The True Mystery and Wonder

In various ways, Psalm 139 keeps cropping up in my life and consciousness, and so I’m going to do a series of posts on it, since it’s too long and the questions about it are too complex to handle in just one.  Many issues gravitate toward this psalm: theodicy (is God just?), Alzheimer’s Disease and other forms of dementia, addiction, abortion, free will, human aloneness, and the one called deus absconditis (the hidden, absent, or self-hidden God). 

The first step is to read the psalm.  Because use of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) without written permission is limited to brief quotations with the citation NRSV (as I’m reasonably sure use of other versions of the Bible is limited as well), I’m giving a link where you can find it on a site called Oremus.  Just select New Revised Standard Version from the drop-down list (2nd one down, the first is its anglicized version) and then enter the passage of the Bible you wish to read, in this case Psalm 139.

Click here.

This psalm has often been considered a hymn to God’s omniscience, God’s all-knowing.  I don’t think so, or at least I don’t think God’s having all the information is the main wonder that causes the psalmist to speak in awe.  After all, if God is God, are we surprised that God knows more than we do?  I would have to say, “Let’s hope God does.”  I believe the true wonder is not that God knows everything but that God cares so much and won’t stop caring.

Again I remind myself that the language of the Bible is relational.  To know is to understand and care.  To know a person is to feel empathy with that person.  Knowledge with indifference toward the thing or especially the person known is a contradiction that makes no biblical sense.  Apathy may be a divine attribute in some philosophical notions of deity, but it definitely is not a biblical attribute of God.  The entire Bible reveals the truth that God is not indifferent toward humanity or the whole creation.  The God of whom the Bible speaks to us is never apathetic.

So, if you’ve already read the psalm, you might want to read it again as an expression of wonder, not at God’s infinite possession of facts and data, but at the persistence of God’s caring and compassion, no matter how far away we run, where we hide, or what life buries us under. 

You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.           (Psalm 139:3 NRSV)

“Search out.”  The translations vary somewhat, but all suggest that God actively endeavors to acquire this personal knowledge of the human and is not passively in possession of all the information there is.  There is willing effort involved.  There is desire to know.  The psalm is confronting us with the God who cares far more about us and for us than we can fathom.

More to come.

Presence and Distance

I find Chapter 3 of the Bible’s book of Exodus crucial to our knowledge of God and our faith-thinking.  In various ways, Moses learns that he cannot approach too close to God, cannot get any hold on God, cannot control or manipulate God in any way.  “Come no closer!” God tells the man.  “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” (Exodus 3:5 NRSV) Then God immediately self-identifies with Moses in relational terms, the terms of who God is to this man who must keep a respectful distance: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” (3:6 NRSV) When Moses asks God’s name – a name to give the people of Israel to whom God is sending him back – the answer he receives keeps him at that respectful distance even while promising God’s presence with him as he fulfills the mission God is giving him.  The traditional translation of the name is, as the NRSV renders it, “I AM WHO I AM.”  This translation maintains God’s independence but lacks affirmation of the promise.  I prefer Martin Buber’s rendering of the name as, “I Will Be (with you) Who I Will Be (with you).”  Moses cannot appropriate God or conjure God’s presence by calling upon the divine name, but he must learn to trust God’s presence as he goes forth to serve as he has been called to do.

The history of religions, including Christianity, is filled with attempts to get a handle on God for human purposes.  That’s magic.  Make the proper sacrifice or say the prescribed words the correct way (perhaps with the requisite emotion), and God will do as you wish – forgiving you, blessing you, or prospering you according to what you desire.  No!  God is sovereign and free.  God cannot be conjured, and God’s hand cannot be forced in any way, by any sacrifice, ritual, formulated confession, sacrament, or prescribed born-again experience. 

But God’s sovereignty is only half the truth, and I believe it is actually the lesser half, though still half.  What I’ve just said may not make mathematical sense (in math, halves are by definition equal), but it does make relational sense.  For a couple who love each other, “I love you,” is always the greater half of the truth, but respect must always be the other half or the love is spoiled.  The two become one, but they must remain two distinct, independent, and free persons if the love is to be renewed continually in a true partnership.

