God’s home

Today’s readings: Ex. 34, 4-6.8-9; 2 Cor. 13, 11-13; Jn 3, 16-18.

God’s identity is hard to define. We believe in the revelation of a God who, while remaining holy and shrouded in mystery, is ‘God with us’. God is not a concept. In the Scriptures, God narrates Himself through the lives of people, giving true glimpses of Himself and disclosing His human face.

In her book The Kindness of God, Janet Martin Soskice says there are biblical titles of God appropriate to offices of governance, for instance, where God is Lord, King and Judge. And there are most intimate titles which represent the offices of love – Father, Brother, Son, Spouse, Lover.

Soskice considers these latter titles as mutually implying ‘kinship’ titles, because if I am your kin, then you are mine. “To claim that God is our father, or Christ our brother, is thus to make a strong claim not only about God but about us.”

A concept with which we all become familiar in early childhood is God’s anger. God is often depicted as touchy, sad, easy to hurt, in pain by whatever wrong we might commit even if it’s what we used to call ‘venial’ sins. Much of this may have been pure projection and it may have caused damage to some in their spiritual development.

Today’s readings seem to belie much of our conceptualisations. The God we believe in is not judgmental. Belief in God cannot be a mere projection of a supreme entity with a watchful big eye on what is going on in the world and in no way respecting our privacy or liberty.

There is a radical difference between certain texts knotty with speculative disquisitions about God and texts like Julian of Norwich’s The Revelation of Divine Love. They are hardly speaking of the same God. Julian of Norwich says: “I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, nor ever shall be, for He is God”.

There is strong contrast in the first reading between Moses with the two tablets of stone and the Lord who des­cended in the form of a cloud and disclosed himself as “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”. Christian experience cannot reduce itself to the written law.

In the Gospel reading Nicodemus is fundamentally stuck in his argumentation with Jesus. He fails miserably to recognise Jesus for who he was and was not touched or moved by Jesus’ words that “God loved the world so much that He gave His only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost”.

The cloud in Exodus recalls The Cloud of Unknowing, the 14th century classic of spirituality that as­sumes that because we cannot really know God we should set aside our intellect and imagination and simply rest in silence before God’s mystery. Like Moses who entered the cloud on Mt Sinai, our grasp of God remains often obscure, shadowy and shaky. This same dark cloud weighs heavily today on our culture.

The emerging new militant atheism is provoking what David Bentley Hart in his book, Atheist Delusions, calls tirades against religion in the bid to avoid the imminence of a new ‘theocracy’. In the past years we had a replay of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code with Philip Pullman’s atheist fantasy trilogy aimed at children, His Dark Materials.

The ‘doubt’ of David Hume in the 18th century and the diatribes of Voltaire and Diderot in despising Christianity for what it actually was may have been beneficial for religion. But there are today brands of atheism consisting of vacuous arguments built mainly on historical ignorance. Intellectual honesty should open our eyes to the way we still speak of God as if He were an earthly being to whom we just owe devotion. But is God all we say He is?

Our understanding of God projected a Christianity that left its mark on the development of Western civilisation. What will happen now that this influence seems to be disappearing? We should take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We cannot hate the world God loved so much. It’s our home and God’s too.