Mystery Unveiled

“Not to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed…” – Romans 16:25-26

I was out this morning in the fog that so often blankets this part of the world that time of day, out in a mountain forest. There was a moment when the fog lifted, and crystal-clear I could see the redwoods looming around me. “The redwoods,” wrote Steinbeck, “once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.”

The fog lifted to show me what had been there all along: what I had sensed but not been able to trace in detail, and it was something entirely beyond myself and my time. When Paul talks about mystery and revelation, it reminds me of N.T. Wright’s description of what the temple meant to a first-century Jew: “The Temple in Jerusalem was not just a big church building at one corner of the city; in Jewish cosmology it was the place where heaven and earth actually overlapped and interlocked… This is not about something ‘up in the sky’ – it is like a curtain being pulled back in the room where you sit.”

For some reason, we do tend to think of God as up in the sky somewhere, but Paul speaks to a first-century Jew who would have been looking for Him here on earth. The concept of God showing up like the unveiling of a secret right here in our space is a bit radical and unsettling. He is not unobtainable or ethereal; he is not an invention. He existed before my ability to see him, he is right here next to me and now within me, and he is as solid as the trees rising slow and strong around me, whose trunks I can touch, even if I can’t quite put the feeling they give me into words. “I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers,” writes Paul (Romans 11:25). Let us open our eyes to it, to this God who is “very near you… in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:14).