The Unexpected God

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 1:1-2:4a.

In 2008, a self-published Christian book became the number 1 trade paperback fiction bestseller and remained so for 2 years. That's odd but the novel is an odd one even for a Christian book. It's called The Shack and it concerns a man whose youngest daughter was abducted by a serial killer. When the man, who is named Mack, is mysteriously summoned to the cabin where police think his child was murdered, he encounters God as several different people. One, called Papa, initially appears to him as an African American woman, Jesus appears as a Middle Eastern carpenter, and the Holy Spirit manifests as an Asian woman. He later encounters the personification of God's wisdom as an Hispanic woman. Finally Papa appears as an older Native American man to lead him to his daughter's body. The main part of the book is Mack talking with God about the senseless tragedy in his life. The author, William P. Young, explains that the title, The Shack, refers to “the house you build out of your own pain.”

It's a very wise, emotionally powerful book about reconciling grievous loss with God's love. Word of mouth in churches made it a bestseller. Yet some Christians objected to its depiction of God, some even calling it heresy. To which I can only say, “Did you find it in the theology section of your bookstore or library? Or was it in fiction?” And since it is fiction, this puts in the same category as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Pilgrim's Progress, and, dare I say it, Jesus' parables. At various times Jesus compares God to a vineyard owner, a sleepy house owner, a farmer sowing seeds, a shepherd looking for lost sheep, a woman looking for lost coins, a king whose son is getting married, a moneylender, an unjust judge, and a master who commends his dishonest manager. Jesus compares himself to a bridegroom, a hen protecting its chicks, a bronze snake raised up by Moses, a gate, a shepherd, a vine, and living bread, among other things. For followers of a person who used similes, allegories and metaphors all the time, it seems really strange that they are thrown by a fictional story where God appears temporarily as people of various ethnicities and sexes.

Whenever we talk about God we must use picture-language. God is by nature beyond our total comprehension. And so just as we need to use a mental picture of a rubber sheet and balls of various sizes to get a basic grip on gravity and space, or the tiny solar system model of the atom, we need graspable ways to understand different aspects of God. Scripture tends to use titles like king, father, husband, shepherd, etc to describe God. Jesus is called the Lamb of God and the Word of God made flesh. The Spirit is called wind, breath, the finger of God, the power of God and our Advocate/Comforter/Helper.

Of course, that's not enough for some people. There is a meme of Facebook that goes like this: “And Jesus said unto the theologians, 'Who do you say that I am?' They replied, 'You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the kergyma of which we find the ultimate meaning in our interpersonal relationships.' And Jesus said, 'What?'” I'm not putting down theology but if the Bible had been written in that language it would not have survived the centuries.

Today is Trinity Sunday and “trinity” is not a word found in the Bible. It was coined to refer to one of the central mysteries of our faith. Scripture says that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet it never backs off of the assertion that there is only one God. The concept of the Trinity, far from trying to explain how this is so, is actually our way of preserving the paradox. That's why efforts to oversimplify it by, say, claiming that it's just God wearing 3 different masks, are called heresies. As J. B. Phillips pointed out, a god small enough to fit into our minds will not be large enough to help us with the big issues in life. And how can a simple god explain, let alone govern our complex and interconnected universe?

Neuroscientists and developmental scientists have noted that almost all children believe in God. Even babies quickly learn the difference between inanimate objects and agents who can change things in the world. They readily pick up on the idea of the unseen agent, like the person who must have picked them up from the sofa where they fell asleep and put them in their bed, or who put away their toys, even if they didn't see who it was. They understand that things do not spontaneously come into being but are made. They also see that most things have a purpose. Comedian Pat Sweeney was surprised to discover her daughter believed in God despite being raised as an atheist. Her kid reassured her that, if it made her mother feel better, she would pretend there was no God when she was home.