I would not call myself or even the church God’s “partner,” because the relationship is not between peers, although I would suggest that God respects us as human beings more than we respect ourselves or each other and does call us into a sort of unequal partnership (See John 15:15).  Even so, I consider the analogy of human love helpful precisely because respect is so crucial to it.  The God to whom the Bible bears witness with many voices is not to be confined, used, stereotyped, labeled, defined, presumed upon, taken for granted, or dictated to.  Not even by Christians quoting scripture is God to be managed, regulated, or restricted.  It is not for us to say what God may or must do.

One more point, and then we stop for now because reflection on Exodus 3 could go on and on (as it should, but not all in one blog post).  Even while establishing the respectful distance Moses must observe and refusing to be bound in any way to the man’s will, wish, or whim, God understands the human need for divine presence and support, especially when faced with a dangerous and overwhelming mission.  Moses must return to Egypt from which he has fled for his life and there make demands on the pharaoh who is certain not to like what he hears.  “Who am I,” Moses asks, “that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” (3:11 NRSV) Uh, God, bringing the Israelites out of their slavery sounds great and all, but, uh, surely you’ve got the wrong guy here.  I have no standing with the king of Egypt.  Why would he listen to me (and not just toss me into a prison cell or worse)?  In response, God makes the all-important promise, the one that matters: “I will be with you,” (3:12a NRSV) and knowing human weakness, adds a sign by which Moses will know that Israel’s deliverance was, indeed, the work of God.

We do well to see and understand that the promise of God’s presence and support is bound up with the mission on which God is sending Moses.  It is no “showers of blessings” promise for someone who just wants success and security in life now and heaven to come afterward.  But it is a promise.

The Bible’s truth of God for us is relational, but what we find here is not just a personal relationship with God for Moses to enjoy and feel good about.  To be chosen is to be called out from among the many for the purpose of service to the many.  Moses is chosen and called because of God’s compassion for the enslaved people and God’s wish, not only to liberate them, but to adopt them and carry the relationship forward in covenant through the generations to come.  Israel was chosen to be God’s covenant people, not for Israel’s sake only, but so the covenant people could become a light to the nations.  The church is called into being – into relationship and service – for the sake of the world, not just for its own sake. 

9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.  10 So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt."  (Exodus 3:9-10 NRSV)

What's in a Word?

How much significance can we attach reasonably to a single word in the Bible?  Can it really serve as a linchpin for understanding God?  Well, no, not likely, and yet very rarely, yes.  Let me be clear.  Biblical interpretation and Christian preaching have been muddled by the tactic of lifting Bible verses and even mere phrases or individual words out of context, altering their meaning from what it was in context, and then making too much of them.  But there are some very important terms in the Bible, terms loaded with meaning, and sometimes the context supports understanding a word to have special significance.

By the end of the second chapter of the Bible’s book of Exodus, Moses has failed in his attempts to save a fellow Hebrew from oppression and to serve as a law-giver for his people, and now he must flee Egypt to preserve his life.  First he killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave and hid the man’s body, and the next day he tried to break up a fight between two Hebrews.  To his dismay, one of the fighters asked him if he intended to kill him as he had killed the Egyptian.  The crime is known, and Moses realizes it will soon reach the ears of the authorities.  So, he goes into exile to the land of Midian where he marries, settles down, and starts a family.  On his own, Moses cannot become deliverer or law-giver.

The chapter concludes with this summary of suffering in slavery:

23 After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God.  24 God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.   25 God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them. [Italics mine.]  (Exodus 2:23-25 NRSV)

The end of verse 25 presents a problem.  The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translates, too weakly I think, “and God took notice of them.”  The Hebrew says simply, “and God knew.”  Knew what?  Is something missing from the Hebrew text? 

The Hebrew word for knowing is a relational term in various senses, as has been exploited popularly by comedians for its reference to sexual intimacy, as in “So-and-so knew his wife, and she conceived . . . .”  Jokes about knowing “in the biblical sense” aside, the Hebrew verb “to know” is relational, as was the people’s thought-world and way of speaking about life.  They did not separate knowing from understanding and caring, hearing from listening and responding to the other person’s need, or acting righteously from treating one’s neighbor justly.  They did not compartmentalize the human being into intellect separate from emotion or emotion apart from action (response).  When the Bible says God “hears,” it is telling us that God listens, cares, and wills to respond; it is not telling us merely that God receives auditory information through divine “ears.” 

