The Absence of Reason

The story is told in a narrative. There are points in time, points in space, all surrounded by descriptions in words. Words with a variety of connotations, denotations, and shades of meaning. But, at the end of the day, the story is told to convey a message. A message is supposed to have an understandable point, so that the message itself does not come across as gibberish. How we understand the message is the key to our rationality, and it is our rationality which begs for things to "make sense." A verb follows a noun. An adjective describes a noun...

If we are hearing a story, we hear it in a cause and effect pattern so that somehow, sense can be made, and we can encapsulate the story in our own minds for further re-telling. It is only natural for our brains to want, therefore, to make sense of everything.

In the NT reading today, there was an absence of "sense." The observers of the crucifixion proposed a simple cause and effect relationship. If you are the Son of God, then show us, by coming down from the cross that we might believe in you. Asking for proof is a rational approach to skepticism. What if Jesus had come down? Since it was His destiny to die for our sins, that would only have put off the inevitable, so that response did not make sense to His destiny. But it is our mind's response to seek sense when we are taking part in an organized activity of story-telling. To demand "proof."

Faith, in this instance, is the belief in the irrational. It is irrational, by our perspective, for God to be humiliated in this way. It is irrational for Him to love us, in all our sin, this much, to take this pain on for us even when we are spitting at Him for it. The story makes no rational sense.

So we have an organized telling, utilizing rationality and structure, for a completely irrational meaning. In the setting of deconstruction versus legalism, this is the basic yin-yang of the bible.

On one hand, the legalists try to apply rationality to interpret the bible, as though certain word combinations have "power" over other word combinations, by being more "rational" somehow. However, at the end of the day, the "rational" word combinations ultimately describe the "irrational'" so what is the point of trying to "out-rationalize" another group of people?

On the other hand, the deconstructionists arrive at a nihilistic point of view by undermining any sense of "rationality" due to the varied nature of vocabulary from the standpoint of the teller versus the listener. Since there is no effective "rationality" in language, how can language impart any "rational" meaning, is their argument. However, as we have seen, it is the "irrational" which is occurring in the bible, especially in this NT reading. Why not use an irrational medium, if the content of the medium is in itself, irrational. How does the irrationality of language disprove the act?

Prove "love." It's an irrational thing. It will make a man sacrifice himself for his children. It will reduce the cleverest man to a fool. And it will bring the God of the universe to His knees. For us.