Mathematical Religion or straining a gnat to swallow a camel.
Beware of mathematics. It’s not that it is evil. I mean we are dependent on numbers, equations, percentages, ratios, statistics and such for the clarity we need to build buildings, run a business, govern with efficiency, calculate productivity, outline the demographics of our society, measure our health. We even get a better sense of the universe with measures like light years. How far, how deep, how much, how long, how many, how large, how frequent – all such questions look for a mathematical answer by which we may analyze our environment, near and far, and thereby gain some control over our existence. Control! One could say that’s the ultimate purpose of mathematics, getting things to add up in a Q.E.D. way.
But sometimes our commitment to math, to numbers can get out of control. That’s a theme in the Bible. For instance, way back in 975 BC King David decided to take a census of his kingdom. He wanted to know accurately the size and demographics of his population. From God’s point of view his ambition to reduce his people to digits had an ulterior motive. David wanted the numbers to help him raise taxation, institute forced labor, increase his military ranks, know who owned how much. He was drifting into becoming a tyrant. The Bible then says that as soon as the census was completed a plague struck Israel – messing up David’s tidy numbers and showing how something like a force of nature, like an epidemic, can throw things out of control despite the math.
Math inevitably had crept into the mindset of Jesus’ contemporaries. Examples abound in the New Testament. Take the story of the Good Samaritan. Here’s a Jewish fellow almost beaten to death on the highway. A Temple priest and then a Levite see him and stingily and antiseptically give him wide berth. Along comes a stranger, a Samaritan, a heretic, sees the fellow and spares no expense to care for him indefinitely. The math of the victim’s care was no object. His was a generosity beyond measure or “Go for broke” as the Japanese-American 442nd Infantry Regiment used to say.
Or take Peter who asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” And Jesus answered, “I don’t say seven times, but seventy times seven.” Again, the disciples were handicapped by their math mentality when they couldn’t figure out how five loaves and two fishes could feed five thousand people. The problem didn’t faze Jesus; he operated by a different calculus: the measureless potential of love. “Five loaves and two fishes can go much farther than you think.” And, by golly, they fed 5000 people with a surplus to boot.
Much of the Church practice I grew up under was mathematical in its emphasis; for instance so many ounces or calories of food on a fast day. In the confessional you would recite your sins – in each case making sure to say how many times and when it came to your penance: five Our Father’s and five Hail Mary’s or maybe even a whole rosary which is fifty Hail Mary’s! And how often did this mathematical reduction tendency carry over into doctrine itself, so that catechism answers to the most profound questions about life, God, Jesus, the Church were reduced to so precise, so measured, so abstract a paragraph that it might amount to something as concise and unchallenging as two plus two equals four. Jesus loved extravagance in word (as in poetry) and in deed. He had no use for miserly thought and behavior. Didn’t he once say, “The measure you give will be the measure you get”?