So, the truth declared by this seemingly incomplete sentence in Exodus is not that God received some information but that God looked upon the Israelites and empathized with them in their sufferings.  God felt their misery with them.  This God was not the “Unmoved Mover,” but the empathic God who took the people’s pain and humiliation to heart.  Because God “knows” in this relational and responsive sense, something will happen for the people’s benefit.  Remembering the covenant relationship, God is moved and will act.  In the next chapter, we’ll see how God will choose to act, but first we are led to understand that God cares.  Chapter 3 confirms this deeper, richer interpretation of the simple phrase, “and God knew.”  We are not lifting a single word out of context and exaggerating its importance but recognizing how very important that word is in context.

When Christians speak of the Bible as revealed truth, they may mean either of two very different things.  An authoritarian Christianity means, “This is what you must believe and had better believe and obey, or else!”  A Christianity more receptive to grace and less impressed with itself means, “This reveals the way God really is in relation to us and our world.  This gives us hope!”  God is empathic: responsive to human suffering, caring, and compassionate.  God is not indifferent to us.  God is not dismissive of our pains and griefs.  The wealthy and powerful among us may not respect the powerless.  The cries of the vulnerable and used may not resound in corporate boardrooms or move those in high office, but the Bible reveals the God who cares.

The Bible’s truth is relational, and it is redemptive rather than vindictive.  It is not the truth of majesty and power but the truth of empathy and compassion.

A Different Kind of Truth

In my posts so far, I’ve focused on the argument from lesser to greater which we find in many of Jesus’ teachings.  I hope I’ve at least begun to show that this approach treats Jesus’ parables fairly, for what they are and how they really work to explain the ways of God and of human life transformed by God’s love.  The idea is to listen to the parables themselves instead of laying upon them some doctrine we already hold as correct or orthodox.  We are seeking to learn rather than to reinforce our already standardized beliefs.

I want to make clear, however, that recognizing this one teaching method is not some special or secret “key” to unlocking the truth of scripture.  People like shortcuts and simplifications, but the Bible does not surrender its truth to them.  On one level, we’ve observed a way Jesus taught by using the familiar as an analogy to the hidden, when the hidden is like the familiar in some way, only much, much more so.  God is like a loving parent, only much, much more so.

There is another level of understanding we have already encountered but may not have recognized.  The philosophically minded might remind us that all talk about God is, of necessity, reasoning by analogy, but that’s not the level of understanding of which I speak now.  True, because we cannot observe God or God’s will and work the way scientists observe natural happenings in the world we inhabit, we must speak of God by analogy to what we know and have experienced.  But the more important insight for understanding the Bible and, therefore, beginning to understand life in biblical terms is this: the Bible’s truth is relational.  The prophets and Jesus insist upon confronting us with the God who cares, who feels for and with us, who has freely and willingly committed to relationship with the human creatures of flesh and blood and will neither give up on us nor enslave us (for our own good, as a tyrant would say).  The notion of an apathetic or indifferent God is utterly unbiblical.

For those who would read the Bible as what I have termed the vindictive bible, divine truth leads to judgment and so to the rewarding of the good or faithful and the punishing of the wicked or unfaithful.  For them, it’s all about heaven and hell (since the faithful recognized many centuries ago that in this earthly life neither the good nor the wicked reliably get what they deserve before they die).

Biblically, however, God’s truth leads, not to judgment that apportions “just deserts” to human beings, but rather toward the healing and restoring of loving and respectful relationship.  God respects our freedom and integrity far more than we respect each other’s or even our own.  So it is that we can discern a sharp contrast in the ways people use the Bible to support change and legislation in the society of the United States.  Those who read what I have called the salvific bible, seek to legislate freedom and equality, as we saw during the Civil Rights Movement.  In contrast, those who read the vindictive bible seek to legislate restriction and suppression, as we now see in the right-wing Christian attempts to return women to the dominion of men and all people to the strictures of the “normal,” as that normal is defined by traditional prejudices that have found Bible quotes to support themselves.

The very language of the Hebrew Scriptures is relational, which makes it quite difficult for us modern Western-thinking people to comprehend.  So, an emerging goal of this blog is to explore the Bible’s relational thinking in hope of rendering it less strange to us.  We have become detached and objective.  Having learned to see the earth as a warehouse of resources for us to use and then discard when we have exhausted their usefulness, we have dulled ourselves further into seeing people the same way – as resources or things for our use, to be discarded (laid off) when we have exhausted them.  In ancient Egypt, the Hebrews were slaves.  They were things to be used and used up.  The God who spoke through Moses adopted those slaves, calling them “my people” and committing to them forever.  Remarkably, God chose freely to become vulnerable to mere human beings.  Love is by nature vulnerable.  The mystery of the Bible and of life is this terrible vulnerability which looks so weak and foolish to those in love with power but is, in truth, the strength and wisdom of God.

