Divine Anomaly

No April Fool's blog today.  I have been thinking about the anomaly of God's Kingdom arriving in Jerusalem on the back of a mule on Palm Sunday. As strange as the sight must have been to the gathered multitude, they cheered Jesus nevertheless because they had been hearing big things about Him out in the country and now here He was in the center Jerusalem itself.  They were looking forward to seeing how the apparent Messiah would deliver them from the hated Romans and set the Jewish nation in its rightful position astride history, so they were willing to wait - a little. Unfortunately, as the week starting on Palm Sunday wore on, He did not usher in the Millenium in any way that they understood and the hosannas quickly turned to boos and then much more culminating in the Cross.

Why does God mask His power? Imagine the good that He could do. Why does He do things in ways that are so different than what we expect. Why does the Kingdom of God arrive on a mule? I suspect that the answer lies in the fact that He is serious about giving us free will.

Imagine you are an Afghan villager when an American armored division rolls into your village. Huge M1 tanks thunder by in an endless parade. Then the Bradley fighting vehicles whine by with their turrets and deadly chain guns swinging slowly side-to-side looking for targets of opportunity. Inside are heavily-armed soldiers and overhead are swarms of deadly Apache helicopters loaded with killer missiles and heavy machine guns. High overhead criss-crossing contrails mark the flight of sleek fighter aircraft on call to immediately obliterate anyone on the ground foolish enough to challenge the might of the American force.  Even if you consider Americans as infidels, you are not going to go up against all this assembled might. No, you understand power and will feign your appreciation and bow when necessary so longs as the infidels are present in such force. But when they leave...

Now consider the level of power that God could demonstrate if He really took off the wraps. What would it look like if He who called the universe into being with the blink of an eye demonstrated His presence in any semblance of His full majesty? The foundations of the earth would indeed shake, puny speck that it is in the galaxy, much less the entire universe. Man, who fancies himself as the measure of all things, would crawl into a hole and quake in the knowledge of real fear. But whatever a man's outward reaction, I doubt that for a large number of people their hearts would be any different than that of the Afghan villager in the face of the shock and awe of an American division. And that's not what God is about.

In Christ, grace has triumphed over justice. God is interested in people who truly turn to Him with an intentional and loving heart after seeking His presence, not people who are stunned into blind submission for the moment because they are overwhelmed by His power. Some day, justice will indeed be served and the wraps will be removed from His true power. But until then, He is content to wait and foreshadow His presence for those who are looking for Him. We will only see the occasional flashes of startlingly bright light behind the humdrum of our everyday existence. We will have to be content recognizing His fingerprints on things that don't quite fit the normal pattern and to experience His grace in the kindness of others. It is difficult to conceive of someone so powerful yet so patient - such a love is quite impossible in a human framework. But it arrived in the form of a man from Nazareth on a donkey in the way that we least expected Him.