For Jesus, more than one thing can be true.

A Reflection for the Memorial of St. Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church

Find today’s readings here.

I guess Jesus was having one of those days. He starts at one extreme, telling his disciples that it would be better for someone to be killed rather than to cause someone else to sin. He then goes to another extreme, telling them that they should always forgive someone who wrongs them and apologizes. Well, Jesus, make up your mind. Which is it?

This is one of those Scripture passages that is almost inevitably cast in the classic Catholic hermeneutic of “both/and.” Often we chuckle when the phrase is invoked, because on the surface it feels like a lazy deflection, an easy way out of a complex theological conundrum. But it’s quite the contrary. Sometimes the most challenging concept for us to wrap our minds around is the fact that more than one thing can be true. And that’s the truth.

We can name several theological tenets that prove the point: Jesus was both fully man and fully God. The Trinity is both one and three. The kingdom of God is at hand, but not yet. Salvation is a totally gratuitous gift, and we can also cooperate in it. In order to save your life, you must lose it. The first will be last and the last will be first.

For me, none of these paradoxes make sense outside of some kind of external revelation. It’s not in our human nature, particularly at this post-Englightenment stage of our evolution, to accept seemingly contradictory realities. But once you see the paradoxes at the heart of Jesus’ teachings, which reflect the paradoxes of reality, you can’t unsee them.

I first saw them in college while reading G.K. Chesterton’s classic book Orthodoxy. Known as “the prince of paradox,” Chesterton brilliantly elucidates his own spiritual discovery of Christianity as a kind of key that fits the lock of our universe and human nature. In an early chapter called “The Maniac,” he engages the prevailing materialistic philosophies of the early 20th century and tries to recover a healthy sense of humility and mystery:

“The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that…. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.”

Reading Jesus’ teachings in the Gospel, we come face to face with paradoxes, and in some cases, extreme contradictions. Perhaps we shouldn’t try to make sense of them, as if they were equations to solve according to our logic. Instead, we should try to accept them in all of their complicated mystery.

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