seeing God

 

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.