Spooky Action at the Cross

Good Saturday evening, friends. Pour something yummy, put your feet up, and settle in. Tonight I want to talk about the strange world of quantum mechanics, and then, because you trust me, connect the whole thing to the oldest mystery of our faith. I’ve spent forty years studying electromagnetic waves, and a good many more ransacking the Word of God, and I’ll tell you: those two worlds sit closer together, in my mind anyway, with each passing year.

Let’s start with a confession. Not mine — Richard Feynman’s. He was about as fine a physicist as ever lived, and as far as quantum mechanics was concerned, he said, flat out, that nobody really understands it. The smartest physicist in the room, stating for the rest of them: I don’t fully get this, and neither do you. There’s a strange comfort in that, isn’t there? Reality itself, right down at the foundation, refuses to fit into our minds at all, and certainly not into tidy either/or boxes — or any other box for that matter.

Here’s the part that troubles many people. Down at the smallest scale of the physical world, atoms and even smaller, reality doesn’t have to pick a side. It can play both sides. The tiny, tiniest world can have its cake and eat it too. It can be in two states at once — here and there, this and that — right up until the moment we look. Physicists call it superposition. Our commonsense mind screams, “It has to be one or the other!” And the universe just quietly answers back, “Says who?” Now turn with me to your Bible, the oldest and strangest reality in the cosmos. 

Long before Feynman ever picked up a piece of chalk, the Word of God was already confessing something that shattered every either/or box we can imagine. Jesus of Nazareth is fully God and fully man. Not half-and-half. Not God wearing a man costume, and not a good man promoted to God. Fully both. All the way down having his cake and eating it as well.

The prophet Isaiah said the virgin will conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel — “God with us.” And John, opening his Gospel, wrote that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Infinity poured into a feed trough in Bethlehem. The One who spoke the galaxies into existence finds himself unable to hold up his own head.

Back to physics. A quantum particle, a very, very small entity, when we finally look at it, “collapses” it settles into one state and gives up the other. But Christ never collapses. He never stops being God to become man, never sets the man aside to be God. He is fully both, always, at the same time, without confusion and without one crowding out the other. The quantum world only whispers a hint of it; the manger and the cross say it out loud. The science is not a perfect analogy. If quantum mechanics doesn’t give us the greatest metaphor for “two opposites at once”, what does? Where do the two seemingly incompatible natures of Christ meet most completely? Not in glory. On a Roman cross.

Paul tells us that Christ, being in very nature God, did not clutch at his own advantage but emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and became obedient to the point of death. Theologians call that self-emptying kenosis. The Infinite is also finite. Deathlessness dies. The glorious one is shamed. On that hill outside Jerusalem, the fullness of God and the frailty of man are fused in a single wounded body — the deepest, truest superposition in all of history, and it happened out in the open where anyone could see. It did not collapse upon observation. The only thing that collapses is our worries, our fears, our problems.

Einstein, poking at quantum entanglement, grumbled about “spooky action at a distance” two particles somehow linked so that what happens to one affects the other, no matter how far apart they drift. He never made peace with it. But I find myself smiling, because I know Someone like that. I am, in fact, entangled with him. The risen Christ is not standing at a distance. Paul says we are the body of Christ — entangled with our Lord across every mile and every century, so that what happened on that cross reaches all the way to your recliner tonight. You are not watching from the cheap seats. You are joined to Him in the greatest seat in the house, the crowning thrown room of Calvary. That mystery blows anything science has tried on out of the water by a country mile.

So, here’s my pastoral word, and then I’ll let you get to your evening. You do not have to understand the Incarnation to be held by it — any more than you have to understand quantum field theory to feel the sun on your face. Feynman admitted he couldn’t wrap his mind around the quantum. I’ll cheerfully admit I can’t wrap mine around the God who was crucified before I was even born. And if you’re not sure you believe a word of it, you’re still welcome at this table; doubt has never once scared off the God who can hold both doubt and faith at the same time. Some mysteries aren’t problems to solve. They’re a Person to trust.

Einstein once fussed that God does not play dice with the universe. He was more right than he knew. God isn’t gambling. This isn’t a casino, and God is not playing around. He is showing us His crucified image from before the foundation of any and every world. So, rest easy tonight. You are entangled with grace. The spooky action of Good Friday explains every moment of your life. God bless you, and I’ll see you back here next Saturday.

— Frank Balgeman, the Physics Pastor from the Santa Cruz Mountains