What Happens Next
And He had to pass through Samaria. John 4:4 NASB
Pass through– In this brief interlude between teaching passages, John recounts that Yeshua left Judea when things became difficult. During the journey, he encountered the woman at the well. I’m sure he didn’t plan to encounter her, but when he did, the opportunity for some truly fascinating discussion occurred. A stranger in a strange land, his conversation in Samaria forever altered how we see God. Maybe I need to pass through Samaria too. [This is not going to be quick. Sorry.]
Recently someone asked me, “Do you think your theology has changed because you are getting older?” I had a difficult time answering. Certainly my theology has changed. I don’t believe things that I used to believe, thinking they were certain and true. I remember Wittgenstein’s remark, “For ‘I know’ seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, ‘I thought I knew.’” I’m not sure if this can be attributed to simply growing older although growing older has allowed me the time to reassess and re-examine, and that time was needed to make these changes. But are the changes simply the result of getting old? Of slowing down? Wearing out? I don’t think so. Maybe I just don’t want to think so. I think that these changes are rather the result of persistent investigation, of refusing to close the door on an idea just because I think I’ve looked hard at it.
Then I notice something else about me. For more than half a century I have honed the skill of compartmentalization. In other words, I practiced the belief that I could wall off some parts of my life from other parts of my life. I did theology in an academic glass jar. I could look at the ideas carefully contained inside the jar without letting them necessarily affect the rest of my life. Or so I thought. The problem, of course, is that it is still my life. It still takes energy from my life to keep the glass jar in place, and I notice that every once in awhile, the jar cracks and what I am wrestling with academically leaks into the rest of my world and I have to confront the consequences of compartmentalization.
For example, I find it difficult to pray. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I rarely open any lecture with prayer. I treat the lecture as if it were strictly academic, insulated from our real lives, just ideas that need to be examined. But these aren’t just ideas, are they? They are saturated with spiritual and psychological implications. They invade us. They confront us. We have to do something with them. So why don’t I like to pray about what we are going to examine? Why do I find prayer so awkward?
There are historical answers to this question. I grew up in religious circles where public prayer was handled by the elite, the religious icons of the spiritual hierarchy whose eloquence and magisterial command of religious words made all the rest of us feel like serfs in God’s Kingdom. In other words, prayer was a public exhibition of status. No one would dare suggest such a thing as the pastor droned on, but we felt it. We weren’t worthy of praying because we didn’t have the vocabulary or the lofty theological phrases needed to attract God’s attention. Only the experts knew what to say—what to really say to make God listen. That was surely obvious when each service began with an invitation for the Holy Spirit to attend (as if God needed an invitation to come into His own church). I grew up in a world of religious gatekeepers. If you really wanted to pray, you needed to become one of those important people. Since public prayer triggers my feelings of worthlessness, I have emotional struggles with prayer. It’s not that I don’t have the vocabulary now. I do. But I also have the history of all those flowery prayers yielding nothing but ego accolades. I never witnessed a public prayer answered. Maybe the right spiritual “spell” wasn’t cast. All I know is that I just avoid this as much as possible. Prayer isn’t safe for me. When I complained (that isn’t quite the right word since “complaining” about spiritual things wasn’t allowed) about the lack of answered prayer, I was told, “You just don’t have enough faith.” But, of course not. That’s why I struggle with it. As if faith is something you can accumulate and keep in your back pocket like a credit card you can use when you need it.
Prayer isn’t safe. Of course, I know it should be—and that makes things worse. Now I have to deal with the guilt of not praying. For a long time God and I had a sort of mutual non-proliferation treaty. He didn’t try to interfere too much with my things and I tried not to interfere too much with His. Well, that doesn’t work too well either, especially when “my things” are constantly involved with “His things.” I write about ideas, mostly ideas that arise in the religious realms. That means I write about God and about what other people have written about God, like the authors of the Bible. So it’s hard to maintain this agreement of non-proliferation. And I’m pretty sure that God deliberately interferes with me as often as He can. That’s just what He does. I try to keep all that interference inside the glass jar but it doesn’t stay contained. Besides, it’s radioactive and my jar isn’t lead glass. God is constantly prying open the lid, and I am constantly dealing with emotional issues that I would rather forget. But I don’t have a son named Manasseh and even if I did, I would be reminded of all those troubles anyway. All the times I desperately wanted to be understood, accepted, loved, listened to, known—and wasn’t. All the times I didn’t understand, accept, love, listen, and know—and someone else was hurt by me. Strangers or lovers, it doesn’t matter. I was a wrecking ball in a lot of lives, including my own. Prayer just seems to overwhelm me with guilt. It’s standing before God who knows all my hurts and hurting and saying things that seem so pedantic, so childish or so beside-the-point. He waits for me to get around to what really hurts, all my darkness, and, of course, that is what I really don’t want to talk about. So we part company again, both knowing that we really were just being polite but didn’t accomplish anything that actually matters. Another time, maybe. When the tears come without notice and I can’t keep them back.
What did Heschel say about faith? Oh, yes, “Unlike knowledge, which is the quiet possession of the intellect, faith is an overwhelming force that enables man to perceive the reality of the transcendent. It is not only the assent to a proposition but the staking of the whole life on the truth of an invisible reality.”[1] The “overwhelming force” of it. That’s what I really want—and what scares me.
