How does God become known to us? The story of Moses and the burning bush suggests that first hand experience would be ideal, along with a family recommendation. God speaks directly to Moses from the bush, and introduces himself as the God of Moses’ ancestors. When Moses mentions the problem of how to identify God to a third party, he is given the cryptic ‘I am that I am’.
Classical Hebrew has only two tenses: the perfect, indicating completed action, and the imperfect. Consequently, God’s name has sometimes been translated as ‘I will be what (or who) I will be’ - an indication, perhaps, of a God who can’t be pinned down and labelled.
The same risky dynamism is expressed in Jesus’ famously worrying saying about losing ones lives in the effort to save it. Life, like God, cannot be pinned down and labelled: it can only be lived, and living always carries some degree of risk. There is, perhaps, a fear that using one’s life might mean ‘using it up’, but this is the point of the other half of the saying: it’s only in using our lives that we actually have life.
The greatest risks we might face, and which are faced by Christians and others, involve direct threats to life. In the face of the ultimate danger, St. Paul urges the Christians in Rome not to repay evil for evil or to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good. Only by doing so is the life of God made known.
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