Despite God’s omniscience, let us strive to ‘surprise’ our Lord

by Phillip Garside

By Phillip Garside
NOLA Catholic Parenting

"When Jesus heard this, he was amazed.”

“Amazed” is not a word I easily associate with Jesus. To be amazed you must be surprised, and to be surprised something must be revealed to you that you didn’t know. Without delving too deeply into the necessarily controversial topic of Jesus’ inner life, this amazement does give us good fodder for a spirituality that centers on free will and potentiality.

As a parent, one thing you learn quickly is that your children will not be exactly what you expect.

Their ability to amaze turns even the staunchest behaviorist parents on their heels. Of course, the best experience of this is when your children surprise you with how virtuous or accomplished they are.

Since parents were also once children, we can uniquely know what it means to be amazed by our children and simultaneously how much we yearn to impress our parents. This dual experience is the key to our use of Jesus’ amazement to form a spiritual technique.

Christians must walk a tightrope between the trust that God is omniscient and in control, and the responsibility to use our will, which is uniquely under our control. The theologically minded often gravitate toward the former – God cannot be surprised. This can mitigate anxiety when we feel a lack of control, but it can also lead to an oppressive implied determinism.

The Gospel provides us a counter inspiration in the form of Jesus’ amazement. He is amazed at the centurion’s faith in Matthew 8, and he is amazed at his Nazorean neighbors’ lack of faith in Mark 6. This affords us a fascinating strategy in our spiritual lives, “how can I surprise Jesus?”

Ask this of yourself today, for this week, for this year, or by the use of your life as a whole. In prayerful meditation, summon how much you want to impress your own parents, or your happiest memory of when your child surprised you. This is the analogy of the spiritual gambit at hand. Can you do an act of charity so out of character, or a feat of restraint so unlike your vice that you can surprise Christ? This emotive meditation gives us a drive and desire to please God in a way that we can comprehend.

But, what about God’s omniscience? Doesn’t Jesus know everything?

Unfortunately, we will not solve the contradiction of free will and divine omniscience today. This is simply a spiritual strategy for our finite minds.

But notice how the story of the amazement threads the needle here. The centurion’s manner of surprising Jesus centered around how much he trusted Jesus’ power, whereas the Nazoreans amaze him with their unfounded belief in their own familiarity. The centurion’s trust was what allowed him to act outside the normal expectations, while the Nazoreans’ presumptions kept them from accepting who Jesus was.

In use of our will, our best strategy is to paradoxically accept God’s omniscient authority, yet still seek to amaze him by how we use our will.

Phillip Garside is a NOLA Catholic Parenting columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].