I think about why I am so frightened by the idea of being overwhelmed by God. I think the fear comes from my deep sense of unworthiness. I know my sins—only too well. I know the failures, the pretensions, the anger, the manipulations—even of myself. The sort of self-abuse that comes from thinking you really haven’t paid for the hurt you’ve caused, and you should pay. Maybe that’s why I find prayer difficult. Maybe I think prayer is really for those people who are acceptable to God, you know, the kind of conversation you have with someone you really like. Dialogue with barbed edges. When you don’t really have to construct your answers to be sure not to offend because you know this relationship isn’t based on pleasing the other person. I think I’ve succumbed to the Western idea of God with a bit of pagan incense added, that is, God is the kind of being who needs to be pleased, to be appeased. I probably inherited that idea from the penal theory of atonement. It suggests that God was so angry with sinners like me that He was willing to make His son pay for us all. So Yeshua was punished instead of me. I know it sounds noble and all that, but if I really think about it, I wouldn’t want some innocent person to pay for my sins. That really makes me feel even worse. Now I have the guilt of my own mistakes plus the guilt of allowing someone else to die for them. No, I don’t think I can serve a God like that—but apparently many people do—or maybe they just don’t think in the warped way I do. There’s definitely something wrong with me, I’m afraid.
I take some solace in Galatians 2:16. “nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through the faithfulness of Yeshua HaMashiach, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified.”
Of course, you’ll recognize that I read it as Dunn suggested, not as it is sometimes translated in evangelically leaning Bibles. Maybe it really isn’t up to me to manufacture faith, as though I have to have “faith in Jesus Christ” in order to be acceptable to God. I wonder what readers of that version do with men like Abraham. I’m sure there’s some theological exception applied to those Old Testament characters. But Heschel makes a lot more sense to me:
“Faith is not a piece of information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed. It is the insight that life is not a self-maintaining, private affair, not a chaos of whims and instincts, but an aspiration, a way not a refuge.”[2]
If my “faith” is just a way to get out of the mess I’m in, or the world’s mess, then it’s really not much good now, is it? It’s like buying a treasury bond that you can’t cash until after you’re dead. No, faith has to mean something now. And hopefully more than just an emotionally comforting feeling when things go wrong. That’s why Zornberg’s comment is so important to me: “Belief, faith, trust . . . has to do with this capacity to discover in oneself an organic, ‘natural,’ and continuing ‘attraction’ to God. Such an emuna can be nurtured only by words, not by blows or by anger.”[3] I do have the uncanny continuing attraction to God, not in the rather syrupy religious music sense (you know, the kind of music that is deliberately used as mood altering and repeats the chorus about ten times with lyrics that are, at best, theologically incipient), but in the sense that I just have to keep pursing Him even if I can’t seem to get a good grip on the arrangement. Perhaps I need to employ the mechanism of Rabbi Nahman:
“When one enters this wasteland a sense of worthlessness vitiates all capacity to live and to approach God. The objective facts may well be depressing; introspection may lead to a realistic sense of inadequacy and guilt. But this then generates a pathological paralysis, in which desire becomes impossible. [R. Nahman’s] solution is a kind of spiritual generosity—to oneself as well as to others. One should search in oneself for the one healthy spot, among the guilt and self-incrimination. This one spot, which remains recognizable, must exist. If one reclaims it, one then has a point of leverage for transforming one’s whole life. . . . Finding the ‘spot’ in oneself (as well as in others) becomes a therapeutic measure: one changes one’s sense of oneself, and makes it possible, in reality, to be transformed.”[4]
“Finding the spot,” yes, that’s what I’m looking for, that place where I can start connecting the dots, as I often tell those who come to listen. The Bible to me is a great connect-the-dots manuscript, a book filled with the way ancient men and women interacted (or didn’t interact) with the God of Israel. My job is to connect the dots, to trace the way God involved Himself with these people from generation to generation, in order to see how He might involve Himself with me. And in the process, read the stories to help me understand who I am, to recognize that God is drawing me into relationship with Him somehow in the midst of the lives of these others. That means venturing into my wilderness, my place of emptiness, where my traumas are the subject of His concern.
“Only in the wilderness can he ‘hear words of Torah,’ only a ‘place of nothingness’ can yield him his desire.”[5]
“To hear the voice of God is to suffer the unbearable; to receive the Torah is to return to life, to one’s recognizable self.”[6]
Has my theology changed? Yes, undoubtedly. Is it the result of growing old? Maybe. Maybe I am that much more aware that my own end is approaching all too quickly. Maybe I am aware that what I have today, what I am asked to do today, may be the last day. And maybe that’s why the wilderness looms larger than before. But now I know that this place of emptiness is not simply the scary abandonment trauma of my past. It is the place where God waits to greet me, even if the encounter is unbearable. It is the place where I might learn how to be myself.
“Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster.”[7]”
Topical Index: age, grace, wilderness, theology, faith, worthiness, John 4:4
[1]Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. 336.
[2]Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. 337.
[3]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus(Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 242.
[7]Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life(HarperOne, 1992), p. 4.
