This reflection is Part 1 of a 3-part blog series written by Taylor Field. In his new book, Relentless, Taylor looks at familiar Bible characters and their stories. As we read their experiences with God, not only do we find ourselves within their stories, we begin to understand “The Crux of the Matter;” we find ourselves knowing the heart of God.
In this story, everything is reversed. The king becomes the servant, the rich one becomes a beggar, and the owner becomes homeless. The liberator becomes the oppressed, the freedom fighter becomes the person bound, the priest becomes the sacrifice, the original author of joy itself becomes the one so severely tortured.
The sunrise, the oceans, the flowers--somehow none of these things had really drawn the children to the Lord of all heaven and earth. So God had to find another way to climb into our hearts.
He won our love by losing his grandeur. The president became the valet; the general became the washer of our soiled feet. God led us to ourselves by becoming that strange puzzle--the God-forsaken God. The way, the truth, and the life led the way to an even deeper truth by crying out “Why have you forsaken me?” The Lord of great peace finally became clear to us under the most humiliating savagery that we could fathom.
As in the story of Jacob in the Hebrew scriptures, God wrestles with us and he lets us win. As with Abraham and Moses, God takes the position of harsh justice and lets his novices argue for mercy, and then he yields. As with Job, God answers Job’s demands not with solutions, but with more questions--seventy-seven of them. Then God ends by asking Job about two tough-skinned uber-creatures. Somehow God seems to commend Job’s bull-dogged impertinence--Job’s over-confident friends are stunned. It doesn’t quite make sense, and yet it does.
The surprises continue.
With the Canaanite woman pleading for help, the Lord on the road takes the position of selective tribalism and let’s her persist in arguing for the universal. Then he surprises his open-mouthed disciples by giving in and rewarding her.
Giving in.
When the world thinks we need a lion, God appears to John as a little hurt lamb. God’s final weapon of choice is submission to a cross instead of the wielding of the expected sword. God “wins” by all this losing and is completely filled by being so totally emptied.