Strange Yet Familiar

The risen Jesus is at once strange and yet deeply familiar, a question to what we have known, loved and desired, and yet continuous with the friend we have known and loved.  His strangeness and his recognizability are both shocking, standing as they do in such inseparable connection…There is no place or time or condition to which he is alien or where his story and his Spirit have nothing to give.  And if this is so, there is no place or time or condition in which he can be domesticated, in which he can be domesticated, in which we can say that his story and his Spirit are exhaustively defined.  He is utterly unsusceptible to definition; and while we may continue to burden him with our hopes, fantasies and projections, there is an obstinate and restless dimension of unclarity that will break through and challenge sooner or later.  Jesus is not to be tied down to any set of worldly configurations and constraints, although he is never a merely abstract term.  He eludes and questions our predictions and projections, recedes and hides before our attempts to arrive at adequate, definitive statements.

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– Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, 2002–2012