Reminded of mystery

As I assume occasionally happens with other Christians whose minds are especially active, today I struggled with doubts about my faith. While the details of those doubts are not important for this post, it's fair to say that a majority of my doubts these days essentially distill down to a difficulty accepting the probability of the claims of the Gospel. In other words, how likely is it that the classic Christian claims about Jesus' life and nature(s) are in fact true? Sometimes God is not subtle about how He addresses my doubts.

I was driving home from work this afternoon and had digressed into a darkened spiritual state while entertaining a particular theological frustration. In the background, my Spotify was rolling through a playlist curated for me by Spotify, my most played songs of 2018. I listen to an extremely eclectic range of music, so it wasn't so much the hard right turn from an LCD Soundsystem tune into a sacred choral work that caught my attention, per se. Rather it was the fact of which choral tune it was: Morten Lauridsen's setting of O Magnum Mysterium. The title translates into English as "O Great Mystery". The full text of the song is thus:

O Great Mystery
And wonderful sacrament
That animals should see the newborn Lord
Lying in a manger!
Blessed is the virgin whose womb
Was worthy to bear
The Lord, Jesus Christ.
​Alleluia!

One of the things that so attracted me to the Orthodox Church was (and continues to be) its unique level of comfort in falling back on "mystery" when it comes to various theological categories. Holy Communion is a great example of this. While the nature and purpose of "the Lord's Supper" as carried on in Christian churches is one of the most divisive and hotly contested theological issues in the history of Christendom, the most traditional name given to the sacrament among the Orthodox is simply "the Holy Mysteries".

An underlying temptation of theologians seems to be to demystify the Faith. I remember a layperson at a theological conference I attended in 2001 asking a panel of theologians debating how to properly understand Divine Sovereignty, "Why do we have to unravel the mystery?" The man received laughter from the crowd and lip service from the theologians.

The further along I get in my Christian journey, the more evident it becomes that relentless rational inquiry--even of a theological nature--ultimately leads to off ramps from the faith. Not because the faith is indefensible, but because the level of certainty required by perpetual inquiry simply isn't on offer in Christianity. Embrace of the Gospel is fundamentally a leap of faith. It's even a suspension of reason, when one considers the enormity of Christ's sacrifice. I'm reminded of a quote from Christian apologist, Ravi Zacharias, whose lectures I was frequently exposed to in my youth:

When it comes to other people, I can remove certain impediments for them, but I can't make them cross the threshold of faith.

​The Gospel is a mystery. Our salvation is a mystery. Christ himself is a mystery (cf. Ephesians 3). We've been given Revelation of a sort, one that is "everything we need" (2 Peter 1:3). But "the secret things belong to the Lord" (Deuteronomy 29:29), and there is a blessing for they "who have believed without having seen" (John 20:29). Sometimes that mystery is like a black hole of terror and nothingness. Today it became a soaring, harmonious reminder of the depth and "otherness" of God, a God Who was in the beginning and whose ways are unsearchable, but Who nevertheless became flesh and dwelt among us; a God through whom all things were made and in Whom all things have their being, but who was nevertheless crucified as a common criminal in a Roman backwater under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried, and who rose again on the third day according to the scriptures.

O great mystery.