A Hermeneutics of Wonder

DAILY BYTE

“I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah will have a child.”

Sarah, now an old woman, hears this incredible statement and laughs to herself. Her laughter exposes her hopelessness, it reveals that she can’t help but interpret all of life now through a veil of misgiving.

“Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”

This riposte to her laughter overwhelms her laughter and rocks the wariness of her worldview. This question demands an answer – of Sarah, but also of us.

If we answer yes to this question, then the world is shut down, the universe is closed, and God is no longer God: benevolent, maybe; kindly and concerned, perhaps; but as powerless as we are in the face of evil. God becomes static, stuck on a throne somewhere but not really involved and present.

For you see, if we live with a hermeneutics of suspicion then what we are really doing is lacking in Incarnational Imagination! In Incarnational Envisioning. This type of envisioning is core to the Gospel – the belief that God became, no, that God becomes flesh and blood and moves into the neighbourhood of our lives (See John 1 in the Message translation).

Jesus is Immanuel – God WITH us. This world is as Dallas Willard describes – ‘God bathed and God permeated.’ We seem to have no problem in seeing demons behind every bush and evil at every turn and this always manages to make headlines and find the front pages of our newspapers, as well as our minds and hearts.

But instead of looking for demons behind bushes, perhaps we should spend more time gazing at the angels living in the trees.

As Richard Rohr says, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” If you want to spend your life looking for evil in everything you surely will find it, but there is just as much goodness and truth and beauty in this world. There are angels in every tree and perhaps it is time that we started opening our eyes to that as well.

For what if instead of living with a hermeneutics of suspicion, we started to read and interpret our experiences with a sense of wonder? If we answered the question posed to Sarah – ‘Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?’ – by saying an emphatic ‘No,’ then we and the world we live in are in God’s hands and the possibilities are endless. God is radically free to keep his promises despite the odds against them.

If living with a hermeneutics of suspicion, with narrowed eyes correspondingly narrows our worlds down, then it is equally true to say that living with a hermeneutics of wonder, with our eyes opened wide in Incarnational Envisioning, seeing angels in every tree and endless God-possibilities around every corner, then surely our worlds will be opened as wide as the heavens as well?

This is not denying the existence of evil, hurt or hardship. It is just not allowing them to control the way we view the world.

As Paul Ricouer says we need to live with a ‘second naiveté’ – a seasoned and weathered determination to view God’s world with childlike delight despite the difficulties that certainly do exist.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Gracious God, may you help us to live with this type of ‘second naiveté’ – to be able to Incarnationally Envision you in every possibility and in every challenge. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Genesis 18 : 14a NRSV

“Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”