Surprised By ParadoxSample

The Surprise of God and His Kingdom

In 2017, the popular book Where’s Waldo? turned thirty years old. The book, first published in the UK, has since been published in many other countries around the world: Waldo is Charlie in France, Jura in Croatia, Willy in Norway, and Holger in Denmark. In every country, the objective remains the same: find the bespectacled character in red and white stripes hidden in a field of objects.

In the Bible, God paradoxically self-reveals and hides. In the Old Testament we have many sightings of God, or theophanies. God visits Abraham before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; he visits Jacob in the wilderness of Bethel and the ford of the Jabbok. Moses meets God in a bush that burns, sees God’s back from the cleft of a rock. The cowardly Gideon meets the LORD and is strengthened for battle because of the visitation. 

The God of the Bible is a God who, because of his relentless love, relentlessly speaks to his people: in visions, in dreams, and face-to-face encounters, as with his servant Moses whose face shone with divine afterglow. 

But God doesn’t always self-reveal, and the kingdom of God isn’t simply plain truth. Think of the befuddlement of the two disciples who encountered the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus as recorded in Luke 24. It was Easter morning, and the news of an empty tomb had not yet reached the travelers. Jesus found them looking sad, and as he fell in step beside them he played dumb when they talked of the weekend’s headlines. “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” They recounted the brutal events of Friday, when Jesus had been scandalously hung up on a cross, and confessed gloomily, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

“O foolish ones,” Jesus chided, “and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” The kingdom, as Jesus would teach them, was never meant to bluster in like a bull. It had always been predicted to be carried in on a donkey—carried all the way to a cross. As paradox always teaches us, God’s ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:9).

Adapted from Surprised by Paradox by Jen Pollock Michel.