Dave Brisbin 1.25.26
Ever heard a line so impactful you thought, I wish I’d said that? Few days ago, I ran across a line attributed to the one-time road manager of the band ACDC…of all people. To be fair, he did become a pastor and a kind of pop theologian:
God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.
Oh yeah, I wish I’d said that. The invisible man is standing in front of you. You sense him, but can’t see a thing. Throw a blanket over empty space, and drape a shape. No detail, but at least a shape, a spatial relationship. I’ve been saying forever that every theology is wrong. How could it be anything else? How could finite language ever define the infinite? Much as we crave that sort of certainty, theology was only ever meant to give shape to a relationship. To limit error and create a paradigm that allows us to navigate—accept life on life’s terms while holding a sense of hope and gratitude.
He said all that…just much pithier.
We think we know God because we’ve read the book—words with edges that limit and restrict. But the word God is just a placeholder for infinite mystery, to which words can point but never describe. And if Jesus and the Father are one, then Jesus is mysterious too. We think we know Jesus because he had a shape and seems to be saying something we read as concrete and certain in a language that wouldn’t exist for a thousand years. Jesus is the word we give to a man who was named Yehoshua, shortened to Yeshua in Hebrew. But to his friends, in Aramaic, the language of the street, he was Eesho. Eesho. Just the sound of it shatters our familiarity.
To look at Jesus from an Aramaic perch, to exhale all we think we know and see the shape that emerges as we throw our blanket out over empty space, is to begin to meet Eesho for the first time. A man who speaks in words without edges, in poetry and stories that invite us to confront all we’ve managed to avoid.
If your Jesus is familiar, comfortable, he is not Eesho.
Eesho is always beckoning farther up and further in, never resolving mystery, but giving just enough shape that we can experience with him what words can never contain.
