The Big Reveal--May 20, 2022

The Big Reveal--May 20, 2022

"Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God's wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory." [1 Corinthians 2:6-8]

I've got to tell you: I have come to love that feeling of getting to the end of a mystery story and seeing how all the pieces fit together.  Especially if the storyteller is a good one and the clues have been there in plain sight all along, there is a feeling of surprise and satisfaction all at the same time.  Whether it's a classic whodunnit novel like Agatha Christie or the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, or a intricately plotted movie that keeps you guessing like Knives Out, The Sixth Sense, or The Usual Suspects, I get such a kick out of witnessing a story unfold and trying to figure out what's going on as I'm seeing it or reading it, and then usually to have the big reveal in the end show me how much of the truth I had missed along the way.  I love it.

And to me, the best part is that moment after the climax of the story where we are shown all the things that had pointed to the conclusion all along, but that we might or might not have understood as the plot unfurled.  You see all the details that might have seemed innocuous or irrelevant before, the mannerisms of characters that had seemed curious but forgettable before, or the seemingly random objects or events from earlier in the story that now take on a whole new significance.  Often, a sentence from one point in the action comes back with a new meaning, or you realize that what a character had said meant something different from what you expected when you first heard it.  I just love those moments, and I truly admire the authors or film directors who can pull it off with panache. 

I should probably also confess that for a lot of my life I didn't think of the Bible as a book that told that kind of story.  I thought, like many, that the Bible was basically a reference book, like a dictionary, almanac, or cookbook, where correct answers were found, and that there was no development of a story, so much as a collection of truths to be learned and rules to be followed.  (I can remember, in an earlier chapter of my life, learning that old saw that the word "Bible" was actually an acronym that stood for "Basic Instructions Before Leavingt Earth," which not only made it sound like the Christian faith was only interested in preparation for an afterlife, but also that the Bible was primarily an instructional booklet rather than a story, much less The Story.)  But to hear Paul tell it here, the message of Jesus is in fact one of those "Aha!" plot twists that reveals a mystery that all of history has been leading up to.  

In other words, as Paul says to the Corinthians, all of human history has been a story in which God's movements and actions have been sometimes obvious and sometimes hidden, but they make sense in a whole new way in light of Jesus.  And once Jesus--the Crucified Savior--comes on the scene, pieces of the puzzle come together, and odd extraneous details now are revealed to be deeply important.  And much like happens at the turning point of a mystery novel or suspense movie, we discover that the truth has been there the whole time, but we didn't know how to hear it against the background noise.  We didn't see how to make sense of what had been there for us to see all along.

In particular, the "mystery" revealed in Jesus is that God has always chosen to work in what we call upside-down ways--lifting up the lowly, welcoming the outcast, feeding all abundantly, siding with the enslaved rather than the enslaver, humbling the arrogant, blessing the ones deemed nobodies, and bearing human violence and death.  We might not have recognized it, because we still so easily soft-pedal those parts of the story and turn up the volume on things that make God seem just like us at our worst: vindictive, spiteful, angry, and litigious.  We have remade God in our own image as the scowling bearded fellow from the Sistine Chapel, and we have invented the notions that God is stingy with good things, transactional in blessing only those who do something for God first, and itching to zap some pitiable sinner.  We have basically re-imagined God as just an emperor on a cosmic scale--like Caesar, Nebuchadnezzar, or Pharaoh, but just over the whole universe.  (And honestly, that's kind of what the ancient Greeks and Romans did when they imagined gods like Zeus or Jupiter, who were plenty powerful, but basically capricious jerks.)  But in Jesus, we come to see that God has always been just what Jesus has told us and shown us--the Merciful One who sends good gifts like sun and rain even on selfish stinkers... the Vulnerable One who risks being rejected... the Audacious One who welcomes outcasts and forgives sinners... and the Faithful One who keeps promises even if it costs God everything.  In Jesus we see what the Hebrew Scriptures (what we sometimes call the Old Testament) have been saying all along about God, but so often missed:  God has always been about the work of lifting up the lowly, feeding the hungry with good things, cancelling debts, liberating the oppressed, and breaking the weapons of the oppressor.  God has always been holding out the vision of a new creation where wolves and lambs can lie down in peace, where swords are beaten into plowshares, and where mercy and justice are our way of life.  God has even always been the sort of Person who bears our pain and death.  So when Jesus comes along and is revealed to be God's Messiah from the cross, it might feel like a gut-punch of a plot-twist, but it's really been God's way all along!

That should also put to a stop all our silly and arrogant thinking as Christians that "the God of the Old Testament" is different from "the God of the New Testament," as sometimes Respectable Religious folks like to say in churches.  Sometimes you'll hear that the God of the Old Testament is mean, cruel, and legalistic, and then Jesus came and sold us a nicer model as the New Testament's God of mercy and kindness.  But that's not what Paul says.  Paul says that God has been leaving the clues and showing God's character all along--but we haven't been able to put the pieces together until Jesus brings it all into focus.  Jesus' coming--and in particular, the way the cross makes sense of Jesus' mission--helps us to see what was true about God from creation on forward.  Jesus is the big reveal that helps us to see what we had been overlooking, and what we had ignored as extraneous.  Kind of like how those old-fashioned tinted cellophane 3-D glasses used to make the red and blue lines of a picture transform before our eyes into a three-dimensional image when you would put them on, Jesus reveals what we had not seen about God until his coming.  And not because the truth about God's character wasn't there all along, but because we couldn't make sense of what was right in front of us.

Like Robert Farrar Capon writes in his classic, The Mystery of Christ... and Why We Don't Get It, "The mysterious, reconciling grace that was revealed in Jesus is not something that got its act in gear for the first time in Jesus; rather, it is a feature of the very constitution of the universe--a feature that was there all along, for everybody and everything. And it was there, Christians believe, because the Person who manifests himself finally and fully in Jesus' humanity is none other than the Word of God, the Second Person of the Three Persons in One God who is intimately and immediately present to every scrap of creation from start to finish." 

In other words, Jesus doesn't show us a different God from the God we meet in creation or in the story of Israel--but rather, Jesus shows us that God's heart looks like Jesus' heart all along, even if we didn't realize it before.  All of creation is the work of the same God who is willing to get strung up on a cross for the sake of that creation.  Every moment of history is held in the hands of a God who was willing to also take nails in the human-divine palms of Jesus.  If we didn't know it before, now with the Big Reveal in Jesus, we can and do.  

And now, the challenge and invitation of each day is to see everything through the lenses Jesus gives us, and to watch as what had been confusing, colored lines become an image with new depth and dimension.  Now that we've seen who God is in Jesus, we can see all the signs we had been given along the way of God's cruciform character... and we can face the day to come with the same kind of love.

Lord Jesus, help us to see your fingerprints all through the world and the story of the Scriptures, and help us to see the day in front of us in light of who you are, too.