Surely, you have heard the expression “God’s ways are not our
ways!” It means that God thinks differently from the way we human beings think
and God does things differently from the way human beings do them. We see
the most dramatic example of just how differently God thinks in today’s feast
of Christ the King. Christ our King is presented to us, stripped and
naked on a cross, dying in agony between two common criminals, spit running
down his face, a sarcastic note nailed above his head, a “crown” of thorns
mockingly hammered into the blood-matted hair of his head for all passers-by to
laugh at! Now that’s not exactly how we picture royalty! We are used to
seeing kings powerful, pampered and pompous! Our King is different, very
different! “He bore our infirmities. He endured our sufferings. He
was pierced for our offenses. He was crushed for our sins.”
Showing up as this kind of “king” is so typical of God. He
has always done this kind of shocking thing! Centuries ago, when God
began to prepare a people from whom he would send a savior, he chose Abraham
and Sara, two childless senior citizens ready for the grave! After
choosing this people as "his" people, they end up enslaved in a
foreign country. Even when they are led out of slavery, God picks a man
with a speech impediment to lead them. Even his messengers, the prophets, were,
more often than not, hesitant, even whiny, sometimes. One had a dirty mouth.
One tried to beg off as being too young and inexperienced. Another tried to run
and had to be swallowed and spit out on the beach and told to go Nineveh. Their
most famous and beloved king, David, was a murderous bigamist! Even when
the birth of the Savior of the world came, he was born not from among the rich
and educated, not at a state-of-the-arts birthing center with the best of
doctors, but in a barn, to an unknown teen-ager, pregnant before marriage, away
from home, after riding for miles on donkey back! God just keeps going and
going! Even before Jesus’ birth, Mary predicted that God’s ways would not
be our ways. “The rich will be pulled from their thrones and the poor will be
lifted up from their manure heaps.”
Again, in his ministry, we see that God’s ways are not our ways.
Jesus was a layman, not a clergyman. He was kicked out of the synagogue,
rejected and hounded by the religious establishment. His closest companions
were a personnel department’s nightmare: a hated tax collector, a liar, two
mama’s babies, an agnostic, a former terrorist, and a petty thief, to name a
few! His closest friends were a motley collection of marginal types:
prostitutes, lepers, the un-churched, women and children, the dirt poor, the
least, the lost and the losers. The gossip about him was that he “welcomed
sinners and ate with them,” helping him earn the nick names of “glutton and
drunkard.” That’s certainly not what most people expect of God! Even his
final “big entry” into Jerusalem was not in a gleaming chariot with white
horses or on a golden throne carried by slaves. No, he deliberately makes his
big entry riding on the back of a jackass!
No wonder most people missed this king. They were looking in the
wrong direction. They thought they knew how God would act. They thought he
would act as they would act. As one preacher put it years ago, “In the
beginning, God created us in his own image and likeness and
ever since we have been trying to create God in our own image
and likeness!” Instead of thinking as God thinks, we try to make God think the
way we think. No wonder we experience God as absent, more than present, in our
lives! We keep trying to make God reasonable, we keep looking for God among the
rich, the beautiful, the self-righteous and the powerful! No wonder
Christianity is dead in countries where power, prestige and money are prized,
but alive and well and growing in countries where the poor, the powerless and
the suffering live. The latter understand how God thinks! The former is
still trying to get God to think as they think! The rich and powerful and
beautiful and so-called smart people think they can do without God. The poor
and powerless know that they need God!
One the most common ways we do not think as God thinks is when we
think that God is absent when things go wrong and present only when things go
right. Looking back over my own life, I can say with confidence that it
was during those times that God seemed most absent is when God was actually
most active! I could not see it at the time, but it is crystal clear from
hindsight! (1) As I look back over my life, especially over a very painful
childhood lived out in an atmosphere of regular psychological abuse, I am
amazed at my own survival. It was painful and I would not want to go through it
again, but I have come to realize that God was certainly using it to prepare me
for helping hundreds of others as a priest, especially the marginalized, the
rejected and left-out. I can say with certainty that that experience, and
the triumph over it, has helped my effectiveness as a priest in helping them
more than any other thing! (2) When I was sent to the home missions right after
ordination, I certainly felt at the time that God seemed to have abandoned me.
In reality, looking back, God was extremely active at that time in my life. God
was preparing me for my life’s work as a preacher, as a "revitalizer"
of parishes and as a person sensitive to religious prejudice. Looking back, I
have realized over and over again, that that period of my life was preparing me
for what I have been doing ever since!
On this Feast of Christ the King, a feast in honor of the king
that is the reverse of how we think of kings, we are challenged to think
differently about God. Its message is simple: God’s ways are not our ways, it
is precisely when we feel God most absent, is when God is most present! So, I
say to all of you who have things going on in your life that you don’t like,
things that make you feel that God is absent, just wait! Trust God! I believe
that you will someday realize that, even in times of loss and tragedy, God is
very active. Scriptures tell the story in a million ways: God’s ways are
not our ways! Contrary to popular opinion, breakdown is a sure sign of a
breakthrough, there is a crown on the other side of every cross, resurrection
on the other side of death! That heart attack may just wake you up
to what’s really important! That relationship breakup may be the best thing
that ever happened to you! That firing may just take you to the best job you
ever had! That unexpected death may bring you closer to others! Ugly
ducklings today may just turn out to be swans tomorrow! Getting what you want
may turn out to be your worst nightmare! That child that disappointed you most
may just turn out to be the child that makes you most proud! That feeling of
God being absent, may be the beginning of feeling closer to God than ever!
Never ever underestimate the value of a so-called tragedy! God’s ways are
not our ways!
