Lectionary
readings set for Holy Communion today: Exodus 32.7-14 and John 5.31-47.
How
do we know what God is like?
From
where I stand within the Christian traditions, my answer is that we know what
God is like when we look at Jesus.
This
matters when it comes to how we understand God when we read about God in the
library of stories we call the Bible.
One
time, when Jesus was debating with a group of people over, essentially, the
question of what God is like, he said to them, ‘You have never heard God’s
voice or seen God’s form.’ He also said, ‘You read your Bible, because you
think that the answers are there, but you miss the point entirely.’
They
didn’t see what God is like in the Bible. And they had never heard God’s voice
or seen God’s form. Which is interesting, because human beings are created in
the image of God. Everything that exists, human beings in a particular way, is
the word of God, incarnate, because everything is spoken into being by God.
Moreover, in his Gospel John claims that the one who was standing before them
was the Word of God, incarnate in a unique non-derivative way, not the
derivative sense that is true of you and me.
They
did not hear or see God in their fellow human beings, not even in the one who
is, fully, the human god.
Perhaps
we don’t, either.
There
was a time, long before the time of Jesus, just after God had brought the
descendants of Israel up out of captivity in Egypt, and had called Moses up
onto the mountain to meet with him face to face, when God told Moses to depart
from his presence, for his people had corrupted themselves; Moses should get
out of the way, that God’s wrath might burn against the people and consume
them; and then begin again starting with Moses.
But
Moses refuses to go away from the God who had called him up the mountain.
Instead, he points out that this should not be God's reputation in the world, a
reputation of perpetrating violence.
What
is going on here? How do we understand the nature of God, what God is like?
Is
God violent, poised at any moment to break out against us if we depart from the
right path? Does God need to be taught mercy and compassion from humans? Is God
a wild animal needing to be tamed?
Or
is God the god of mercy and compassion, who calls his people to do likewise? Is
this a test? Not in the way we apply tests today, to determine whether Moses is
acceptable to God (pass) or not (fail), but in the way we used to apply tests:
to determine how much Moses has understood, so far?
Moses
passes the test. Not the test of acceptability, but the indicator of the extent
to which he has understood what God is like, and therefore how the people of
God should be in the world.
This
is what we see in Jesus. Jesus is not the child who takes on the burden of
responsibility for regulating the violent outbursts of his parent. Jesus
reveals to the world what God is like: full of compassion and mercy; who tests
his people so that they can see the extent to which they have understood this
way of being in the world, and where they still have learning to do.
When
we look at society, whether the one most immediately around us or in other
parts of the global village, do we lament the fact that God is taking so long
to get round to smiting those idiots...or do we cry out, Lord, have mercy?
Our
honest response reveals what we truly believe about what God is like.
Moses
passes the test, but then he goes down the mountain and acts out a violent rage
against the very people he has understood to be under God’s mercy. It is
possible to know something and to fail to live up to what we know. That in
itself should cause us to fall back on the mercy and compassion of God.
Otherwise, we will destroy one another.
That
is why we must keep coming back to Jesus, in whom all are being saved from the
violence that mars the likeness of God we are created to bear in the world.