My Dear Good Samaritans,

One of the facets about God I find the most fascinating is that God is full of paradoxes. God transcends all things and yet, in a manger in Bethlehem, becomes a tiny baby. God is simultaneously all genders, but at the same time no gender. God is all-powerful but self-limits that power, “humbling” Godself. And, then there’s the central paradox of the Holy Trinity—God is three and God is one. All of these radiate a truth that theologians have realized for a very long time: the more we know about God, the less we have to say. Or, in the immortal words of St. Augustine, “If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God.”

This Sunday we are continuing our exploration of the many different names of God with a beautiful hymn You, Lord, Are Both Lamb and Shepherd. It is also known by another title Christus Paradox, the Paradox of Christ.

It was written by Sylvia Dunstan, a United Church of Canada minister. And this song does something genuinely unusual. Rather than offering us a single, stable image of God to hold onto, it gives us pairs of opposites—and then insists that both are true at once. Lamb and Shepherd. Prince and slave. Peacemaker and swordbringer. Gift and cost. Defeat and victory. Death and life.

For our brains that crave order, these pairings can be unsettling to say the least. We like our categories clean. And one of the things our brains do most reliably with language about God is to reach for the familiar and let it harden into the only option. But Dunstan won’t let us do that. Each verse hands us something we thought we understood—and then immediately places its opposite right beside it.

I hope you have come to realize that God exceeds every category we try to impose—that the moment we think we have a firm grasp on who God is, we are probably holding something too small. As soon as we understand, we realize that it’s not actually right for God, to use Augustine’s idea. Dunstan embodies this by doing something almost playful: she doesn’t just give us one image and move on, she hands us two opposing images and says hold both. God is not simply powerful; God is also the one stripped of might upon the cross. God is not simply transcendent, enthroned in cosmic glory; God is also the one who walks each day beside us. God is not found in the either/or. No, God is present most fully in the both/and.

The contradictions aren’t a problem to be solved—they are the very point. God meets us in the paradoxes and the tension of our world.

Peace,