Simply Difficult

Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ...
- Galatians 6

For every man shall bear his own burden...
- Galatians 6

Honor thy father and mother...
- Mark 7

And call no man your father upon the earth...
- Matthew 11

Love thy neighbor as thyself...
- Matthew 5

Let the dead bury their dead...
- Matthew 8

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you...
- John 14

Think not that I am come to bring peace...
- Matthew 10

Lord, I believe...
- Mark 9

Help thou my unbelief...
- Mark 9

taken from The Brothers K by David James Duncan

That’s about the way it is, huh? A seething cauldron of paradox, this Jesus is. I cannot understand folks who think you can wrap him up with a fish sticker on the back of your car or a six week bible study down at your local teahouse.

One of men I call friend told me the other day that I was behaving in an inscrutable manner. He then, in a rather friendly fashion, proceeded to define “inscrutable” for me. The word means “difficult to fathom or understand.”

This Jesus, he’s rather inscrutable, don’t you think? I don’t know that he tried to be on purpose, it’s just what happens when you mix heaven and earth, divinity with hair and elbows and navels. And if we, as Christians believe, have this Jesus within us, then it would stand to reason, if reason really stands for anything these days, that we, by virtue of the guilt-by-association rule, would be rather inscrutable too. Would we? Could we? Inscrutable be?

These days in which we find ourselves living, these days of the church of Oprah and co. and the shenanigans of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and those folks in Texas with all the underage mothers and the absolute assheaded stupidity of Rush Limbaugh, these days need a visible witness to the particularity of this Jesus. And that is going to happen, if it ever happens, by way of the people who claim to know him. And I, for one, would like to lobby for a people of God inscrutable. That the world would know we are Christians, as the song says, by our love, by our love, but that they'd also know us by our difficult to fathomness. That last phrase is going to be hard to put to music around a YoungLife campfire, but I think you get my drift.

It's not that we would try to be inscrutable on purpose. Folks can smell that a mile away and mercy, every day has enough trouble of its own without us trying to be difficult to understand on purpose. No, this would rather be a very natural result of mixing heaven and earth, which usually comes by reaching out with a hand to heaven in one direction and a hand to earth in the other, which puts you in the cruciform position, which is always what happens when you attempt to mix heaven and earth. And the inscrutable Jesus hinted at that when he said I've come that you might have life, now take up your cross.