The truth of the Bible is steadfast love and faithfulness.  It is relational always, never just objective and never, ever, indifferent.  To understand biblical truth, we must learn to think of life as a relational matter.

What Parent Among You?

Seek and you will find.  Knock and the door will be opened.  Ask and it will be given.  In his teaching presented to us in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus promises God will respond to the searching of the person who persists and will not remain distant.  He does not say that finding God will be quick or easy, nor does he suggest that entering into the life God desires to give will be a simple or painless matter for the seeker, but he does promise it will not be futile.

Then he adds a parable which I understand to use the same type of argument from lesser to greater I explained in my previous post about the parable of the shepherd who goes out to find the one stray sheep.  This teaching method presents an ordinary human situation which serves as the lesser condition, then invites and challenges faith to make the jump to the greater condition which involves the will and way of God in dealing with human beings.

Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!  (Matthew 7:9-11 NRSV)

The lesser premise is that decent parents know how to give good, helpful, life-nourishing things to their children.  Here Jesus suggests absurdities to clarify the situation and gain agreement.  What kind of parent would trick a hungry child by offering a small loaf of bread but then do a bait-and-switch with a stone of similar size and shape?  Would that be funny?  Even crazier would be the idea that some parent might actually think the stone was as good a provision as the bread for satisfying the child’s hunger.  Say what?  Worse yet is the idea of tricking the hungry child by offering a fish but substituting a (live, venomous) snake.  The obvious answer for the listeners to Jesus’ questions is something like, “Are you kidding?  No one would do such things, at least not I nor anyone else I know or would care to know.”  The questions are deliberately weird because they invite unquestioned agreement.  No even minimally good parents treat their children that way.

Don’t be thrown by the phrase, “you who are evil.”  Jesus is not calling them evil people as compared to others; he is contrasting them with God who, as far as Jesus is concerned, is the only one who is good (see Mark 10:17,18).  Again, lesser to greater.

The greater premise is introduced by the phrase, “how much more will your Father in heaven.”  Parents love their children and seek to care for them, provide for their needs, and keep them safe and sound, but human parents make mistakes, get grouchy and sometimes unreasonable, act selfishly, get sick or just exhausted, and so are limited in their ability to be good parents.  How much more, Jesus asks, will God, whose love has no evil (nothing harmful) in it and who does not get sick or drop exhausted into a soft chair, give good things to those who ask? 

The logic is plain and simple, but the truth is not.  First of all, Jesus is presenting God, not as the supreme judge whose idea of justice is to reward the virtuous and punish the wicked, but as the supremely loving Parent who loves the children no matter what.  Red flag!  The proudly virtuous will immediately ask something like, “So, if God loves ‘the children’ (all of them!) no matter what they do, does that mean all striving to be righteous and faithful is just a grand waste of time?  Are you saying the unworthy can still find God?  Then why bother to keep the commandments or try to be faithful?”  People who believe truth to be judgment leading to reward or punishment have a terribly hard time understanding love.  But the parent metaphor works because loving parents don’t stop loving the son or daughter who hurts them, messes up in life, or even goes horribly wrong.  The parents are not pleased (no kidding!), but they cannot stop loving.  True, we human parents have our limitations even on love, but God is greater. 

Jesus is calling for a persistent trust in God’s love and care, but such trust is not clearly justified by the experiences of human life.  For him, God’s redemptive love and faithfulness to it form together the greatest reality of all, even though it remains a hidden truth that cannot be proved.  Jesus will not say to people that if they make a big enough pledge, they’ll be blessed with life’s goodies.  He will not base his confidence upon anything but God’s love itself.  As with parents’ love for their children, there is no question of deserving God’s love; the love itself is the overriding truth.  But what Jesus asks us to accept as true is not easy to believe, except perhaps when life is going very, very well for us and those we love.

