Good Shepherd Sunday - The Good News: You Don't Know It All (Apophatic/Negative Theology)

Sermon Recap: Psalm 23 is so familiar that it can feel like easy comfort, but at its core it’s not about certainty—it’s about trust. “The Lord is my shepherd” isn’t a claim that we fully understand our lives, but that we belong to one who leads us. Drawing on the idea of “unknowing,” the psalm invites us to let go of our need for control and answers and instead learn to follow, because the journey it describes includes both green pastures and dark valleys where explanations are absent and certainty fails. Yet, God’s presence remains—guiding, accompanying, and providing even in the midst of unresolved fear and struggle. Rather than removing difficulty, God sets a table within it offering abundance not through control but through trust, so that the confidence the psalm ends with is not in a predictable plan but in a relationship with the shepherd who is always with us. Faith is less about having everything figured out and more about loosening our grip just enough to be led and to trust that we are not alone.

Read/listen to the original sermon here.

Center of the ceiling of the "Velatio" cubicle: the Good Shepherd. Location: Catacomb of Priscilla, Italy, Rome. Date: Second half of the 3rd century

On the surface, a term like "negative theology" can be misleading. And even the root of the word "apophatic" (Greek apophēmi = deny) doesn't sound all that faithful. But, what we're really looking at here is way of thinking about God in terms of what/who God not is not, rather than the more popular approach of considering what/who God is in a positive sense (cataphatic theology). Both theological camps work to help us contemplate God in a more robust and complete way. But, at the heart of this sermon lies a commitment to wading into the more apophatic waters of theological life.

Specifically, in order to faithfully lean into the unknowing to which the sermon speaks, we must first admit (and then believe as Good News) that God is, in fact, not totally knowable in any human capacity. Or — in other words — it is God unknowability that underscores the necessity that we give up the control-based need to be certain about God instead of trusting God. Without the apophatic admission and faithful acceptance that God is, in fact, not fully knowable, any contemplative or spiritual work toward unknowing as Belle Tindall-Riley describes is at best limited, and at worst intellectually and spiritually dishonest.

There are other negative attributes that we should also consider about God's nature as we mature in our theological life. For one, God is immutable (not changeable). This is a foundational theological claim that underpins important aspects of Christian the life such as: prayer, the will of God, and God's providence (perhaps the trickiest of them all). Also, God enjoys (I hope) divine infinity (not able to be limited — either by space or time). As we naturally attempt to understand God by classifying God's nature in terms of our own limited, human categories, divine infinity is critical to our ability to trust in God's provision and power to effect change in our world.

So, yes. The Lord is our Shepherd, and that is good news insofar as we allow ourselves to be a little more like sheep — limited and in need of leadership (if not also just a little dumb in relation to the Almighty). Meditating on what and who God is not can help us toward faithfulness in that particular spiritual project.