Because I'm not good at articulating my puzzlement and confusion, I turn to Karl Rahner who always has something profound to say. In "Encounters with Silence" he writes:
When I try to take You [God] into account in the calculations of my life, I can only put You down as an 'unknown'--the riddle of Your Infinity, which Itself contains everything, throws all my calculations off, and so the end result is still an insoluble puzzle...With this one word You tell me everything: Infinity. But it is precisely this word that renders futile all attempts at neatly planning out my life. You are thus the eternal threat in my life, frightening me out of all sense of security.
Somehow, that just sums it up for me with Sunday's readings--God is a riddle, a puzzle, a threat to my sense of security.
Imagine for a moment that you are in that crowd of early Hebrew people wandering in the desert. You left a life of slavery to follow an unseen, untouchable, mystery of a God--a God that is a puzzle in many ways. And while you're out there in the desert, you've been faced with challenges--you have had to pray for food and water, your leader has gone up and down a mountain only to return with a lot of new rules and regulations, and now he's up there again. The people in your group have started to loose hope and faith in your leader Moses, and in God for that matter, and they want and need the security of a neatly packaged god...one that isn't a riddle or puzzle, but a tangible manifestation to worship. And so out of fear and confusion, the second in command, Aaron, creates for you a golden calf. When God sees what's going on, God tells Moses to leave and return to the people, and God plans to destroy the people for their faithlessness.
Now when we read this story up to this point, the question always comes up "didn't the people know better?" Probably. But they were scared, confused, and uncertain. How often do we react out of fear? Our natural instincts tell us to prepare for the worst, every man/woman/child for themselves, fear what you do not understand. We live in a culture of fear. And sometimes, we do dumb things out of fear.
Luckily, that's not the end of the story for us or for the Hebrews. According to Exodus, Moses continues the conversation with God and prays that God will spare the people instead of destroying them. And God does. It's one of those pivitol moments when God's grace and forgiveness seems to go "above and beyond" what is called for. God acknowledges our relationship, that we were created in God's image, and that we will fall short from time to time. And for an early people first starting to understand their relationship to this puzzling, unknown God, this is salvation. Unlike the multi-god systems of religion at the time, this God doesn't just "willy-nilly" destroy creation, or pout up in the clouds; this God--THE God--forgives and redeems.
But over time, this God has been misunderstood, and once again become a puzzle.
The Matthew reading for Sunday makes my head hurt. As I've been working my way through it, I kept wondering, do we really understand God as the king in this story? If so, is that the kind of God that I want to be in relationship with? In doing a little scholarship on the text, I was able to discover that Matthew was writing to an audience that had been abused. The king (God) had invited everyone to the wedding banquet (relationship), but they had refused, mocked, harmed and even killed some of the servants (prophets). Again, in the king's (God's) goodness, the invitation is extended again, and the hall is filled with guests--the good and the bad. Yes, this is a great image of the Kingdom of God! All are welcome, even when they refuse the invitation, even when they act badly, even if they aren't "good". But the lesson doesn't end there. Matthew goes on to say that someone arrived without a robe, and this man is then ordered by the king to be bound and thrown out into the darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Is this the God we know?
For Matthew's community, the answer is yes. This is the God who has watched the chosen be overtaken in Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70AD. This is the God who has tried repeatedly to have the kingdom opened to all. And this is the God, who when mocked and abused, gets revenge.
But I'm not so sure this is the God we know. I think that we have come to understand God in our current context as a loving, forgiving, grace-filled God. So while Jesus' (via Matthew) may have had harsh words of excluding some folks from the Kingdom of Heaven, I think we have to remember that God does invite us into a relationship that is going to sometimes fall apart on our end, but that is always invitational from God's end. To me, that's why God is a riddle, a puzzle, and totally confusing. Because everytime I expect that the invitation will be recinded, God instead sends it out again. God is far more generous than we could ever imagine. It's not that we choose to accept God's invitation to the banquet of the Kingdom, it's that we have been chosen. And for all our shortcomings, fears, and bad decisions, God still chooses to be in relationship with us.
Bill Countryman, one of my favorite seminary professors and theologians wrote "Good News of Jesus: Reintroducing the Gospel", and he said, "God's love takes us up precisely when we are least deserving of it, when we are least lovable". Yep, that's most of us at any given time. Whether we're building up golden calfs for ourselves to provide false comfort, or laughing at the invitation, God is there. There's nothing neat or tidy about it, and it is truly the most puzzling riddle of all.