Sunset. Gusts sweep the horizon and gales swirl dust. Leaves rustle; darkness creeps and captures the land. Night has fallen.
A man is walking to a secret meeting. The man holds a Ph.D. in religion. He is known as the “Doctor.” The Doctor has spent his life analyzing the enigmas of life: the mind, the supernatural, God. He is full of answers. His ideas on religion, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, are all well-reasoned. He is a guru of the spiritual, a shaman. He is on the circuit, a frequent speaker and best-selling author. He has channeled his learning into a good living. He is, you might say, comfortable. Comfortable with his ideas, comfortable with his knowledge, comfortable with daily routines, comfortable with his life.
The man he is about to meet, though, is not comfortable. He is, in fact, homeless. He depends on others for his means. And he is not always comfortable to be around. But he has attracted a following. He has become something of a fad in the religious community, a Rasputin of sorts. And the Doctor too is impressed with him. In fact, the Doctor is ready to give his seal of approval to this humble one. The Doctor is willing to offer the homeless man some help, to give him his chance.
The Doctor reaches the meeting place. A flurry of wind blows in his face, tossing his hair. He shakes hands with the homeless man. The Doctor speaks first.
“Hello! I’m glad we could meet. I’ve heard some remarkable things about you!”
It was as if the homeless man did not even hear the Doctor. “If you are not born from above,” said the homeless man, “you have no vision at all of who God is or what spirituality means.”[1]
What a quirky thing to say, thought the Doctor. Born from above? What does that mean? “Do you mean going back to your mom’s womb?” the Doctor chuckled.
“Listen: Unless you are born of water and Wind, you cannot come into the Presence of the Almighty. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Wind gives birth to life!”
Suddenly, the Doctor was reminded of a passage from the prophet Ezekiel: “I will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean. I will give you a new heart. I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my laws….I will put my Ruach, my Wind, in you , and you will live!”[2]
The homeless man continued: “The wind blows wherever it pleases, but you cannot capture it. You may hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Wind!”
The Doctor’s mind raced. The wind blew on his face and whispered in his ear: “Step forward to the edge of the Almighty and gasp at the greatness of His dimensions. Do you think you can comprehend and capture the Almighty? Can He be confined to your knowledge, your books, your habits, your understanding, your three pound brain? Have you stood speechless at your ignorance in understanding spiritual things? Have you understood that you don’t call on God, He calls on you? Listen, the wind blows where it will, and you don’t know where it is coming from or where it is going. So it is with everyone reborn by the touch of the Almighty. The things you call spiritual are the dust at the bottom of the Ocean of the Almighty. Gasp, and kneel.”
Another old passage flickered in the Doctor’s mind, that eerie passage where Abraham had fallen into a deep sleep and a thick and dreadful darkness had come over him.[3] The Mystery of the Almighty shrouded Abraham, and he saw a smoking firepot with a blazing torch cut through the halves of a roasted lamb, and the Mystery of the Almighty sealed a covenant with him. On that night, God promised that Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as the grains of sand on the seashores of the earth. The only problem was that Abraham had no kids, and his wife was as barren as the Sahara desert. But it wasn’t Abraham or Sarah that gave birth to the promise. It was the Breath, the Wind, of God. “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Wind gives birth to Life!”
A dreadful darkness came over the Doctor, and he sensed that Great Disturbance that comes to every generation of people since time begun: Revelation! God is a Mystery, and He can only be known as He chooses to reveal Himself. “The Wind blows where it wills.” This is not religion, it is revelation! In religion, “we venture to grasp at God. Because it is a grasping, religion is a contradiction of revelation, the concentrated expression of human unbelief.”[4] In religion, we “talk” instead of listen to God. Religion is “speaking of man in a loud voice;”[5] Revelation is the alarming nearness of the Presence of God.
The Mystery of the Almighty is matched by the mystery of man. Who can understand the human heart? Why do we do the things we do? Why the death camps of Auschwitz? Why the hollowness of heart in the wealthy West? What will be the outcome of man’s history? Who can open the scroll of human history and determine our destiny?
In the midst of these mysteries, the homeless man continued: “Just as Moses lifted up that snake in the wilderness and all who looked on it were healed, so must I, the Son of Man, be lifted up, so that everyone who focuses on me will be healed of the diseases of their souls and live forever.”
The Doctor was again shocked. For the Revelation had come, and God had chosen to reveal Himself as a Homeless Man. The Doctor sensed that the Revelation somehow included this Homeless Man, this Son of Man, suffering for all to see, perhaps being nailed to a Roman cross. Although the depth of that Revelation could not now be understood by him, the Doctor sensed that in the poverty of the Homeless Man, the Almighty would expose the pretenses of the proud, capture the hearts of the empty, heal the hurts of the hurting, forgive the failures of the fallen, kiss the cheeks of the humbled, and rescue mankind. Somehow, in the destiny of this Homeless Man, the Mystery of the Almighty would unlock the mystery of mankind and determine, finally, the destiny of human history. This is revelation, not the human movement to God but the divine journey of God into His creation. The transcendent has become immanent, Emmanuel, the “With us” God.
God shows Himself to be the great and true God in the fact that He can and will let His grace bear this cost, that He is capable and willing and ready for this condescension, this act of extravagance, this far journey. What marks out God above all false gods is that they are not capable and ready for this. The [false] gods are a reflection of the human pride which will not bend, which will not stoop to that which is beneath it. God is not proud. In His high majesty He is humble. It is in this high humility that He speaks and acts as the God who reconciles the world to Himself.[6]
Before the night was over, the Doctor reflected on yet another passage, this time from the great prophet Isaiah: “My ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts, says the LORD.”[7]
[1] These words from the Homeless Man are paraphrased from John 3.
[2] Ezekiel 36:25ff
[3] Genesis 15:12ff.
[4] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. 1, Part 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 299-303, 307-308.
[5] Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology (New York: 1957), 196
[6] Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV, Part 1, 159.
[7] Isaiah 55: 8-9