Either we are the bewildered beneficiaries of a highly improbable, nearly mathematically impossible run of fortunate accidents, or this universe with its inviolable natural laws has a Creator. So believing in that kind of God is fairly easy. And indeed 83% of the world's population believe in God, with 63% absolutely certain and 20% fairly certain. 7% of the people in the world are atheists with most of them in China. 5% of American adults are agnostics and 4% are actual atheists. And yet nearly 1 in 5 atheists does believe in some kind of higher power. It's just really hard to believe that we and the world are the results of random happenstance.

This is not to say that everyone believes in a transcendent God, independent of the universe in the same way a mechanic is separate from the machine he made. Some believe God is the universe, while some believe God is in the universe. Christianity, while holding that God is transcendent, also says God is immanent, or in creation, through his Holy Spirit. Part of it is that, just as a novel or a work of art reflects something of the author or artist, creation reflects aspects of God. (Psalm 19:1-4) 

But it is more than that. God's Spirit is at work in creation. Often we focus on how breakable things are and forget how they tend to repair themselves. A forest fire destroys hundreds of square miles of trees. In just a year there is evidence of new growth and in a decade only experts can see there was once a fire there. The reason we set broken bones is that they will start growing together again regardless of whether we straighten them or not. If our injuries didn't heal we would emerge from childhood crisscrossed with innumerable tiny wounds. Even big scars fade. While it is good that we have finally acknowledged post-traumatic stress and its psychological damage, we are only beginning to recognize the existence of post-traumatic growth and the remarkable resilience most of us have. This healing and renewal we see in creation is what theologians call "common grace" given by the Spirit.

And while we acknowledge God the Creator who is separate from what he made and the Spirit who works in creation, they are so abstract it is difficult to relate to them. We are personal beings. And so God also comes to us in a form we understand and can relate to: Jesus Christ. As J.B. Phillips put it, this is the vast God who is beyond our comprehension focused in terms of time and space and human personality. And Jesus was not a rich and powerful king as one might have expected of God but an ordinary working man, whom most people can relate to. He was a Jew, the object of the antisemitism of the Greco-Roman culture of that time. He lived in a tiny country, occupied by an army carrying out the will of a brutal dictatorship. He didn't travel on a horse or in a chariot but on foot. His whole life he never visited what was considered in his time an important city and was never more that a week's walk from his hometown. His friends were not influential but a bunch of fishermen and a tax collector and a former political fanatic and and several women who held no sway in that culture. He never led an army. Most of his followers were people who came to be healed and then heard him preach. And many stopped following him when he said some hard to understand and hard to swallow truths. A friend betrayed him to his religious rivals, who in turn misrepresented him before a politician who was on shaky ground with the emperor. And more to shut them up rather than him, the politician had Jesus executed in the most painful and humiliating way. All in all, Jesus' life story was not terribly different from a lot of the prophets, or anyone who ran afoul of the authorities. But it's not the life you would expect for God Incarnate. Except for one last thing he did.

It was such a "not that unusual" life that we may never have heard about Jesus if, like all the other would-be messiahs before and after him, he had stayed dead. He would have been like Socrates, a wise thinker, unjustly killed, no more. If his disciples hadn't met with him after his execution and burial, and had they not come out of hiding and declared that he had risen from the dead, and had they not continued to proclaim this even though it cost them their lives, and if they hadn't had it written down and disseminated throughout the empire, we never would have suspected that he was someone more than a mere man. In Jesus God became, as much as possible, one of us.

Even so, the church could have saved everybody a lot of headaches if it had broken with the Old Testament and declared there were 3 gods. Although that would have made Jesus' own insistence that there is one God difficult to explain away. Or the church could have said it was one God in 3 different modes. Except that would have made it odd when Jesus talks to the Father or about the Holy Spirit in the third person. So the church came up with the term trinity, not to explain or simplify the paradox but to preserve it.

