Blessed Perplexity
This weeks’ blog comes from David Zahl. You can find this post and others at mbird.com.
We do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.
(2 Cor 4:5-12)
My older brother tells the story of going shopping for antiques in rural South Carolina. He and his wife were looking for a new coffee table. They found one that they liked at a small shop in a town called Walterboro, but it was out of their price range. The owner asked them where they were from and they told her, “We’re from Charleston.”
She said she’d grown up in Charleston, on Sullivan’s Island. At the time my brother was working on Sullivan’s Island. The lady then told them that her father had served as an Episcopal priest at the little church there. Flabbergasted, my sister-in-law responded: “My husband is one of the ministers at that church!”
Everyone got the chills. Clearly God wanted them to have this coffee table! Their entire day had been part of a much bigger plan.
And so they splurged. They bought the table and drove back to Charleston, excited to finally get it into the home where it had been destined to serve. They sat it down in the middle of the room, and … it was not right at all. In fact, the piece looked terrible.
My brother’s takeaway was: “While God is certainly in our midst, what exactly he is doing at any particular moment is rarely a thing that can be easily perceived.” Ha.
Consider that story a lead-in to one of the apostle Paul’s more stunning passages in the New Testament, in which we read the line, “We are perplexed but not driven to despair.”
What does it mean to be “perplexed”? It means to be confused to a frustrating and sometimes painful extent.
We are often perplexed, for example, about what we should do. Life is full of decisions, most of which are not between What’s Good and What’s Bad, but between What’s Kind of Okay and What’s Possibly Alright. It is seldom clear what we should do in any given situation.
I see this in my experience as a parent. Where do we send our child to school? What sort of hobbies and friendships do we encourage? How much screentime is too much? To be alive is to be perplexed.
In the marriage service of the Book of Common Prayer, we pray that the husband and wife will be “a counselor in perplexity” to one another. There is an assumption that, no matter who they are, the couple will be confronted with disorienting circumstances at some point in their life together.
Discombobulation is guaranteed. This contradicts the unspoken expectation many of us harbor that the paths we follow will be clear-cut, and that perplexity will be the exception.
Usually when we use the word “perplexing,” we are talking about something bad that happened or is happening. We do not understand what is going on, and it hurts. The job we lobbied so hard for turned out to be a bust. The relationship we thought was the answer to our dreams didn’t pan out. Maybe we find ourselves still single, or single again, and are genuinely baffled. We look in the mirror and are perplexed by the person looking back at us.
On a grander scale, perhaps we thought God was working out good in the world but all we can see is destruction and heartache. If the God of the Bible is real — a God who we are told loves us — then why would such-and-such happen? It is impossible to be awake to the world and yourself and not get stuck in the ‘prison of why’ from time to time.
The Corinthians who Paul is addressing in today’s reading are perplexed. What they’re perplexed about is Paul himself. How can they trust his authority if so many bad things have befallen him? If God is truly with him, wouldn’t Paul’s life have gone more smoothly?
Paul’s response is telling. He does not deny his many trials and tribulations. Instead, in chapter 11, he lists them:
Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked. (2 Cor 11:24-27)
This litany is counterintuitive in the extreme. But let’s put aside Paul for a moment. How do you and I respond to perplexity?
HBO Sports once did a segment on Will Shortz, the man in charge of the New York Times crossword puzzles. He is a bit of a god among those who enjoy more playful forms of perplexity. During the interview the reporter asked Shortz why he thinks people like puzzles so much.
The fascination is feeling in control. So much of life we have no control over. We just muddle through our private problems and move on to the next thing. With a crossword, or other human-made puzzle, you have achieved perfection. That’s very satisfying.
Puzzles, in other words, have right answers and wrong answers, and that clarity is refreshing in a world of ‘muddling through.’
Shortz provides a window into our instincts. When confronted with perplexity, we seek to nail things down. For example, when presented with the endless mysteries of childrearing, we embrace an ironclad parenting (or political!) philosophy that we hope will serve us in 100% of cases.
You might say that the degree of certainty that we espouse in our culture today speaks to the depth of the perplexity we feel. The more afraid we are — the more out of control we perceive things to be — the louder we project our certainties. We think it will reduce the dissonance, but of course, it does not.
If we’re religious, we ask God to give us clarity. We ask him to grant us some sense of what he is doing, which will allow us to face life successfully. Hear me when I say that he will do no such thing. I mean, we may catch small glimpses of providence from time to time. But why would he turn you into a vessel that has no need for him?
Perhaps God is not interested in clarity so much as faith. Faith means trusting him to be all the things you need him to be, despite your own inadequacies, and in light of the fact that you don’t actually know what you need. As one friend put it, if you do not go to your grave confused, you don’t go to your grave trusting. Which is a fancy way of saying that God doesn’t want to give us clarity; he wants to be our clarity.
This is in line with where Paul goes in his letter. He views the perplexity of his life as a confirmation of the gospel rather than a denial of it. Christians, he suggests, are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.” Paul’s life is merely an acorn that has fallen to the earth and died, becoming the mammoth oak tree of the early church.
Maybe for you, the dreams you have for your child need to die so that you might love them for who they are, not for who you would have them be. Maybe that applies to an institution. Maybe the dreams you have for yourself need to die.
Whatever the case, this seems to be the pattern of how God works: by subtraction, not addition.
We know this to be true because, as perplexing as God’s work in the world often appears, he has given us one crystal-clear and utterly non-mysterious picture of his power and presence that we can lean upon. That is Christ himself. Or as Paul so beautifully puts it, we see “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” God is not a puzzle to be solved, but has made himself known.
This is the Jesus who constantly made choices that mystified his followers, that were at odds with what made sense. Jesus’s ministry did not proceed from strength to strength but from weakness to weakness — yet it also proceeded according to plan. The plan to bring life out of death and make suffering the servant of hope.
Practically speaking, this means that the right thing will happen, but not in the way we think it would or should. T.S. Eliot said it like this in his play The Family Reunion:
This is the way things happen.
Everything is true in a different sense,
A sense that would have seemed meaningless before.
Everything tends towards reconciliation
As the stone falls, as the tree falls. And in the end
That is the completion which at the beginning
Would have seemed the ruin.
To close, I’ll tell you a story. A man that I know and his family recently spent five months in the hospital with a daughter facing death from heart disease. Her courageous comportment, even up to accepting death in prayer if need be, affected many in the hospital.
She eventually recovered, praise God. When the family left the hospital for good, the father thanked the staff for all they had done. The head physician objected. She said, “No, I want to thank you. The presence of your family has transformed this hospital.”
Speaking to the father later, I mentioned that I would have been an absolute basket case. I asked him how he handled himself with such grace. What allowed him to be an agent of peace in that awful situation? He told me, “I suppose I have learned to stop asking why God allows problems and difficulties and to start asking what God’s plan is right in the middle of them.”
That, my friends, is faith. To find God — or be found by God — in the middle of disaster is to encounter the crucified God. The God whose purpose is greater and more glorious than we can imagine.
This means that the perplexities you are confronting today — how could this happen? — are meaningful insofar as they illuminate the perplexity of the Cross — how could that happen?
Perplexity does not drive us to despair because it points us to the one who was driven to despair, the Son of Man who was crushed, forsaken, destroyed for our sake. Yet this same Jesus, who we call Wonderful Counselor, rose again to bring us close — as if to make it clear that his good and holy plan, for you and for me and for the whole world, follows the path of blessed perplexity. Amen.