Jesus Mean and Wild by Mark Galli

Author:Mark Galli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2006-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Yet—and this is also crucial—this is not a frustrated longing, but an infatuated longing. When a young man and woman fall in love, they have found another person who suddenly fascinates them. This woman is the first person I think of when I wake up and the last person I think of before going to sleep. I relish every minute I spend with her. I ask her all sorts of questions about her life, her interests, her passions. The more I know, the more I realize I don’t know, and my fascination becomes even more intense. When we fall out of love—out of this giddy, wonderful period—it’s partly because we run out of energy to be continually fascinated. And we become bored and selfish and a host of other things. But the experience returns now and then throughout marriage, and it is this experience that reflects, I believe, the type of experience we’ll have with God for eternity: an endless falling in love, an endless fascination, an endless pursuing of the mystery of God—and the fact that we are never fully satisfied is precisely one reason we’ll find the kingdom of heaven such a joy.

“C. S. Lewis argued that love is most fully realized ‘when what you most desire is out of reach,’” writes Belden Lane in his penetrating book, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. “It is love’s unattainability that draws us inexorably to it. Nothing is so unattainable as God, nothing more out of reach. Yet nothing evokes our love more strongly.”4

Lane notes how this theme runs throughout Christian history. Anglican priest and metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne believed that human desire was the very image of God within us. Julian of Norwich says, “There is in God a quality of thirst and longing.” As Lane sums up, “Human desire is simply a reflection of that original, irrepressible yearning in Christ.”5

This is one reason the message of Jesus is elusive, why he speaks in parables that sometimes are nearly impenetrable and other times so layered with meaning that it could take an eternity to unravel their mysteries. It’s the reason that God only slowly, over thousands of years, unveiled his plan for Israel and all the earth. It’s the reason God refuses to show Moses anything but his backside. It’s the reason Jesus toys with the Syrophoenician woman, Nicodemus, the woman at the well, and others. He rarely comes out and says plainly what it is he was trying to communicate. With the Syrophoenician woman he refers to “food” that is not worthy of “dogs” (Mark 7:25–30). To Nicodemus, he speaks about being born again (John 3:1–21). To the woman at the well, he speaks of water that will quench all thirst (John 4:7–15). Always elusive, always engaging, prompting the humble seeker to take the next step, to ask another question, to dig a little deeper.

The parable in Mark is one such example; it confused everyone. But it is only Jesus’s most intimate disciples who take the trouble to find out more.

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