The God who Drops In to the World

When Moses (in Exodus 33) asks to be shown God’s ways, and God’s glory, the most he is allowed to see is God’s departing back. Not until the Christian identification of Jesus as God-with-us is there any hint that we might be able to see God’s face, but this raises a question: is the glory of God to be identified with the physical features of Jesus?

Presumably not. Among other things, we are reminded elsewhere in scripture that ‘God is spirit’, so it is more appropriate to identify the divine with Jesus’ nature as a person than with his physical appearance. This is comforting, as we know quite a lot about what Jesus said and did, but almost nothing about what he looked like.

In Matthew 22.15-22, we read about his response to the question of whether taxes should be paid to the Roman authorities. To many conscientious people this seemed like an unacceptable compromise with the occupying forces of a foreign power. Some preferred to opt out altogether, and live in self-sufficient communities unpolluted by contact with the ungodly.

Today’s equivalent question might be whether we should opt out of the morally questionable worlds of finance and politics altogether until they have cleaned up their acts considerably, and there are communities today that attempt greater or lesser degrees of separation from the rest of the world.

This does not seem to have been the way of Jesus, but his answer to the tax question was ingenious, demonstrating that even those who went out of their way to avoid pollution from the ways of the world carried part of that world in their pockets. Whose, after all, was the coin that bore Caesar’s image?

The nature of God is to be found in the person of Jesus, and the way of God is to be found in his risky participation in the world—in the conviction that we are not polluted by contact with the ungodly, but that the ungodly will be enriched by whatever touch of God’s presence we can bring to it.

The Visible Presence of God

Do we need visible symbols of God? We certainly need to be reminded that God is with us, but the episode of the golden calf reminds us of a number of possible dangers. Actually the story reminds us of several of the worse forms of religious behaviour, and of the vital importance of realising that the writers of the Bible were not all admirable people with a perfect insight into the nature of God.

The narrative in Exodus chapter 32 has a complex history, but it comes to us as an account of how a nomadic community responded when they grew weary of waiting to hear what God was saying. The image itself seems to have a few well-chosen characteristics: it is an object of value, it represents a source of nourishment, and the people themselves have contributed to it. The problem, of course is that it contravened the recently given commandments.

However, the story goes from bad to worse when Moses comes back down the mountain, sees what has been going on in his absence, and acts swiftly to ‘purify the camp’. The least bad part of it is the psychological violence involved in grinding the image to dust, scattering it on the water, and forcing the people to drink it.

Skip from there to what we still do, and there is one small similarity: we ingest the symbols of our God. It’s the only similarity between the two events, though. The golden calf was only ever meant to represent God, whereas on most occasions bread and wine simply represent bread and wine. In the context Jesus gave it, however, it represents a life given in love for people who suffer ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.

Another virtue of bread and wine as symbols of God is the fact that they are temporary and perishable. If we ever gaze at them in wonder, we are not gazing at their beauty and grandeur, but at the paradoxical insistence that everything we believe about God can be identified with something so ordinary. God is here not to direct our lives from on high, but to be used up in our lives. Used up completely, in fact, except that the more God is given and shared in the world, the more there is to give and share, and the more our common humanity is able to live in God’s presence.

The Great Feast

Matthew 22.1-14 is a mess. It looks like an adaptation of Luke 14.15ff, with a bit of eschatological condemnation tacked on to the end for good measure. The original meaning seems to have been that no-one is excluded from God’s kingdom except by having chosen to go elsewhere, but Matthew adds the worrying spectacle of a latecomer being punished for ignoring the dress code. If nothing else, it’s a useful reminder that the Bible should not always be taken literally. If there’s a meaning in this for us, we need to find it by working on the metaphor.

The Essence of Christianity

Dangerous ground! if anybody can disagree about anything, they can disagree about the essence of their faith. Christians are no exception. Are some Christians just plain wrong about the essence of their faith? Does the essence of Christianity vary from place to place, or from age to age? We often speak the language of eternal truth, but find that our descriptions of that truth seem somewhat transient. On the basis of recent conversations among the faithful, however, I feel that I can offer (in no particular order) some stable criteria for genuine Christianity.

* It's about community: Christ is with us in our solitude, but is identifiable in our love for each other.

* It's about acceptance: Where people are rejected by any community, even those with Christian labels, Christ is with them rather than those who have cast them out.

* It's about liberation: Christ is the truth that sets us free. If we are still longing for our freedom, then we're still longing for Christ.

* It's a journey: Christ is our companion on the way, not the distant objective (that's the kingdom of God).

* It's about the outrageous presence of God in the middle of all that seems most distant from God, who does not keep a sanctified distance from the world, but risks getting right into it.

* It's about opening our eyes to where God is, and what God is doing, and joining in. It's about experiencing God's life and sharing it.