We are constantly beset by the unknown and the unknowable: Questions with no answers. “Man’s goings are of the Lord; how can a man then understand his own way?” the proverb asks.1 “For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him?” the apostle Paul echoes.2 “But we have the mind of Christ.” What a strange way to end the verse: “But we have the mind of Christ.” When reading, I’ve always passed over that part, assuming it must have some mysterious, spiritual meaning which I have never been able to grasp. I now think it a great deal more straightforward.
We do not comprehend God. We do not comprehend the Devil. We do not comprehend this world. We do not even comprehend ourselves. But there is something we may comprehend: Jesus Christ. That is why we study the Scriptures, not because they answer every question, but because they answer the ones that matter most—the ones which cannot go unanswered. In the written Word, we possess the Word made flesh. In it, we have the mind of Christ, and in that mind, all the highest things which may dwell in a human being.
The Scriptures make manifest that the mind of Christ does not mean complete knowledge. Christ says, “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.”3 And yet, Christ is also said in the Scriptures to be one with the Father.4 We might ask, How can this be? The answer is that complete knowledge is not necessary for oneness with God.
The apostle John says God knows all things,5 but—as grand as this quality might seem—it is not essential to God. It is not the fulness of God. What the apostle Paul prays for Christians is this:
That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.6
This is what we must know, even if we cannot know it completely: The love of Christ. Herein lies all the fulness, all the completeness, of God available to us. In the example of Christ’s love, in the truth that it atoned for our sins through his passion and resurrection, and in the hope of a world which it will one day make new, we have all that is necessary.
John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all [y]e know on earth, and all ye need to know.”7 There is something true in that—for Jesus is beautiful. He wasn’t in a physical sense; Isaiah makes that clear: “[H]e hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.”8 In fact, his life was spent upending humanity’s definitions of beauty and worth: He saw beauty in poverty, in hunger, in weeping, in rejection. He saw hope for those on whom the world had given up. Perhaps more than even his teachings, his mere presence in the world gave beauty to the lives of those around him. Oscar Wilde summarized this in a letter he wrote from prison: “Christ […] is […] a work of art. [… B]y being brought into his presence one becomes something. And everybody is predestined to his presence. Once at least in his life each man walks with Christ to Emmaus.”9 Christ embodies the only inescapable Beauty—one that transcends form and time and space—a pure, perfect, and eternal Love. As Jesus teaches Martha, to encounter that Beauty is the only real business of life, the only thing necessary to a life worth living.10
Photo by Svitlana Rusak on Unsplash
- Book of Proverbs: Ch. 20, v. 24 ↩︎
- First Epistle to the Corinthians: Ch. 2, v. 16 ↩︎
- The Gospel according to Mark: Ch. 13, v. 32 ↩︎
- The Gospel according to John: Ch. 10, v. 30; First Epistle of John: Ch. 5, v. 7 ↩︎
- The First Epistle of John: Ch. 3, v. 20 ↩︎
- Epistle to the Ephesians: Ch. 3, v. 19 ↩︎
- “Ode on a Grecian Urn” ↩︎
- Book of Isaiah: Ch. 53, v. 2 ↩︎
- “De Profundis” ↩︎
- The Gospel according to Luke: Ch. 10, v. 41-42 ↩︎
Comparing Notes 