One problem we encounter in understanding some of Jesus’ teachings that employ this argument from lesser to greater arises when we stumble over the lesser situation before we even get to the greater one.  What he presents as commonplace and self-evident to his original audience may sound strange to us or, as in this case, to some of us.  The sons and daughters of abusive parents probably will not respond well to the image of God as loving Father.  Those who have lived with neglect, scorn, violence, or sexual abuse in their childhood do not need to hear that God is just like their fathers only more so!  Plus, as the theologian Douglas John Hall notes in his three-volume work, Theology in a North American Context, many people have had more than enough of fathers almighty – at home and at work, in personal, economic, and political life.

So, in this seemingly simple, straightforward teaching of Jesus, we encounter a double problem of disappointed or even betrayed trust in people (parents or other parent-type authority figures) who were supposed to be loving and kind and, also, disappointed trust in God.  The Bible does not shy from these problems.  In Exodus we read that the Hebrew slaves are unable to believe Moses’ promise of freedom brought by the intervention of a God who is adopting them; they cannot believe him because they are too crushed and broken in spirit.  Exodus makes this observation with sympathy not scorn.  Jesus also shows understanding of the difficulty that broken, shamed, and suffering people have with faith in the unseen but supposedly loving God.

Children are supposed to be prepared for trusting the unseen God’s love for them by experiencing their parents’ seen, heard, and felt love for them.  They are supposed to learn what forgiveness, understanding, and compassion are all about – from their parents.  But if all they learn is to survive neglect or abuse, or if all they learn is that they must deserve reward or they will get punishment or “just” disapproval, then trusting the unseen God becomes extremely difficult for them.  To paraphrase the Bible, if they cannot trust the parents and other adults they have seen, how will they trust the God they have not seen?

From Sheep to People

The two-verse passage I discussed in my previous post is followed in both Matthew and Luke by a parable or parable-like teaching device.  Because the parables of Jesus are not doctrinal and because they are, in an ancient sense, interactive, ways of interpreting them have varied broadly.  People who preach have sometimes gone wild with the images, ranging far and wide from the context and manner in which those images are actually employed in the parables themselves.  I have heard sermons play with, for example, “You are the salt of the earth,” by explaining every conceivable property and use of salt without regard for the way the image of salt functions in its context.  I have come away feeling more cheated than entertained, having heard far more than I cared about salt and next to nothing of Jesus’ teaching about discipleship lived in the world we actually inhabit but lived in terms of the reign of God which remains hidden to all but faith, hope, and love.

So, before we look at that parable-like teaching device in Jesus’ follow-up to his promise that those who persist in seeking will find life that is truly human and meaningful, let me use an easier parable to explain the teaching device we now call “the argument from lesser to greater.”  We might also regard it as learning about the hidden and mysterious by examining what we already believe about the familiar.

The whole idea is a faith-logic that argues this way: if you agree that something is real and true in the familiar condition where it is less likely, will you not let yourself believe that it is real and true in the unseen condition (the will and way of God) where it is, indeed, more likely?

Recognizing this teaching device Jesus employs frequently in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) liberates us from the doctrinally oppressive interpretations of his teaching that take them to be allegories and from the convoluted arguments such interpretations cause, but it also raises new questions and problems as we make the leap from his time and culture to our own.

Let’s look at a fairly easy example of the faith-argument from lesser to greater.

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” So he told them this parable: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” (Luke 15:1-7 NRSV)

First, we need a little background information on the lesser situation.  In most regions of the world, shepherds drive their flocks, sometimes using dogs to help them manage the sheep.  In Jesus’ culture, however, shepherds had for centuries led their sheep, which requires a kind of bonding that trains the sheep to follow.  In ancient Israel and Judah, therefore, the shepherd served as a metaphor for a leader of the people as well as for the people’s covenant God.  True leadership required leading, caring, and sympathizing rather than herding, driving, and confining.

The LORD is my shepherd.  I shall not be left lacking.  He makes me lie down in green pastures.  He leads me beside calm waters.  (my translation)

So, what’s the common understanding of the lesser situation in this parable of the stray sheep that Jesus uses to set up a faith-understanding of the will and way of God?

The shepherd knows his sheep, and it matters to him that one is missing.  He fears for the stray sheep’s safety and will risk his own to find it.  It would be wrong to assume he cares nothing for the other ninety-nine sheep, but caring knows no logic of numbers and percentages.  The modern business view may be that this shepherd is a fool, and we might do well to ponder that kind of logic that regards people by numbers and can pat itself on the back for successfully writing people off as no longer useful or necessary.  But for now, we need to understand that in Jesus’ culture, it would likely be agreed that a good, responsible (true) shepherd would behave just as this shepherd in the parable behaves: he would leave the ninety-nine (presumably in the care of others) and go out looking for the stray until he found it.  Yes, and he would rejoice when he did find it, especially since the odds of his finding it alive and sound were not so good.  A lone sheep is easy prey.

