I might not have had as much trouble with today's reading if I hadn't read those December devotionals where Oswald described obedience as easy. From December 23: "The proof that your old man is crucified with Christ is the amazing ease with which the life of God in you enables you to obey the voice of Jesus Christ." Compare that with the opening lines of today's devotional: "A man who has not been born of the Spirit of God will tell you that the teachings of Jesus are simple. But when you are baptized with the Holy Ghost, you find 'clouds and darkness are round about Him.'" And this line from the end of the first paragraph: "After the amazing delight and liberty of realizing what Jesus Christ does, comes the impenetrable darkness of realizing Who He is."
So, I struggled. If Jesus' teachings are not simple, if he is surrounded by mystery and darkness, how can it be easy to follow him?
Honestly, I still chafe at the adjective "easy" being applied to life in general, obedience in particular, but that aside, here's where I landed after wrestling with today's concepts:
- Reverence is required. Jesus became man. He is Emmanuel -- God with us -- true intimacy is possible, yes, but he is still God. We are not equals. His thoughts are beyond our comprehension. We may come boldly before his throne, but we still stand on hallow ground. We must take "our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet."
- Listening is required. It is the Spirit of God working in us that makes Scripture personal and life-giving. "The Bible has been so many words to us -- clouds and darkness -- then all of a sudden the words become spirit and life because Jesus re-speaks them to us in a particular condition." I remember experiencing this with the story of the woman at the well -- a story I had heard a hundred times and thought I knew. I was in a place in my life where I felt radically misunderstood, and I heard this story anew as reassurance that God knows me, understands me.
- Mystery is involved. I cannot simply sit down with the proper books, notebook and pen, and apply scholarly principles to the understanding of God's Word. I am dependent on the Spirit to whisper, to prod, to open my eyes, and to move me to a position where comprehension is possible. This is a departure for me from the years when I regarded Scripture as completely accessible to everyone.
- Finally, I do not understand Oswald's last two sentences with regard to the distinction between dreams and visions and words. Anyone else? Please feel welcome to leave a comment if you have some insight on that point.
Barbara
Excerpted from Psalms: Prayers of the Heart by Eugene Peterson:
ReplyDeleteThe Psalms are poetry and the Psalms are prayer. These two features, the poetry and the prayer, need to be kept in mind always. If either is forgotten the Psalms will not only be misunderstood but misused.
Poetry is language used with intensity. It is not, as so many suppose, decorative speech. Poets tell us what our eyes, blurred with too much gawking, and our ears, dulled with too much chatter, miss around and within us. Poets use words to drag us into the depths of reality itself, not by reporting on how life is, but by pushing-pulling us into the middle of it. Poetry gets at the heart of existence. Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal. It is root language. Poetry doesn't so much tell us something we never knew as bring into recognition what was latent or forgotten or overlooked. The Psalms are almost entirely this kind of language. Knowing this, we will not be looking primarily for ideas about God in the Psalms or for direction in moral conduct. We will expect, rather, to find exposed and sharpened what it means to be human beings before God.
Prayer is language used in relation to God. It gives utterance to what we sense of want or respond to before God. God speaks to us; our answers are our prayers. The answers are not always articulate. Silence, sighs, groaning -- these also constitute responses. But always God is involved, whether in darkness or in light, whether in faith or despair. This is hard to get used to. Our habit is to talk about God, not to him. We love discussing God. But the Psalms resist such discussions. They are provided not to teach us about God but to train us in responding to him. We don't learn the Psalms until we are praying them.
Those two features, the poetry and the prayer, account for both the excitement and the difficulty in studying the Psalms. The poetry requires that we deal with our actual humanity -- these words dive beneath the surfaces of pose and pretense straight into the depths. We are more comfortable with prose, the laid-back language of our ordinary discourse. The prayer requires that we deal with God -- this God who is determined on nothing less than total renovation of our lives. We would rather have a religious bull session.