The angel of God said, “What’s this? You ask for my name? You wouldn’t understand — it’s sheer wonder.” Judges 13:18 (MSG)
The Wonder of God – Sheer Wonder Series – Part 4
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For Mary and Joseph, and for Manoah and his wife, the promised child wasn’t the completion of a gift, it was the beginning. It didn’t close up their questions and experience but opened them up wider than ever.
If you know anything about Samson, you know he lived a crazy and full life – full of heartache, angst, triumph, tragedy, lust, victory… he experienced so much. An angel, who turned out to be God, promised his then childless parents that they would have a baby boy who would deliver their people from Philistine oppression. What hope would have filled them at the moment, what joy and excitement!! But had they known what waited for them, and their son, in the years after the promise was delivered, they may have been more sombre about receiving it. The same goes for Mary and Joseph and all they went through being the parents of Jesus. Two promised children, two men who would save their people, two sets of parents raising revolutionaries.
When the Angel of the Lord appeared again to Manoah and his wife after promising them Samson, Manoah asked him what his name was, and I love the response. He said, “You ask for my name? You wouldn’t understand—it’s sheer wonder.”
He didn’t explain himself in adjectives. He told the truth. He is too wonder-full to comprehend or understand. Not in an “everything is beautiful” way. ‘Wonderful' in a real and inclusive way. The Sheer Wonder that is God doesn’t shrink back from tragedy. It doesn’t hide in heartache. It doesn’t shrug off tough questions or criticisms. It listens as we shake our fists to the heavens asking, “why?” It sees both the sun and the moon, light and dark. It dances with us when we’re rejoicing. It cries with us when we’re weeping. It doesn’t prefer one kind of person to another. It doesn’t need life to be clean and understandable.
The wonder of God is that he can touch the entirety of our lives, and all the lives that the world contains, and all that pertains to them – each and everyone – with his love.
The wonder of God is not that he created Samson to be a superhuman man with strength like no other. The wonder of God is that he was with Samson through it all.
So when we say, “holy is his name” or “his name is higher” or “he is wonder and majesty”, don’t let the words be a label, a descriptive box, a line that we say because it is the thing to say.
Let those words, his name (that is, as Manoah’s wife said, both terrifying and glorious) be an invitation to unite our lives – the good, bad, ugly and beautiful – to the divine mystery of his grace and love. And spend a lifetime trying to comprehend all that that means and is.
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Written by Liz Milani
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