Homily for 12 Mar 2016

12 Mar 2016

Jesus doesn’t fit into human categories: and that’s the problem.  As we heard: “Some say, ‘This is truly the Prophet.’  Others say, ‘This is the Christ—but wait, the Christ isn’t supposed to come from Galilee.’” Everybody’s confused by Jesus.  And he really does cause a ruckus in the community—even today’s community.

Some people call Jesus a “Friend;” others say he is “Mighty Lord;” still others say he is merely “a perfect human being.”  Jesus still causes confusion today among Christians, and even within our own individual sense of who he is.  And it seems to be because Jesus just doesn’t fit into our human categories.

Even if the Jews correctly understood him as “the Messiah, the Christ,” they still would’ve missed the mark.  And even if they had known him to be God himself, they still wouldn’t have understood him—because “who can understand God?”  Maybe the Jews didn’t know what to do with him because they didn’t know to approach him.  Many of them had a sense that Jesus was . . . peculiar, to say the least.  But all they could do was to define him in our more narrow human categories.

And we do the same thing. Maybe the reason Jesus can be such a mystery to us because . . . he is.  He’s God and, again—“who can understand God?”  There’s more to him than we can possibly grasp by our human understandings of things and how the world works.  Is Jesus “Friend?” Yes.  Is Jesus “Mighty Lord?”  Yes.  Is he “a perfect human being?”  Yes.  But not in the way we define those things.

Jesus comes to us; he reveals himself to us.  And, to an extent, we can know him.  But, ultimately, there’s always a part of Jesus that will remain a mystery.  He’ll always be somewhat fleeting in our lives.  The remedy, however, is to keep an open mind to the ways of God.  About the time we think we have God figured out, we don’t.

And we can let that frustrate us, or we can just go with it . . . and wait to see what God is up to next.