PARADOX AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD
Have you ever thought about . . . what if there are no paradoxes and contradictions in life but only clarity and certainties?
According to a dictionary, the term paradox is from the Greek word paradoxon, which means “contrary to expectations, existing belief, or perceived opinion.” Another one defines a paradox as “a statement that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality, expresses a possible truth.” I like what Neils Bohr who received the Nobel Prize in Physics said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.” The possibility of “both-and” truth befuddles the simplistic mind tendencies of "either-or" truth.
What if Jesus hadn't spoken to us in parables? Here I would propose that most of Jesus’ parables are paradoxical in nature because the Kingdom of God Jesus taught is decisively “contrary to expectations, existing belief, or perceived opinion.” One would have to wonder: what if Jesus hadn't spoken to us in indistinct paradoxical sayings? Or why did Jesus communicate in paradoxes and contradictions? What and how do we make sense of Jesus’ approach?
As mentioned above, the Kingdom of God Jesus portrayed is replete with paradoxes. One of the most difficult and profound paradoxical sayings of Jesus is, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). This counterintuitive gem of wisdom is one of those rare sayings that is repeated in all four Gospels (Matthew 10:39, 16:25, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:24, and John 12:25). Jesus actualized the message of losing himself by living out “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
In the Kingdom of God, we can only “go up” by going down, which is another way of saying we can only find life by losing it. Meister Eckhart, a 13th and 14th-century Dominican mystic and theologian, famously explained that we mature spiritually by subtraction, not by addition. We learn by unlearning and gain by letting go. Richard Rohr wisely said that there are two things that can profoundly change us: great love and great suffering. Going down, losing one’s life, and letting go all point to suffering. The voluntary humble road to suffering was the way of Jesus and Jesus invites us now to follow Him. The people who embrace suffering can understand others who are suffering, thus creating a community of healers and transformers. This paradoxical way of humility is how the Kingdom of God reigns and will continue to reign. The world will never comprehend this truth. The Kingdom comes not by power but in humility. Even the religiosity of modern Christianity may have missed the mark. Could it be that our (Christian) obsessive tendency to operate out of a belief-based system, which is a closed system of “right” and “wrong”, an either-or approach, has done significant harm to the counterintuitive integrity of the Kingdom that Jesus taught and embodied?
Why would God allow paradoxes? Why would God speak truths in paradoxes? Why would God not speak to us in deafening clarity and certainty?
Here are a few of my observations to the questions above.
Espousing paradox means that wisdom and discernment of life come from God, not from us. It forces the ultimate dependency of the finite calculating mind on God’s infinite wisdom. The burden of figuring things out is not ours to carry. It helpfully shifts our focus to God as the source of all wisdom, which is faith in action. William Johnston’s insight is brilliant, “Faith is the breakthrough into that deep realm of the soul which accepts paradox with humility.”
The above observation leads to this point. Paradox speaks of God’s mercy to save us from harsh and perhaps even deadly judgment and unspeakable harm to one another. It is God’s gracious act of saving us and humanity from trying to settle things on our own terms.
Paradox also addresses God’s desire for freedom to reign and guide our lives in the pursuit of “both-ands truths”, as immature and infantile as we may be. One can conclude that God considers God’s gift of freedom to humanity that seriously.
Additionally, paradox puts all of us in a quandary of disorder and in disarray, placing all of us on equal footing (that is if we accept paradox as paradox). The good news is that it creates natural hunger and desire for reorder and integration to take place in life. Without disorder, there cannot be reorder. To put it differently, as we learn to wrestle with real paradox in life, we often see a bigger or more foundational truth that was initially hidden in the “original” paradox. We become more generous, tender, and grace-filled toward ourselves and others. Richard Rohr who speaks of the importance of order, disorder, and reorder as life’s necessary stages, writes, “When you go to one side or the other too much, you find yourself either overly righteous or overly skeptical and cynical. There must be a healthy middle, and I hope that is what we are looking for here, as we try to hold both the needed light and the necessary darkness.”
Parker Palmer said that paradox is contradiction integrated and transformed (my paraphrase). Healthy and mature spirituality is more both-and than either-or. In this vein, paradox often teaches us to reflect on the seemingly contradictory nature of the both-ands and to discover truth in the both-ands.
Paradox trains us to see the invisible. Embracing paradox opens spiritual eyes to see the deep and wide permeation of God’s Kingdom on this earth. This key of seeing the invisible unlocks how we can correctly see the visible.
Finally, the upside-down nature of the Kingdom of God is paradoxical in nature. Teachings like “unless you become like this little child, you will not enter the Kingdom” and loving your enemy were clearly a completely different way of seeing and living. Thus, the contrarian stance of the Kingdom compared to the world and even to the religious Christian world must stand on the ground of paradoxes. There simply is no other way.