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Like Following the Wind

Jesus is as inscrutable as any enlightened sage. Indeed, he is as inscrutable as God himself. As he says in John’s gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (3:8). The Buddha says something remarkably similar in the Dhammapada: “Like the flight of birds in the sky, the path of the selfless is hard to follow” (7:92). And the Hebrew prophet Isaiah says plainly, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (55:8-9).

 Any attempt to explain the whole of Jesus, as unavoidable as such explanations may seem to the religiously minded (among whom I count myself), is doomed from the start. You might as well try to explain a squirrel, or a beech tree, or a raindrop. And yet the difference between Jesus and a raindrop is, of course, that he tried to teach us something. What was it? On one hand, it seems obvious: he taught us what love is. On the other hand, when we try to square that fact with his actual words and deeds, we see immediately the chasm between our understanding of love and his. For this reason, I think that shock and befuddlement are often truer responses to Jesus than blithe assurance or even comfort.

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