Break out of the familiar and of your opinions to meet the mystery of God.
No miracles will happen without faith. Jesus comes home to Nazareth, but no one believes him when he shares the good news. Even more, they were offended! The people of Nazareth have opinions about Jesus, and it blinds them. One of the dangers for us who believe is to identify our beliefs, opinions, prejudices with faith itself. Faith is far deeper than our opinions, judgments, and prejudices. It is even deeper than our beliefs for faith launches us into the mystery of God.
When we have faith, we receive Jesus’ experience of God. The core experience of God that Jesus transmits is found in his terms for God. Jesus calls God his “heavenly Abba.” These names for God tell us God is incomprehensible mystery and incomprehensibly close to us. To know this God, we need faith. For Jesus, to have faith means to let go of the mind and trust in God here and now, even if it seems like God is nowhere to be found. The Christian mystics call faith “unknowing,” that is, according to Dionysius the Areopagite, “knowing beyond the mind by knowing nothing.” It is the prayer of interior silence, sinking into God without paying attention to our thinking our emotions.
But the people of Nazareth do not experience faith. They think they know who Jesus is. Familiarity, thinking we know and being dismissive, kills faith. We are incredible. We deploy myriad defenses to resist the good news of being one with God. Our egos cannot take it. Other ways we block out, cover over, and otherwise distract ourselves from Reality, from our inherent oneness with God, include the blame game, denying, ignoring, assuming one is right, complaining, and rationalizing, and, as the people of Nazareth do, taking offense. What is your unique combination?
Since familiarity kills spiritual presence and intention, we can consider using different language for God. I suggest the language of “divine nothing.” Truly, nothingness may help us because it is so different, uncomfortably different, from our normal language for God. We have a lot of ego-defenses blocking out God; divine nothingness may be one way to pierce these defenses.
The experience of God that Jesus transmits to us is the experience of the divine nothing. As “heavenly,” God is transcendent, that is, beyond all things. The divine is so mysterious and beyond that God transcends existence itself. And since God transcends all, God is universally available to all. God is the deepest reality of every creature in existence.
I am not saying Jesus ever used the phrase "divine nothing." It is a phrase used by the mystics and I think it captures the mysteriousness of Jesus’ God-experience since for Jesus the divine reality is both incomprehensibly beyond us, so beyond that we can't even comprehend how beyond, and also deeply interior to us.
We can presume the biblical and Jewish sense of divine transcendence behind Jesus’ preaching in the Gospels – even when Jesus calls God, “Abba,” he is communicating the tremendous immediacy of God's transcendent and incomprehensible mystery. And as transcendent mystery, God is above everything. This means everything we think is important defers to the divine nothingness. In other words, only God is God and no thing in our world is absolute. Naturally, this includes our beliefs, opinions, prejudices, and all our other mental defenses. Everything in this world, this universe, is relative to the divine mystery.
The whole mission of Jesus falls apart and lacks any real effectiveness if God is not transcendent mystery, which is what “divine nothing” refers to. Even when Jesus teaches us about the love and mercy of God, it is dependent on transcendence. Divine love breaks through all categories, conditions, and every finite calculus or logic. Divine love can do that because it is transcendent mystery. Using the term “divine nothing” hinges on the understanding of God in the Gospels as utterly incomprehensible and infinitely transcendent mystery
Ultimately, the mystics talk about God as nothingness not to add another name to God but to shatter our minds and beckon us beyond thinking into the silent mystery of God. In other words, they, and Jesus, ask us to dive into the vast waters of divine mystery by prayer and faith. This will break through our many ego defenses so we may experience God as Jesus did.