What helped me with the concept was the statement in the first letter of John, where he says that “God is love.” (1 John 4:8) Not that God is loving but that God is love itself. If we think of the persons in the Trinity as so absolutely in love as to think and act and speak as one, this helps us understand it a bit better. We get glimpses of this when 2 parents, who otherwise have different opinions on everything else, are in total agreement when it comes to their children. Or when when a writer and a director and an actor share the same vision for a play or a movie. Or when politicians from different parties come together to do something for the good of all the citizens. But those are just brief and exceptional flashes of the unity which is the eternal state of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

And each performs different functions in the realization of the unified will of the Triune God. The Father creates us. Jesus dies for us. The Spirit unites us. Specifically, the Father creates us in the image of God. Jesus models the image of God for us. The Spirit restores the image of God in us.

And, as with any close collaboration, there is overlap. Father, Son and Spirit are all involved in creation. (Genesis 1:1-2; John 1:1, 14) Sent by the Father, the Son is able to minister to us in his earthly life through the power of the Spirit. (Luke 3:21-22; 4:14) Both the Son and the Spirit intercede for us with the Father. (1 John 2:1-2; Romans 8:26) Because Father, Son and Spirit are one.

And we are supposed to imitate this oneness. On the night before he died, Jesus prayed that we would be one as he and the Father are one. (John 17:11)

But what a second! Aren't we created in God's image? Shouldn't being like God be our default setting? Why don't we see this oneness in human beings?

Because it is the oneness, not of ideology, not of race, not of nationality, but of love. And genuine love is voluntary. God did not make us robots, preprogrammed to act a certain way. God gave us the ability to choose. And as we have seen, people often choose not to love God or to love those who made in God's image. Instead we have chosen to love certain people and not others. We have chosen to act in ways that are definitely not loving. Or we have simply chosen not to act, one way or the other; to sit on the sidelines and let the unloving actions of others continue.

God did not choose to sit back. When we chose not to act in loving ways towards others, God acted. The Father gave us his law of love, and the justice that proceeds from that love, and the mercy that tempers that justice. And then his Son, Jesus, entered into creation and fulfilled that law in his life, and especially in his death. He showed us the full extent of God's love, justice and mercy. He didn't back down when the powers that be, the religious and political leaders of his day, wanted him to either shut up or toe the line. And when he didn't, they beat him, they whipped him and they killed him. God took the worst we could do to him, and he did so out of selfless love. And in his passion we see clearly the line between hate and self-sacrificial love, and between those who abuse their power to make others do what they want and the one who laid aside certain divine prerogatives and powers, (Philippians 2:5-8) choosing instead to display the power of love.

Meanwhile, his students and friends holed up behind locked doors, afraid of the authorities. Until the risen Jesus appeared to them and showed them the power divine love has even over death. And when the Spirit was poured out on them and ignited their courage, they publicly defied the authorities and preached the good news of God's love, justice and mercy, despite beatings and imprisonment and eventually their deaths.

We have been invited to enter into the eternal love relationship of Father, Son and Spirit. But to be able to do that, we must be changed into persons who love as God does. We need to choose to let the Spirit write the law of love, justice and mercy in our hearts. (Jeremiah 31:33) But it's not enough for it to stay there. We must, like Jesus, display love, justice and mercy in our lives. Which means we need to let the Spirit empower us to live by that law.

As we have seen, not merely today but throughout all of history, there are plenty who choose not to love others, not to love their neighbors and especially not their enemies. And they are willing to use their power to enforce the law of “might makes right.” Which makes countering that by displaying God's law of love, justice and mercy scary. Jesus said count the cost. He said, “Whoever does not carry his own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:27)

And so it comes down to faith. Do we really believe that the fundamental reality behind all creation is that God is love? Do we really believe that Jesus showed the extent of that love by suffering and dying for others? Do we really believe that in his resurrection he showed that not even death can triumph over God's love? Do we really trust God's Spirit enough to let him propel us into similar loving but risky acts of justice and mercy?

Paul wrote, “For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15) Jesus died for us. The first Christians died for him. What are you willing to do in response to God's unlimited, incomprehensible love?