Mystery is your Friend

This past week we came to a very difficult passage in 1 Peter (3:17-4:6). In this passage, Peter is talking about Christ's victory over the evil powers that are at work in the world - the powers that take perverse pleasure in the ruination of God's good creation. He talks about Christ's victory in terms of putting things back into their right order (all angels, powers and authorities have been made subject to the risen Christ (3:22); he also characterized Christ's victory as proclamation to those in prison and to the dead (3:19, 4:6). Rather than shying away from the passage and deferring it to a lecture format as we sometimes do with difficult passages, we preached on it during worship and we said what we thought was the main idea of the passage (see previous homily recap). I have been thinking about this passage a lot since preaching on it and it has occurred to me that one of the most important things to be learned from the passage is that a mysterious text that has never enjoyed a "consensus" interpretation from the church through the ages can teach us a lot about the limits of our understanding and, in turn, the role that mystery and a lack of perfect knowledge plays in bringing us into a deeper relationship with Jesus and the gospel.

This week in the devotional time leading up to the sacrament of communion we chose this passage from the gospel of Luke 24:13-27. In this passage two of Jesus' disciples are walking along the road with the risen Jesus. They do not recognize him and begin talking to them about the sadness they shared around his death and the confusing accounts of his resurrection. Jesus takes this as an opportunity to teach them how to read the Bible from a post-resurrection perspective. He taught them that the meaning of the entire OT, the Jewish scriptures, should be found in the meaning of his life, death and resurrection. "Then he said to them, ‘Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah* should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures." In this walking lecture Jesus taught these two disciples not how to study the Bible harder so that they and we might understand every jot and tittle comprehensively. Rather, he is saying at least two things:

1. The meaning of the Bible cannot be known apart from Jesus' life, death and resurrection
2. Much data and many teachings in the Bible are not as important as the overall knowledge of God's intentions to love and redeem as revealed in Jesus' life, death and resurrection.

After Jesus' teaching time with these two disciples came to a close, he broke bread and drank wine with them. Upon the sharing of the communion meal, they saw him for who he was: mystery revealed in sacramental relationship! Then we find the disciples saying this to each other: "They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us* while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’

And so, as I have been meditating on the difficult passage from 1 Peter that we took up last week I have been reminded that to encounter a mysterious passage from scripture is always an invitation to encounter Jesus himself, allowing mystery and human limits to draw me deeper into a worshipful encounter with him. In turn, I have been reminded that that it is in the gospel where we find the mysteries of God revealed to us, for our salvation.

Questions for discussion:

1. Are you comfortable with mystery and/or things in the Bible that you don't understand? If so, have you always been? If not, do you think you should get more comfortable with mystery?

2. If someone were to say to you, what is the meaning of the Bible, how would you sum it up in your own words?