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Is Jesus intentionally trying to confuse us? The Gospel might make us think so. Jesus taught the crowds in parables, which are uninterpreted metaphors that do not have an allegorical or literal meaning. Parables are puzzles that point to a truth but do not give it away. You have to work for them, and even after you think you have figured them out, there is still more to be discovered. That is why Jesus says that it is important for his followers to look and see but not perceive, and that they listen and hear but not understand. It is not that Jesus wants to confuse us. But He wants us to realize that if we think we understand God, we are not understanding Him. For God is not like a sudoku puzzle or a rubik's cube, He is not something that we can solve and be done with. No, God because He is shrouded in mystery is always able to stretch our minds even further. Like a parable, there are an infinite number of ways to try to understand Him.
This does not mean that our search for God is hopeless. No, the life of St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest Church theologian ever, shows how exciting it can be to develop our minds so that we can say something excellent about who God is. Nobody gets excited when we learn about the obvious, but when we strive to stretch our minds to understand things that at first seem impossible to understand, then we are doing something exciting. We are stretching the capacity of human reason. St. Thomas Aquinas did this in a beautiful way, and was able to penetrate the mysteries of God with great clarity. The great result of his intellectual search for God, however, was that he realized that God was still so far beyond him. This did not lead St. Thomas to despair, however, but made him more prayerful and ready for Christ to come and dwell within his heart. St. Thomas had a great mind, to be sure, and wrote incredible things, but even more importantly, He allowed Christ Jesus to write on his heart. +m
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