Why Wait?

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses…we do not know what has become of him.” (Exodus 32:1)

Imagine this scenario from the people’s perspective.

Moses has led them out of slavery in Egypt. He is their leader, their judge, and the mouthpiece of their God—the embodiment of everything that might keep them moving forward with purpose. After traveling through the desert, they come to this foreboding mountain. Moses scales it to talk with God. Days pass.

Weeks pass.

These folks are in the middle of nowhere, with scarce resources and no one in authority to articulate a vision for them. They are waiting around for a disappeared leader who may never return—and a rather frightening God who may or may not speak to them. Strangest of all, this is exactly what God wants them to do.

Think of how profoundly countercultural this message is for us moderns.

We keep to-do lists and check off the items to celebrate our progress. We love to be busy, to feel productive. So much information and so many goods are now available in seconds.

In themselves, these are good things. But when they control our lives as they do in this century, it’s easy to lose the ability to wait and wander.

Now imagine what happens if we do wait and wander.

Suddenly we have time to ask deeper questions, like why am I living this way? The “necessities” of modern life look less necessary. The ideas and desires that shape our lives—excessive work, upward mobility, busyness as a virtue—seem vacuous. We start making less room for the urgent and more room for the important, including God.

Once we make room for God, anything can happen.

That may be the ultimate value of the desert experience. Our usual touchstones fall away, and we are left with the one relationship on which everything depends. As we live in that relationship, God produces an entirely different kind of fruit in us. It not only brings us peace of soul, but confronts the go-go culture around us by its very example.

If we live in the desert, then, God can work with us to change our small corner of the world. Is that too much to say? Or could there be truth in it?

The Vexing Gospel of John

[Jesus said,] “You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:4-6)

Let me share an ongoing struggle with you.

About a year ago, I decided I needed a fresh look at the gospels. Among the motivators were two beliefs that could be at odds: first, that the Bible deserves to be taken seriously (whatever that means); second, that I cannot imagine God excluding any human soul because it did not subscribe to specific beliefs. That, to me, makes God smaller—and I distrust anything that makes God smaller.

I started with Matthew and loved it. I felt liberated by the overwhelming emphasis on inner transformation and outer practice as part of the reign of God—elements that, I think rightly, Marcus Borg cites as the core of the gospel in The Heart of Christianity. This gospel calls us to embrace the less fortunate, to be generous to all, to heal, to distrust wealth, all from the wellspring of a heart transformed by the Spirit. Wonderful.

Then I came to the gospel of John.

Suddenly it is not so much about the practice of Christianity as the person of Jesus. Belief in Jesus as Messiah is the path to God. In fact, verses like the one above—including “those who do not believe are condemned already” (3:18)—indicate that this belief is the only path to God. If true as written, that would pretty much take down my belief in an all-inclusive God.

So what gives? Is it that simple: we take it literally and assume that the Buddhists are going to hell? On the other extreme, do we simply ignore it because we don’t like it?

Those answers, I believe, are simplistic. Now look at the next (perhaps more thoughtful) level of response: Do we explain this message as a product of the times in which John was written? Or the understanding of that writer in that culture, time, and place? Or the fact that the whole gospel was written more than a half century after Christ, so who knows what he really said?

These seem more reasonable to me, and if I were a Bible scholar, perhaps I could adopt one of them with confidence. But without the scholarship to back them up, even these approaches seem too dismissive, too unwilling to stare into the text and then, like Jacob with the angel, wrestle it until it blesses us.

What’s the answer? I do have a couple of thoughts: it intrigues me, for instance, that Jesus calls himself the way—so the way is a person, not a belief system. But honestly, I don’t know. Maybe wrestling with texts, regardless of one’s academic background, is the only way to give proper respect to all the factors: the text, the context in which it was written, and where we live now. Maybe that’s the best way to get at the truth behind each passage. Maybe.

What do you think?