There’s a famous couplet that goes “How odd of God / To choose the Jews.” You hear this quote attributed to different people, including twentieth-century Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc, but it appears to have come from British journalist William Norman Ewer (1885-1976).
In our current, ultra-sensitive political environment, some folks have taken the couplet as anti-Semitic. A funny Jewish rejoinder I have heard is, “Not odd of God. / Goyim annoy ‘im.”
I’ve never thought the original is anti-Semitic. It seems to me simply a cute, rhyming formulation of what the Old Testament itself says about God’s election of the Jews. In Deuteronomy, God is explicit about the fact that he did not make the Jews his chosen people because of special qualities but because of his love and his promises to the Patriarchs:
“It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love upon you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples; but it is because the LORD loves you, and is keeping the oath which he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt” (Deut. 7:7-8).
There is a lot of oddness connected with God. Sometimes this perplexes people. At various points in their lives, people may become suddenly aware of how something about God or what he has done is profoundly odd, more so than they previously realized.
This especially happens during the course of conversions. If someone is becoming a Catholic after living with a different set of beliefs, the oddness of certain things in the apostolic deposit leaps out at him. Because humans are uncomfortable with odd claims, these at first are a stumbling block to faith.
It is the job of apologetics to clear them away. This is done either by pointing out (1) that they are not actually as odd as it first seemed, (2) that there is direct evidence for them, or (3) that there is indirect evidence for them (i.e., they’re part of the package with Catholicism, and there is good evidence that Catholicism is true).
Even once apologetics has done its job, the person may still feel discomfort. When the human mind encounters an unexpectedly odd idea-even after the mind has accepted the truth of the concept-it needs to live with the idea for a while before it gets comfortable. People need to have an item as part of their mental furniture for a time before they become confident.
Those who have accepted the Catholic faith-especially those who have grown up in it-should bear this in mind when dealing with converts. To better appreciate how unexpected or unforeseeable some of the things God chooses to do can be, it may be helpful to review a few of them:
First, God makes stuff out of nothing. This is really amazing. If he wanted, he could have just stayed alone, an eternal communion of infinite Persons, needing nothing besides himself for his infinite beatitude. Yet he chose to make stuff-things that by definition have to be tiny and trivial compared to his incomparable Reality. And since there wasn’t anything around yet to make them out of, he just said, “Let there be . . . ” and there was.
The oddness doesn’t stop there. When God chose to make our universe, he decided to have the vast, overwhelming majority of it be nothing but empty space. All matter and energy is spread so thin in the universe that it is next to nothing compared to the overall volume of the cosmos.
And God keeps making empty space. If current astronomical theories are correct, not only is the universe expanding, but its rate of expansion is accelerating, with volumes and volumes of new empty space being created at growth rate that far outstrips the speed of light (which means that the visible part of the universe is a bright tiny speck in a vast darkness). Even the solid things that God made are themselves mostly empty space, the distances between atoms and their constituent elements being comparable in scale to the distances between stars and planets.
Most of the objects in the universe not only are not alive, there is no possibility they will ever have life or come in contact with living things. Even if there turn out to be inhabited planets out there, the great majority of the universe is and always will be lifeless.
In the one spot where we know that God made life-Earth-he made the vast majority of living creatures (all except our own species) unintelligent, nonrational beings. And if current ideas about the history of the earth are correct, he made humans very late in the game, with billions of prior years of earth history before he put us on the scene, despite the fact that all terrestrial creation was building up to our arrival.
Then, after man’s fall into sin, God starts his program of redemption, which is itself a marvel. But he doesn’t start it by writing REPENT AND BELIEVE THE GOSPEL in glowing letters across the sky for everyone to see. Instead, he starts his plan small, with one guy-Abraham-from whom eventually he draws a single nation to be the chosen people representing him.
Then, when the time is right, he takes the amazing step of actually becoming a man! But he doesn’t just create a human nature for himself out of nothing. Instead, he decides to enter humanity through the process of growing in the womb, being born, and growing to adulthood. Only it isn’t the usual process, because he dispenses with having a human father and provides for a miraculous birth as well. Once he has grown to adulthood in human form, he starts his ministry but hides from the general public the fact that he is the promised Messiah and God in the flesh.
And this is not all. He reveals that though he is God, he is one of three Persons in the Godhead, so that God is a Trinity-something we would have had no way of deducing for ourselves by reason alone. It is something that only God could reveal to us about himself.
He also tells us that he is “gentle and humble in heart” (Matt. 11:29, NIV). Who would have imagined that the Lord God, infinite Ruler and Creator of the Universe, is humble? In fact, he’s so humble that he has chosen to die as a man-and not die peacefully in old age but allow himself to be executed, while still a young man, as a criminal against the state. God himself, mind you!
In doing this, he tells us, he is making satisfaction for the sins of the world, offering his own life to his Father as a human sacrifice (the sacrifice of a Person with a human nature)-something that has otherwise been completely forbidden. He also has decided that, after having been so sacrificed, he is going to return to human form by bringing himself back to life-and in a transfigured way such that his body will be supernaturalized and able to do many things it previously couldn’t.
However, he isn’t going to stay on earth and reign in the flesh over mankind-yet. Instead, he’s going to take his glorified body back with him to heaven and wait while his movement on earth grows. After a final conflict with the forces of evil, which will almost destroy his movement, he will return from heaven in bodily form, rescue his followers, and physically renovate all of heaven and earth.
Oh, yes—and part of that renovation will be restoring to their bodies everyone who has ever lived, many of them now having the same kind of glorified, transfigured body that God does. They will then be judged, the good ones going to eternal reward, and the evil ones going to eternal suffering.
Wow!
Amazing!
You would never guess this stuff, yet it all makes sense. When you look at it close up (closer than we can here), it all hangs together in a logical way. And there is good evidence for all of it.
You can’t deduce what God is going to do the same way you can deduce the laws of mathematics. His actions are a matter of his own free choice. You also can’t predict what he’s going to do based on how humans use their free will, because-setting aside the Incarnation-he isn’t human. His own essential, divine nature is far above us, something we can’t understand or predict.
As he tells us in the book of Isaiah, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Is. 55:8-9).
Amen!
Some people balk at things like the Eucharist or the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption of Mary as if they were strange things. But when you think about it, they are no stranger than the things we’ve already seen God do. They have their own inner logic, just like the items above. There is good evidence for them as well.
But to balk at them on the grounds that they seem odd to a person who isn’t used to them? One wants to say, “Wait a minute! What kind of a God do you suppose you are dealing with? This is just more of the same. It’s what we’d expect a God this unpredictable to do. All we can count on is that what God does will be good, not that it won’t be strange.”
On the other hand, to those who are impatient with converts as they come to terms with things like the Eucharist or the Immaculate Conception, it can be helpful to say, “Just a second: Have you considered the oddness of some of the other things God has done?”
For God to be odd is as it should be. Any God worth worshiping, any God that is truly infinite, is bound to appear strange and do strange things from a limited human vantage point. As the Catechism puts it, “Even when he reveals himself, God remains a mystery beyond words: ‘If you understood him, it would not be God'” (CCC 230, quoting Augustine, Sermons 52:6:16 and 117:3:5).