Who can believe it? ...

Friday, June 8, 2016. Sometimes reality is hard to believe. About 100 years ago in physics the scientist tried to uncover the structure of atoms, of molecules, of light and radiation. Does it consist of waves? Are there particles? How does it all fit together.

Complementary Pictures …

The experiments physicists made did not tell a clear story, initially. Electromagnetic radiation had just been discovered by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz. The British physicist James-Clerk Maxwell had formulated his equations some decades earlier. So radiation seems to be waves. But it was also particles. You could observe it in experiments. Particles which behaved like waves …

The picture was resolved by the quantum theory. It unifies the wave picture and the particle picture into a larger framework, a different framework. The ideas about what light is, what radio waves are, what radar waves are, are complementary. It is particles. But it is also waves. We can interpret it as probability waves, but they truly behave like waves, and also they truly behave like particles.

Nature is strange sometimes. It just shows how limited our human understanding of nature is. Our understanding of this world is and remains just an initial understanding. It is just a first step, searching, grasping, asking, tentative … So it is no wonder that we also find some things strange which Jesus tells us when it comes to God and his relationship to this world, to mankind, to each individual human. In the gospel of John we are taken into a discussion where the disciples of Jesus complain about his difficult arguments:

Jesus is the bread …

60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” 61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. (John 6, 60-63)

Jesus talked about him being the bread of life. He told them that they need to eat this bread, eat his body and drink his blood. They heard it and were shocked. What is Jesus saying. How can you eat him? How can you drink him?

Sometimes strange pictures can be important - as with the particles and waves. Here, we hear about Jesus and that his death is so important. He is using a tough picture. But it touches the nerve of our existence. It is all about life, about perspective and eternity. It is about full reconciliation with God and about healing of our mind, our soul and - ultimately - our body as well. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts