“The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him,” says Psalm 147:11. We are to fear the Lord. And I do.
Still, somehow, this doesn’t seem right. Why would a good and loving God want us to fear him? Is he some kind of bully?
Intellectually, I have an answer. Fear is a form of worship. We make ourselves tiny before the things we fear, lowering and limiting ourselves until we are smaller than whatever the small thing is that rules us. The reason to turn our fear toward God is precisely because he is not a bully. If we acknowledge that we are humble and small before the infinite God, then that still leaves plenty of room for us to be great—to be fully the ones he created us to be.
But recently I discovered something more—another answer to the question of why to fear, a response that went beyond the intellectual. I discovered, in my heart, a full and genuine feeling of fear toward God. I find I don’t just have an argument anymore, I have an emotion.
Why?
I sat with this feeling and studied it. I sat with God over this fear toward God. And I found: This particular fear is not a fear like anxiety, not a fear like dread, and certainly not a fear like panic.
It is fear instead that flows from awe. The fear is a consequence, maybe an inescapable consequence, of being filled with the Spirit of God. The Spirit pushes closer to the skin as my resistance is slowly overcome, and I find that I am fed much less by my own attainment and effort. I find that much more of who I understand myself to be is built upon the loving enormity of that which is infinite, eternal, ultimate, and deeply personal all at once.
I have acknowledged Jesus for about three years. I have seen redemption over that time—an elegant reengineering of my heart and life in ways I never could have planned or chosen. I have also seen the reality of prayer—God faithfully showing answers to those things I trustingly bring before him, providing a tangible response to prayer far more often than he is silent.
God accompanies us. I need him. I always did need him, but now I know it.
And even now—particularly now—I feel fearful as I come before him. There is still a part of me that fears not honoring him or praying to him in a fitting way. I do fear God—I fear him indeed. I fear how lost and small I would be if he ever turned away.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
The Tale of the Fountain and the Vessels
Once upon a time:
There was this fountain. It was a fountain that poured out abundant love. The fountain imagined vessels into existence to hold all of the love that was pouring out of it.
Every vessel the fountain imagined was different. Some were ceramic and some were crystal. Every bowl, cup, and decanter was made in the image of some particular shape of love that had shimmered within the fountain’s dancing patterns. And every ewer, flagon, and flask filled up with the love, sloshing with all that it contained. Each of the vessels glistened in the overflow, all of them radiating from the love cascading into and around them.
Then all of the vessels smashed themselves to pieces.
Why they did this—even just after it happened—was not clear. It was apparent at once that the act had been wantonly foolish and destructive. It was simply that smashing themselves had been the one choice forbidden to them by the fountain. Smashing themselves therefore became the one choice that was fascinating.
The fountain remained unchanged, but all of the vessels lay shattered. All the love that had been in them spilled away.
The vessels reformed themselves, sort of. Pieces were missing. The pieces that did still remain fit poorly together in the wake of the violence. For the sake of being whole at all, a vessel would graft its remaining pieces into a clumsy, awkward, mismatched assembly that at least managed to hold some small, meager, misshapen amount of space.
Most of the vessels did this. They now were porous and small, unable to hold much love at all. What love they did hold seeped out. These vessels would have been discarded—except that the fountain said no.
The fountain made a new vessel instead. The new vessel came out of the very heart of the fountain.
Look at this, said the fountain to the vessels. You can be like this.
Some began to try, rearranging their shards to be more like the perfect vessel. But even as they had just begun to do this, the new vessel itself was lost. The perfect vessel was smashed. The new vessel was the one discarded, while the ones that should have been discarded remained.
But something was happening. Even more of the broken ones bravely began to let go of their meager and malformed shapes. Even more of the damaged vessels strove to match the proportions of the perfect vessel about which they had heard.
All of them were still missing pieces. All of them were missing huge shards. Previously, they had patched and covered themselves to make due, to make themselves somehow whole. Now, as they stretched instead toward their fuller shapes, the gaps became fully evident. The vessels tried to hold love, and the love spilled out through the wide and open holes.
Yet the fountain still was abundant. It was as abundant as it ever had been, as abundant as it was from the beginning. Love poured out of the fountain so fast that it filled the vessels and kept them full, the overflow replacing all of the love in all of the vessels as quickly as it flowed out of even the widest holes in their sides. The fountain did this for every vessel that simply believed the fountain’s promise that a broken vessel could again be whole.
Something else happened, too. The love that spilled out of all of these large open holes was shaped by the jagged gaps. The shimmering patterns created by these shard-shaped openings intersected in intricate ways. As the vessels spread wide to reclaim the original dimensions that the fountain had given them, the fullness of each vessel’s damage was revealed. Love streamed out of the holes in crazy gushes, and the wounds became beautiful.
There was this fountain. It was a fountain that poured out abundant love. The fountain imagined vessels into existence to hold all of the love that was pouring out of it.
Every vessel the fountain imagined was different. Some were ceramic and some were crystal. Every bowl, cup, and decanter was made in the image of some particular shape of love that had shimmered within the fountain’s dancing patterns. And every ewer, flagon, and flask filled up with the love, sloshing with all that it contained. Each of the vessels glistened in the overflow, all of them radiating from the love cascading into and around them.
Then all of the vessels smashed themselves to pieces.
Why they did this—even just after it happened—was not clear. It was apparent at once that the act had been wantonly foolish and destructive. It was simply that smashing themselves had been the one choice forbidden to them by the fountain. Smashing themselves therefore became the one choice that was fascinating.
The fountain remained unchanged, but all of the vessels lay shattered. All the love that had been in them spilled away.
The vessels reformed themselves, sort of. Pieces were missing. The pieces that did still remain fit poorly together in the wake of the violence. For the sake of being whole at all, a vessel would graft its remaining pieces into a clumsy, awkward, mismatched assembly that at least managed to hold some small, meager, misshapen amount of space.
Most of the vessels did this. They now were porous and small, unable to hold much love at all. What love they did hold seeped out. These vessels would have been discarded—except that the fountain said no.
The fountain made a new vessel instead. The new vessel came out of the very heart of the fountain.
Look at this, said the fountain to the vessels. You can be like this.
Some began to try, rearranging their shards to be more like the perfect vessel. But even as they had just begun to do this, the new vessel itself was lost. The perfect vessel was smashed. The new vessel was the one discarded, while the ones that should have been discarded remained.
But something was happening. Even more of the broken ones bravely began to let go of their meager and malformed shapes. Even more of the damaged vessels strove to match the proportions of the perfect vessel about which they had heard.
All of them were still missing pieces. All of them were missing huge shards. Previously, they had patched and covered themselves to make due, to make themselves somehow whole. Now, as they stretched instead toward their fuller shapes, the gaps became fully evident. The vessels tried to hold love, and the love spilled out through the wide and open holes.
Yet the fountain still was abundant. It was as abundant as it ever had been, as abundant as it was from the beginning. Love poured out of the fountain so fast that it filled the vessels and kept them full, the overflow replacing all of the love in all of the vessels as quickly as it flowed out of even the widest holes in their sides. The fountain did this for every vessel that simply believed the fountain’s promise that a broken vessel could again be whole.
Something else happened, too. The love that spilled out of all of these large open holes was shaped by the jagged gaps. The shimmering patterns created by these shard-shaped openings intersected in intricate ways. As the vessels spread wide to reclaim the original dimensions that the fountain had given them, the fullness of each vessel’s damage was revealed. Love streamed out of the holes in crazy gushes, and the wounds became beautiful.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
The Next Great Move Toward Him
Why do we not congratulate people who have suffered affliction or loss?
Why do we not praise God for the hand that takes instead of giving?
To do so, of course, would seem insensitive to say the least. It would even seem heartless. Affliction is painful. Loss hurts. When a brother or sister is frightened or agonizing, the sympathetic heart can do little except to look into those worrying eyes and say, “This isn’t right. God doesn’t want this for you. He wants to show you that he loves you by making this situation go away.”
Indeed, we want that sentiment to be true for our personal sakes as well. A little of our own fear enters into someone else’s sadness, because we know how readily our own circumstances might change. Tomorrow, it might be you or me who is weeping for relief from the affliction.
Yet this expectation that only pleasantness flows into our life out of God’s hand is, at best, questionable. The belief that the sources of pain in our lives are all errors that cry out for correction seems inconsistent with what we, the students and followers of Jesus, claim to believe.
God is a creator. He alone knows what each of us can become. He is the creator, along with each of us, of our own particular lives. God is the challenging and uplifting creator who calls each of us to a personal destiny that is profoundly greater than what we would otherwise accept for ourselves.
Jesus does make it clear: You will have trouble within this finite world (John 16:33).
He makes it clear: You will be pruned so that you can be more fruitful (John 15:2).
He makes it clear: He disciplines the ones he loves (Revelation 3:19).
For the sake of being left to have an unruffled life, would you rather be unfruitful? Would you rather not be loved by God?
Jesus also makes it clear that his way is the way of joy. But joy is eternal. Therefore, it cannot be that joy is linked to our material comfort, because everything about this current material world is going away. Indeed, the most basic choice each of us is called to make—the fundamental question of faith—is whether or not we too will go the way of the world. Joy is found on the other side of this choice. The choice keeps on presenting itself. We find joy, in every case, by embracing the eternal instead of the fleeting.
The believer is exhorted to give thanks in all things (1 Thessalonians 5:18). We do this not because of the “things,” not because “all things” are fun, but instead because of us—because we are being remade. We’re being recreated, in mind and in body. Through the teaching and events that transform us, we are becoming more like his Son, the one who sees clearly how much of the world we know is simply melting from existence.
The personal transformation is often gradual. In small increments, we find we are a little freer and a little more loving year by year. But then there are the times when the next step is decisive and large, the times when God moves his hand visibly and says: You are ready now. Leave your comfort even farther behind you, as you make your great move toward me.
Why do we not praise God for the hand that takes instead of giving?
To do so, of course, would seem insensitive to say the least. It would even seem heartless. Affliction is painful. Loss hurts. When a brother or sister is frightened or agonizing, the sympathetic heart can do little except to look into those worrying eyes and say, “This isn’t right. God doesn’t want this for you. He wants to show you that he loves you by making this situation go away.”
Indeed, we want that sentiment to be true for our personal sakes as well. A little of our own fear enters into someone else’s sadness, because we know how readily our own circumstances might change. Tomorrow, it might be you or me who is weeping for relief from the affliction.
Yet this expectation that only pleasantness flows into our life out of God’s hand is, at best, questionable. The belief that the sources of pain in our lives are all errors that cry out for correction seems inconsistent with what we, the students and followers of Jesus, claim to believe.
God is a creator. He alone knows what each of us can become. He is the creator, along with each of us, of our own particular lives. God is the challenging and uplifting creator who calls each of us to a personal destiny that is profoundly greater than what we would otherwise accept for ourselves.
Jesus does make it clear: You will have trouble within this finite world (John 16:33).
He makes it clear: You will be pruned so that you can be more fruitful (John 15:2).
He makes it clear: He disciplines the ones he loves (Revelation 3:19).
For the sake of being left to have an unruffled life, would you rather be unfruitful? Would you rather not be loved by God?
Jesus also makes it clear that his way is the way of joy. But joy is eternal. Therefore, it cannot be that joy is linked to our material comfort, because everything about this current material world is going away. Indeed, the most basic choice each of us is called to make—the fundamental question of faith—is whether or not we too will go the way of the world. Joy is found on the other side of this choice. The choice keeps on presenting itself. We find joy, in every case, by embracing the eternal instead of the fleeting.
The believer is exhorted to give thanks in all things (1 Thessalonians 5:18). We do this not because of the “things,” not because “all things” are fun, but instead because of us—because we are being remade. We’re being recreated, in mind and in body. Through the teaching and events that transform us, we are becoming more like his Son, the one who sees clearly how much of the world we know is simply melting from existence.
The personal transformation is often gradual. In small increments, we find we are a little freer and a little more loving year by year. But then there are the times when the next step is decisive and large, the times when God moves his hand visibly and says: You are ready now. Leave your comfort even farther behind you, as you make your great move toward me.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Is He Really That Big? (“Ahistorical,” “Ascientific”—and Here’s Why)
The Bible is surprisingly practical.
Among other things, the book is a guide to transformation. The ultimate transformation, in fact—how we move from death to life, how we move out of the finite and futile state of settling for sparks of comfort, to know instead the eternal state of living and resting in joy. The eternal can be touched right here. And in many ways, the steps the Bible offers for making this contact and achieving this transformation are plainly and remarkably clear.
Take the question, for example, of how to know whether the Holy Spirit leads you, or whether you have been waylaid by some other spirit instead. We cannot know this by ourselves—not for sure. Our hearts are deceived (Jeremiah 17:9), while enemies masquerade as angels (2 Corinthians 11:14). Yet the Bible says there are nine clues, and the clues are quite specific. They are:
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
These are the fruits of the Holy Spirit, according to Galatians 5:22-23. A heart that is growing out of the Holy Spirit should manifest this fruit.
Another such litmus test that is even more strikingly clear is found in a passage from the First Letter of John. This passage also indicates something of the very reason why God engineered the world’s salvation in the way that he did.
John writes:
Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. —1 John 4:2-3
The matter is apparently that simple. That is, when we try to measure whether we ourselves are of God—whether we are still proceeding in a way that is consistent with surrender to God’s loving will ... or whether instead we have given into whim, ego, convenience, obsession, or even something darker—whenever this is the question, the letter of John offers this basic test.
To state that test another way: Are we growing in our confidence that God has come in the flesh?
Perhaps not. We might find that we are (once again) dubious and constrained, snared within a thicket of doubt, uncomfortable with professing the relevance and reality of this truth. Recognizing that this is the case is valuable. Belief is the way to life.
Roman 10:9 states as much. We are to say Jesus is Lord, and we are to believe in our hearts he rose from the dead. Belief is the only route to this truth because logic alone can’t reach it. Nothing like the death and resurrection of God himself has ever happened before or since. Therefore, neither science nor history alone—both of which are built on precedent—can account for this occurrence. At the pinnacle of God’s plan, at the turning point of creation, is this ascienctific and ahistorical event.
That’s not to say the event is anti-scientific. Like a forensic examiner, the doubter Thomas was allowed to examine body (the risen body) in front of witnesses (John 20:27).
Nor was the event anti-historical. The historical record is marked by the impact of the event.
But the event was the assertion of God, in this case entering the world from beyond history and outside of science. That this God was born human by means of a virgin conception makes this very point. Here was a different sort of human being—a man transcending science by having no biological paternity, and transcending history by having no literal paternal ancestry. The skeptic says that nothing about the laws of science or the events of history can provide any basis for such an event. And the believer says: Amen.
Consider the distinction. We are to love God. If it is truly God we love, then the one we love is greater than the world. That same First Letter of John also says, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15).
Our temptation is to see the world as all there is, the world and nothing more—worshiping the world to the exclusion of the Father. But the resurrection of the Son brings this very matter into focus. To believe that science’s laws and history’s assumptions are inviolable even to God is to say that God is smaller than these things, and that God is not truly greater than the world.
Is God really greater? Is he really in moment-by-moment control? Can he really transcend science and history?
Without the resurrection, all we can say is, “In theory, yes.” The answer doesn’t lift or challenge. There is no consequence to this conception of God. It doesn’t change hearts.
The way of Jesus Christ says, “Can God really transcend science and history? Answer: Yes he can—because he did!”
Thus does the event of the resurrection provide a focus for our faith. God came into the world—the world that surrounds and defines us, the overwhelming world—and he left his teachings and his blood upon it. He died here. And he rose.
And in rising, he gave us something to touch that is nearly as tangible as the body that Thomas felt. He gave us a concrete reality and a discernable history that clarifies our faith. At the same time, he gave a direction for our hearts to go. He ascended, and our hearts took flight along with him.
Among other things, the book is a guide to transformation. The ultimate transformation, in fact—how we move from death to life, how we move out of the finite and futile state of settling for sparks of comfort, to know instead the eternal state of living and resting in joy. The eternal can be touched right here. And in many ways, the steps the Bible offers for making this contact and achieving this transformation are plainly and remarkably clear.
Take the question, for example, of how to know whether the Holy Spirit leads you, or whether you have been waylaid by some other spirit instead. We cannot know this by ourselves—not for sure. Our hearts are deceived (Jeremiah 17:9), while enemies masquerade as angels (2 Corinthians 11:14). Yet the Bible says there are nine clues, and the clues are quite specific. They are:
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
These are the fruits of the Holy Spirit, according to Galatians 5:22-23. A heart that is growing out of the Holy Spirit should manifest this fruit.
Another such litmus test that is even more strikingly clear is found in a passage from the First Letter of John. This passage also indicates something of the very reason why God engineered the world’s salvation in the way that he did.
John writes:
Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. —1 John 4:2-3
The matter is apparently that simple. That is, when we try to measure whether we ourselves are of God—whether we are still proceeding in a way that is consistent with surrender to God’s loving will ... or whether instead we have given into whim, ego, convenience, obsession, or even something darker—whenever this is the question, the letter of John offers this basic test.
To state that test another way: Are we growing in our confidence that God has come in the flesh?
Perhaps not. We might find that we are (once again) dubious and constrained, snared within a thicket of doubt, uncomfortable with professing the relevance and reality of this truth. Recognizing that this is the case is valuable. Belief is the way to life.
Roman 10:9 states as much. We are to say Jesus is Lord, and we are to believe in our hearts he rose from the dead. Belief is the only route to this truth because logic alone can’t reach it. Nothing like the death and resurrection of God himself has ever happened before or since. Therefore, neither science nor history alone—both of which are built on precedent—can account for this occurrence. At the pinnacle of God’s plan, at the turning point of creation, is this ascienctific and ahistorical event.
That’s not to say the event is anti-scientific. Like a forensic examiner, the doubter Thomas was allowed to examine body (the risen body) in front of witnesses (John 20:27).
Nor was the event anti-historical. The historical record is marked by the impact of the event.
But the event was the assertion of God, in this case entering the world from beyond history and outside of science. That this God was born human by means of a virgin conception makes this very point. Here was a different sort of human being—a man transcending science by having no biological paternity, and transcending history by having no literal paternal ancestry. The skeptic says that nothing about the laws of science or the events of history can provide any basis for such an event. And the believer says: Amen.
Consider the distinction. We are to love God. If it is truly God we love, then the one we love is greater than the world. That same First Letter of John also says, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15).
Our temptation is to see the world as all there is, the world and nothing more—worshiping the world to the exclusion of the Father. But the resurrection of the Son brings this very matter into focus. To believe that science’s laws and history’s assumptions are inviolable even to God is to say that God is smaller than these things, and that God is not truly greater than the world.
Is God really greater? Is he really in moment-by-moment control? Can he really transcend science and history?
Without the resurrection, all we can say is, “In theory, yes.” The answer doesn’t lift or challenge. There is no consequence to this conception of God. It doesn’t change hearts.
The way of Jesus Christ says, “Can God really transcend science and history? Answer: Yes he can—because he did!”
Thus does the event of the resurrection provide a focus for our faith. God came into the world—the world that surrounds and defines us, the overwhelming world—and he left his teachings and his blood upon it. He died here. And he rose.
And in rising, he gave us something to touch that is nearly as tangible as the body that Thomas felt. He gave us a concrete reality and a discernable history that clarifies our faith. At the same time, he gave a direction for our hearts to go. He ascended, and our hearts took flight along with him.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Carry Your Mat
Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.”
—John 5:8
When Jesus healed an invalid at the pool, he did not just tell the man to rise and walk. He told him to rise, carry his mat, and walk.
Why did he include the mat?
This had to be more than just embellishment. Jesus knew there would be consequences. The day was the Sabbath, when carrying a load was considered a violation of the law. The man was soon cited for this very offense (John 5:10). The value of carrying that mat was apparently great enough to be worth the price.
Jesus even gave the same command elsewhere. One time, the crowds were so thick around him that a paralytic was lowered to him from the roof. When this man was healed, the Lord did not tell him just to walk, but to carry his mat all the way home (Mark 2:11).
I think Jesus must have known something about these men. He knows the same thing about me. All of us, these men and I, have a problem with forgetting how much we have been blessed. For these men, Jesus provided a reminder.
They would not have chosen it. Both of the former invalids must have known these mats too well. They must have lain upon them so helplessly, and for so long, that the mats would have seemed like prison cells, or cages. They might well have reeked. Once the men were free to walk, they would have leapt from those old mats if they could. They would have run from them. But Jesus made use of the mats. As long as the men carried them, lugging the slight weight along, they would see just what they were doing. That is: They were walking. Rather than being subject to the mats, now the mats were subject to them.
Thus the mat is an additional gift. It is the blessing of holding our blessings in mind. The “mat,” in whatever form it takes in the life of one who has been healed, serves as ballast against our selfishness and pride. The first human beings quickly forgot—disregarding the blessings of the garden. And we are prone to forgetting just as quickly.
Your own mat might be a debt that still lingers out of a difficult time—a time that, otherwise, is blessedly finished now.
Or the mat might be some familiar dark emotion that you still encounter from time to time—the emotion that once had you almost completely surrounded, back when you were in the prison from which the Lord has set you free.
If you feel that you are incompletely healed because you still carry some hurt, temptation, or remnant out the time when you were afflicted—then consider what purpose the weight might serve. Consider who you might be if you did not have this reminder, this connection to where you have been.
If you were completely blessed, is it possible you would completely forget?
Give thanks for the mat. Carry it humbly.
Give thanks for the God who wants to keep you this close, who wants to keep your heart aware—aware, that is, of how far you have come ... and how great is the load that you don’t have to carry anymore.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Past My Own Heart
I pray past my own heart. I do it all the time.
I hope I can continue to keep concealed from you what gets inside my heart. I experience envy. The dislike of people who seem to have things easier than I do rises within my heart, and I resent them for—I don’t know—just existing where I can see them.
I also delight in the misfortune of others. I feel relief when misfortune befalls someone—a sort of happiness, somehow—because when that particular spell of bad news entered the world, it didn’t land on me.
These things are in my heart. Selfishness, fear. They are pruned down sometimes, but the root still remains. You would not believe what is in my heart, what ugly things routinely blossom there. But then, that’s a lie, because I am hoping you would believe it. I am hoping that the hints I have heard are true—that everyone else has infected hearts, too.
I pray past my own heart because I know I am to pray for others—not just the ones I feel fondly about, but also enemies (Matthew 5:44), and also ones about whom no particular feeling rises.
I know I am to do this, because I believe. In addition to envy, anger, selfishness, and fear, I also have allowed belief into my heart. I have given my heart to belief—even though it is a broken heart over which weeds still flourish. The belief to which I’ve given it is very specific. In my heart, there is no single secret that better explains the universe and my own place within it than the resurrection of Christ. And there is no document that better explains Christ than the anthology of scriptures we call the Bible.
So I try as best as I am able to feed upon the Bible’s teachings. And some of the Bible’s teachings prove to be personal prophecies that I see fulfilled—as I watch the fruits of faith ripen in my own life, the fruits that come of finally surrendering to God’s easy and loving will instead of continuing to be hard on myself.
I also pray. And in prayer, I feel how much of my heart is still blackened, is still stone or ash. I feel it most of all in my attitudes toward other people. So as I am praying for one or another of these people, I sometimes must say: “Lord, ignore what my heart is saying about this person right now. Ignore it. I pray that you will comfort him and give him blessings, and that he will hear the voice of your love in his life and he will draw closer to you.”
I hope I can continue to keep concealed from you what gets inside my heart. I experience envy. The dislike of people who seem to have things easier than I do rises within my heart, and I resent them for—I don’t know—just existing where I can see them.
I also delight in the misfortune of others. I feel relief when misfortune befalls someone—a sort of happiness, somehow—because when that particular spell of bad news entered the world, it didn’t land on me.
These things are in my heart. Selfishness, fear. They are pruned down sometimes, but the root still remains. You would not believe what is in my heart, what ugly things routinely blossom there. But then, that’s a lie, because I am hoping you would believe it. I am hoping that the hints I have heard are true—that everyone else has infected hearts, too.
I pray past my own heart because I know I am to pray for others—not just the ones I feel fondly about, but also enemies (Matthew 5:44), and also ones about whom no particular feeling rises.
I know I am to do this, because I believe. In addition to envy, anger, selfishness, and fear, I also have allowed belief into my heart. I have given my heart to belief—even though it is a broken heart over which weeds still flourish. The belief to which I’ve given it is very specific. In my heart, there is no single secret that better explains the universe and my own place within it than the resurrection of Christ. And there is no document that better explains Christ than the anthology of scriptures we call the Bible.
So I try as best as I am able to feed upon the Bible’s teachings. And some of the Bible’s teachings prove to be personal prophecies that I see fulfilled—as I watch the fruits of faith ripen in my own life, the fruits that come of finally surrendering to God’s easy and loving will instead of continuing to be hard on myself.