Loving parents with more than one child do not love one more than another, but their love goes out to the one in distress.  That’s how love works.  They do not ask which child deserves more.  They do not parent objectively and dispassionately, coldly employing “carrots and sticks” to herd their children toward adulthood.  They love.  What Jesus is trying to explain is no great mystery to those who love.

There’s the lesser condition: the way a true shepherd would be expected to choose his course of action and his joy at recovering the lost sheep.

Now, we must deduce the greater condition, and Luke helps by giving us the context, which is the criticism of Jesus made by the pious among his people. To them, the holiness of God required that people of God keep their distance from the unclean and sinful.  To Jesus, the redemptive love of God required him to associate himself with the unclean and sinful.  The pious assumed God’s ultimate job to be rewarding the righteous and punishing the wicked.  Jesus insists God has no such agenda and takes no delight in giving people what they deserve.  God’s will is to find and restore the lost.  So, here’s faith-logic’s question: You righteous people, if you agreed that a true shepherd would care enough about a stray sheep to risk his own safety by going out into the darkness and searching until he found it, why do object when, for God’s sake, I go into the darkness to search out and find people who have strayed and gotten lost?  If a shepherd will rejoice over a rescued sheep, will God not rejoice over a rescued person?  Do you think a shepherd cares more for sheep than God cares for people? 

That’s the way of the faith-argument from lesser to greater.  In my next post, we’ll look at the somewhat more difficult parable which follows upon Jesus’ promise that God will open the door for those who persist in knocking.

Starting with a Promise

“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”  (Matthew 7:7-8 NRSV)

This promise from Jesus in the collection of his teaching known in the church as the Sermon on the Mount (contained in the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5-7) has been and remains very important to me.  This passage of just two verses is also very easily misunderstood if taken out of context.

Jesus’ promise does NOT fit into the company of such vaporous, positive-thinking aphorisms as, “You can be whatever you want to be,” or any of the “You can get whatever you really want in life” type of self-confidence boosters for go-getters.  Even less does the promise belong in the company of assurances that if we pray hard enough and believe hard enough, God will give us what we desire, as though God were the supreme genii in some mystical Aladdin’s lamp.

The context for this promise is formed by (1) Jesus’ announcement of the nearness of the coming kingdom or reign of God which will change human life entirely, (2) his healing ministry which actualizes what is truly the will of God for suffering humanity, and (3) his teaching about the nature of the reign of God and the kind of redeemed and transformed human nature we need in order to welcome it and live together in it.  See in the passage just prior to the Sermon of the Mount, Matthew 4:23:

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. (NRSV)

The hiddenness of God and the elusiveness of God’s justice and compassion have always been severe problems for people who have longed for such divine intervention in an unfair and often cruel world.  At the outset of this collection of teaching, in the section we call the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-10 or 12), Jesus blesses the losers in this world - the poor, the hungry, the grief-stricken, the ones who long for justice and kindness but are denied them, the rejected and persecuted.  He blesses them, not because he imagines their plights to be somehow virtuous or beneficial, but because God is coming near to set things right and they (the losers) are the ones open to God’s redemptive work.

The assurances are that God, while not readily available to be used, longs for relationship with human beings and that what God truly wills for human life is wholeness and fulfillment, not disappointment, grief, and bitterness.  God is not indifferent to us.  That assurance, which Jesus demonstrates in his own ministry, means everything to those who hunger and thirst for justice and, so far, are not satisfied.  God is never indifferent. 

The way is not easy because it is worth everything to pursue.  God is not readily on call because God is not to be presumed upon or used for my purposes.  God remains hidden because the world has been turned over to itself and its own ways and God’s hidden way must be sought.  But, Jesus promises, God wants to be found, wills to open the door to life, longs to give us what we need to be truly human together, meaningfully alive, and free.

Out of the Babylonian exile came the promise to a dejected Israel, a destroyed Judah, that Jesus presents as ripe for fulfillment:

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the LORD, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the LORD, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.  (Jeremiah 29:11-14 NRSV)