Who will go for me?” Isaiah, without hesitation, offers himself.

Now this would be an uncomplicated, inspirational story if it weren’t for the last few verses. What Isaiah is commanded to preach is strange indeed. “Go and say to this people, `Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking but do not understand. Make the mind of this people dull and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.’”

Poor Isaiah! Here he wants to spread God’s message, to urge people to repent and be healed. But God as much as tells him that his words will be futile - no one is going to understand him. But that’s all right, because God didn’t intend for him to succeed anyway, at least not yet.

This saying is picked up later by the gospel writers. After Jesus has told a parable, the disciples, his closest followers, ask him what it means. He responds along the same lines as Isaiah 6: I speaks in parables, Jesus tells them, “so that looking they may not perceive and listening they may not understand.” Now that doesn’t sound very Christ-like, does it? Here is Jesus out preaching, attracting a good deal of attention. Huge crowds gather on the hillside, row upon row, eagerly anticipating what he has to say. He doesn’t begin his sermon with a great spiritual truth, but in an almost folksy fashion, with a story: “Once upon a time there was this farmer, and he went out to sow seed in his fields.” And off he goes, telling stories. Some people don’t understand what he is saying and wonder why he talks in parables. “If you have something to say, why not say it directly instead of beating around the mustard bush?” To which Jesus responds: “The reason I preach in parables is so they will hear me and not understand what I’m taking about, so they will see me and not perceive what I’m getting at. I don’t want them to repent. I don’t want them to believe the gospel. Not just yet.”

That’s not what we expect him to say, is it? We expect him to say that he uses parables to spice up his preaching. Without stories, you know, a sermon can be deadly dull. Or maybe he uses stories to make his preaching clear and concrete. If you’re talking about lofty concepts like the Kingdom of God, you’ve got to bring it down to fields and seeds and weeds - things rural people can understand. But no. The reason for parables, Jesus says, is so that people won’t get it. (Of course some people like Isaiah and the disciples get it some of time.)

So what’s up with this? Does God deliberately harden the hearts and block the ears of people against the message that Isaiah, Jesus, and people like you and me share with them for their salvation and healing? That doesn’t make sense. I don’t believe God does a separation of the sheep from the goats sort of thing - predetermining who will and who won’t understand and respond to God’s word. But it does seem to me that God has made us in such a way that many people have a natural tendency to resist and at times even block out the messages that God wants to communicate to us. There are a few people predisposed to faith, but most of us aren’t born to accept everything we hear instantly, without questioning or resisting, at least at first. That seems to be part of God’s plan.

Ton Long, in an article entitled The Language of God’s Future, suggests that it is possible to believe the gospel of Jesus Christ too early, to reach out and grab the gospel too quickly, without understanding its full implications. People who move quickly toward Jesus may “do so for the wrong reasons. They’re attracted to the glitter and not the substance. They want information without obligation. When you reach out with haste to grab the gospel, you get the surface but not the depth.” Jesus does not want us splashing around in the shallow end of the pool thinking we are diving down to the depths... “The crowd who came to hear Jesus beside the sea of Galilee... wanted something they could take home with them that day. They wanted peace of mind now, a prayer life” that would be effective starting now, a faith that works to make life better today. They looked for a faith that was quick and easy. But that’s not what Jesus was offering.

C.H. Dodd has written that “a parable is a metaphor or a simile drawn from everyday life, the meaning of which is sufficiently in doubt to tease the mind into active thought.” You think you know, but you don’t. It pushes the mind into deeper, active engagement, which is a good thing. Because, in America today, Long contends, the main problem is not atheism or unbelief, but superficiality. We are content with a faith that brings us peace of mind and reassurance of God’s love, but we are not ready to test our wings, to move out of our comfort zones and respond to the more difficult challenges of God which might disrupt our lives or ruffle the feathers of others.

I once had a friend who had gotten herself into serious trouble, morally and legally. I was never quite sure if she felt truly sorry for her actions and understood how hard she would have to work to get her life back on track again. She assumed she could do it on her own without outside help. One day she told me cheerfully that she had been born again - she had accepted Jesus as her savior, been forgiven and now her life was on the right track. I remember feeling skeptical. Had she really heard the gospel. It seemed to me that being born again to her was a panacea - a way to feel better about herself and what she had done. But her faith was only surface deep. What it should have been was the beginning of serious soul-seaching and hard inner struggle to deal with her dark side and to make amends to those she had betrayed and hurt.

Fortunately, Scripture doesn’t assume that being blind and deaf to God’s word is a permanent condition. Isaiah asks God: “How long,” how long until the people hear? He assumes that even in the dark God us preparing us, making us ready. When we have our lives all together, when everything is fine, our ears may be closed to faith in Jesus Christ simply because no experiences have come along which challenge our feelings of self-sufficiency. We have no need of outside support or challenge. We simply aren’t yet asking the question for which God or Christ is the answer. It may take a major life transition or loss to open us up. The life and witness of other Christians help prepare the soil. God is at work making us ready.

But there is also a sense in which we are all deaf and blind. While the disciples asked questions and seem to have understood more than the crowds about what Jesus had to teach them, they were also, at times, depicted as pretty dense, as failing to get what Jesus was trying to tell them. It seems that revelation is progressive. One of the marvels about scripture is that there is always a reserve of meaning. God always has more to teach and show us. Jorge Gonzalez describes scripture as a quarry of diamonds. You can think they’ve all been mined already, but each generation will find new things that speak clearly and people will say “Why didn’t I understand this before?”

In the 19th century, people were preaching in favor of slavery on the basis of the scriptures because the Bible is full of references to it. Perhaps because God hadn’t yet opened their eyes, perhaps because they couldn’t see past their own self-interest, they could not “hear” the deeper implications of the gospel about human worth. Today there isn’t a single person who considers himself a Christian who would preach in favor of slavery. First, the hearts of a few were changed and those prophets prepared the soil by preaching an unpopular message to closed minds and hearts.

Those of us who believe we have heard and responded to Christ’s message may be tempted to be critical of those whose eyes, ears and hearts seem to be closed to the message of faith or truth as we understand it. But we ought not be smug.. The journey of faith is not simply a progression from partial to greater understanding. As we grow older we discover that it is actually a journey from what we thought we knew for sure to not knowing much at all. And it might well be God who blinds us, who leads us into the darkness of unknowing for a while so that, later, our eyes will be open to the greater mystery that is God. This is what I believe happened to Paul on the road to Damascus: Paul, the Pharisee who was closed to the Christian message and persecuted Christians, was struck blind for a time by God. A period of darkness and confusion was necessary in order for him to receive the new truths that God wanted to teach him. As Greek scholar, Kallistos Ware, has written: “We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery.” That is the real journey of faith.