How does God Know?

      In worship we're 3/4 of the way through one of the all time great bible stories, Jonah.  Yesterday's reading from chapter three sent a question rippling through coffee hour.  How can God change God's mind?  (Doesn't God know how its all going to turn out before it starts?)  When God saw what they did, how they changed from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it. (Jonah 3: 10, NRSV).
     What a wonderful and important question!!!  In some ways it's a question more important than potential answers, a question older than Christianity.  In fact, its a question that begs more questions.  What assumptions lie underneath?  The question seems to ask whether God is free to change or eternally unchanging.  If God knows how it all turns out in the end, how can the path to the end change?
       Assumption #1
When we say"know" we assume we mean a firm grasp of creations facts and narrative arch.  But the Hebrew word know is relational, as a mother knows an infant or a married couple knows each other, emotionally, phyically, intimately.
      Assumption #2

     When we say, "the end," we mean the period at the end of a cosmic sentence, the last chapter, a finale (grand or not).  Early Christians, influenced by Aristotle, used "end" as telos, fulfillment of purpose.
       Assumption #3
      We tend to assume that God experiences time the same way we do.  After all, Jesus Christ, our window to God, entered our time and space.  We know God in our time, in our experience.  And in modern western culture that means in our past, present, and future. Time forms a linear movement, one thing leads to another. So....if (using our assumed meanings) God knows the end of the story, its hard to see how God can change God's mind.  The outcome iteself would change like the path of a ribbon waved in a new direction.

     What if God is unlimited by our linear time?  What if this arc of past, present future is dancing in something fuller, of infinite dimension..... in God?  Other cultures, and theories of physics, conceive of time as non-linear.   Perhaps God holds (knows, creates) all that makes fullfillment of God's purposes possible.  Perhaps when something happens in our lives, the linear idea that God might have known it was going to happen is less important than the eternal knowledge that God will help us make something awesome out of it, something that serves love.
     Perhaps when we read Jonah's story, we're confused because our assumptions are like the tail trying to wag the dog!
    

God's very being is mercy. The mercy of God lies in God's readiness to share in sympathy the distress of another, a readiness which springs from God's inmost nature and stamps all God's being and doing.... And this, of course, is why we are able to face, acknowledge, accept and live through suffering, for we know that it can never be ultimate, it can never constitute the bottom line. God is at the foundation and God is at the boundaries.  Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction  (www.inwardoutward.org 3-22-10)