28 November 2018
Wednesday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
“I saw something like…” This expression comes up time and again in John’s Apocalypse and in Christian mysticism, and we hear one instance of it in Revelation 15: “I saw something like a sea of glass mingled with fire.” We may not all be mystics, but the value of this phrase extends to the whole Christian reality in which we are called to live, whether mystics or not. “I saw something like” indicates the paradox of Christianity, which resists our reductions and returns us time and again to the at-times uncomfortable place where God breaks through whatever categories we may wish to impose on him.
On the one hand, some may use “I saw something like” to relativize what God actually intends to convey to the Church. Such people might say that the thing that is described is not the reality itself, and so the image described may no longer be valid in the context our time and place. Here, they escape from the concrete demands of God’s Word by reminding us that where there is likeness, there is also unlikeness, and stressing the latter. While there is some truth to this argument, it is vitiated by the disobedience to God’s Word that underlies the shift in perspective that it demands. It ignores the reality that what the mystic sees is in fact likewhat the mystic describes, more so than anything else that the mystic could use to describe the reality that God conveys. So it is for us: the realities that God offers us really do express themselves in the concrete realities that we live in the here and now. There is a real likeness between heaven and earth, to such an extent that we must affirm that eternal life is not some sort of superseding of the flesh, but its resurrection.
On the other hand, we must not forget that this reallikeness remains a likeness. We cannot reduce God or the life that he offers us to merely that which we can grasp. To do so is often to fall into either gnosticism (if we think that what we can grasp is a “knowledge” of things divine) or pelagianism (if we think that we can grasp the divine life by doing this or that, whether liturgy or service). No, the Christian position is rather to remain in that paradox of love where we gratefully acknowledge the concrete reality of the likenessthat we receive and find therein the truth offered to us, without ever vitiating that truth by imagining that we can “square the circle” or “complete the thought” and grasp it. Deus semper major!God is always greater! We do know God, because God reveals himself to us in love, but it is only in love that we know him rightly, and in love God will always remain greater than what we know. “I saw something like…”