Myths We Miss

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. – 2 Timothy 4:3-4

We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die. – W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (thanks to Tailfeathers)

Since I like myths and know that “myth” can be positive as well as negative, I went to some word studies and verified that Paul is referring to something that is false or fictitious.  I suspect there were lots of myths with regard to the life and work of Jesus and the meaning and significance of the Incarnation and the Cross back in those days, just as there are today.  What Paul is saying is that people are less interested in hearing the truth than in hearing something that excites and gratifies, that scratches their itch, soothes and placates. 

I think we all know the truth when we hear it; the difference is in how that truth reacts with what is in us.  Some of us brace ourselves against truth as we would brace ourselves against a door to keep out an unwanted intruder.  Truth can be intrusive and disruptive.  It is not immediately comforting.  It is more like life-saving surgery than a palliative – pain rather than a pain-killer.  A person who does not like being made uneasy by truth can always find something to help them block it out.  Their arguments are usually slightly out of place and incongruous -- like a chair jammed up under the doorknob. 

Jesus said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”  Why wouldn’t we let Jesus in?  Young’s Literal Translation of Revelation 3:19-20 goes like this:  As many as I love, I do convict and chasten; be zealous, then, and reform; lo, I have stood at the door, and I knock ….  Those who bar the door have no excuse, but maybe an explanation.  The love of Christ comes to us not without conviction – the sense that we are not what we should be, not quite right.  He brings discipline to those He loves.  It starts as a change in our behavior, a better way of living, and, if it ended there, I think, strangely enough, more people could probably accept it.

Making the connection to the Divine is where we run into trouble.  I am as guilty as anyone of speaking of the nearness of God without often acknowledging the paradox.  He condescends to come near, yet He is, in His being, far away and beyond.  The light touches us always and everywhere, and everybody wants a day in the sun.  A day on the sun, not so much.  It is impossible for the creatures we are to exist, let alone operate in His sphere.  The truth He offers us must first bind us in a chrysalis that looks a lot like death so that the higher order creature may emerge.   We are finite.  He is infinite, and there is an “infinite qualitative difference”, as Kierkegaard said, between us, like the great gulf that lay between the rich man in hell and paradise.  We need revelation not speculation.  Rational thinking and reason will help us understand and apply the revelation, but some things are going to be axiomatic.  Without accepting what is given, we are just crawling in circles, going nowhere.  

Some of us are simply unwilling to let go of the old familiar ground to be metamorphosed.  So the caterpillars stick with their caterpillar myths about how wonderful it is to crawl upon the grass from shrub to shrub and tree to tree.  They speak of the higher life lived upon the branches.  There are many caterpillar religions and books of butterfly jokes which the crawling creatures shout to one another as the bright-winged soar and float and head off to worlds unknown and unknowable.  What leaf-chewing caterpillar, comfortable and canny, would ever fall for such a wild and unsettling life, even if those preposterous butterfly legends were true?