Today’s readings: Exodus 34, 4-6.8-9; 2 Corinthians 13, 11-13; John 3, 16-18.
The Scripture readings on this Sunday when we celebrate God as Trinity offer a deep meditation not on who God is but on how we experience His greatness through the way He deals with us. God’s attitude to the world is not what we so often imagined it to be. There have always been fundamentalists around, fake prophets judging people and the world alike. All this is belied in the Scriptures.
It has always been of great disservice to speak dogmatically and arrogantly in the name of God, even if and when that attitude was coming from the Church and from people who claimed to have the authority to do it. Today, while we acknowledge and uphold the faith of the Church as defined and proclaimed in the past, our concern is to demonstrate that the God we believe in is not the static, unknowable God sophistically described in philosophically worded dogmas.
The God we believe in is the God in our midst, the God who entered history to take a human face while retaining His transcendence. We read from Exodus today that God spoke to Moses from the cloud, which means that He made Himself known from the cloud of unknowing. We are simply invited like Moses to bow down to the ground and worship.
There is indeed a sharp contrast between Moses in Exodus and Nicodemus in John’s gospel. The former is overwhelmed by how God revealed Himself and ends up in worship. The latter, failing to acknowledge God’s human face in Jesus Christ, remains perplexed to the extent that he continued to hold firm to the security of his old school theology.
The God of our contemplation is very different from the God of our theologies and catechisms. In the times we live in, we need to learn how to discern God’s presence in His apparent absence. Learning God’s language has never been easy, even for the prophets of old and those of our times. Perhaps this is the reason why we constantly keep asking where God is whenever we go through dark patches in life.
St John of the Cross writes: “One word the Father spoke, which word was His Son, and this word He speaks ever in eternal silence, and in silence must it be heard by the soul”. We read that Moses went up the mountain of Sinai “with the two tablets of stone in his hands”, probably believing that God’s word was cast in stone. But much more was yet to come.
God speaks gently, not imparting commands; He speaks softly, not angrily; He is a God of tenderness and compassion, not the God we carved in the minds of people and in the culture we breathe, which is still reminiscent of a God who resembles more a volcano that erupts with anger when running out of patience with humanity and the world.
The true God can only be discerned and experienced in contemplation, in listening authentically to our inner selves. The key to His mystery lies in letting ourselves be touched by Him who, as John affirms, loves us so much that He wants to share with us His eternal life. Creating us in His own image and likeness, He put in our fragility the seed of eternal life, which makes us desire and aspire to much and much more than what earthly life can procure us.