I also pray. And in prayer, I feel how much of my heart is still blackened, is still stone or ash. I feel it most of all in my attitudes toward other people. So as I am praying for one or another of these people, I sometimes must say: “Lord, ignore what my heart is saying about this person right now. Ignore it. I pray that you will comfort him and give him blessings, and that he will hear the voice of your love in his life and he will draw closer to you.”
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Who Is This “Son” We Worship?
All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was
made. —John 1:3
Thinking people naturally wrestle with the notion of an all-knowing God having “hopes” for human beings, and giving us free will. After all, the all-knowing God already knows all! He knows how his hopes will be realized. He knows what choices we will make.
Yet the identification of the Son in the verse above as the one through whom “all things were made” actually speaks to this apparent contradiction. The Son-God as the creative agent of the Father-God provides us with a precious insight—a picture, or perhaps just a glimpse, into the way that our God is simultaneously omnipotent and engaged.
The Son, also called the “Word,” was with the Father in the beginning. The start of John’s gospel says this (John 1:1-2), but the very beginning of the Bible says this as well. In Genesis, in the first three verses, all three members of the Trinity are present.
The Father is in Genesis 1:1. The Spirit is mentioned in 1:2. Then, in Genesis 1:3, God says “Let there be light” before any material sources of light have been created. The sun hasn’t been invented yet. Instead of the sun, this light is the Son. John’s gospel actually confirms this identity—calling the Son “the Light” just before repeating the essential point that the world was made through him (John 1:9-10).
Therefore, what we see in Genesis 1:3 is God sending in the Son—the one who is charged with making every part of the world according to the Father’s will. The Father is the author or designer of the world, while the Son is the craftsman. The Son is, if you will, the carpenter.
This is the one who gave us the Commandments. He identified himself to us in both the Old and New Testaments as “I AM.” Old Testament scripture refers to him as “Lord,” with New Testament scripture making the distinction that God is the Father while the Lord is Christ (I Thessalonians 1:1, for example). In other words, this “Son” has been active and near since well before Jesus. When the Son became human in order to return us to God, he simply embodied in the flesh the very same role he plays through every moment and molecule of the universe. In the flesh or beyond it, the Son is the loving link between God and his creation.
As scripture also puts it, the Son is the vine by which the fruit grows, while the Father is the keeper of the vineyard (John 15:1).
Of course, both are also God. Both are also one God—the same God. “Father” and “Son” are human terms that help humans hold onto these senses of the different ways that God is. Father-God and Son-God are simultaneously the same and separate, simultaneously integral and different.
What are the differences? One of them might be time.
The Father exists outside of time. Necessarily so. He created the linear phenomenon we think of as “time,” and he could not create anything to which he himself is subject. But the Son—while he, too, transcends time—somehow also descends into time to carry out his role. After all, we see the Son working in seasons and following plans that unfold in steps. The Son also pursues and communicates with beings who do live in time, such as you and me.
Another difference between Father and Son might relate to information or perspective. God the Father knows all. God the Son can know all, because the Father would deny him nothing. However, we see hints that the Son knowingly works with less than complete knowledge, leaving ultimate knowledge with the Father. (Mark 13:32 is significant.)
To be sure, the Son knows vastly more than we ever could. From our perspective, the Son is practically omniscient. From his perspective, though, there is one who knows more. Between “practically omniscient” and fully omniscient there lies a distance that, as far as we know, might be great indeed—as great as the distance between the vine and vine keeper. This is the distance before which the Son worshipfully bows to his Father.
The picture that develops from these glimpses shows us something so contrary to our expectations that we still have difficulty imagining it. Namely, ours is a humble god. The Son is as vast as the universe, but at the same time he is so close that we can barely conceive of his intimacy. Rather than standing above us as master, he wishes to stand beside us as friend (John 15:15). What we thought we saw as logical contradictions about the nature of God thus become resonant notes in Christ—harmonizing to voice the very song of his nature. The Son-God fulfills these two separate but complementary roles:
He is the king of all of the cosmos.
Yet he is also the workman, the reverential servant, the maker of creation. He is the one who is faithfully fulfilling every detail of his Father’s perfect plan.
Photo: Detail of MCC chapel courtesy of John Cowell.
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