The Hidden God
St Mary’s Linton June 25th 2017 Trinity 2 Proper 7 Ian Fisher
During the hot summer evenings we often open the doors and windows of our sitting room in an attempt to get some movement of air and keep the temperature on the tolerable side of too hot. But as you know, one consequence of sitting in a room at night with the doors and windows open and the lights on is that very quickly the light is surrounded by moths, beetles and other flying insects. The attraction of moths to the light must have had provided some evolutionary advantage which allowed them to compete, survive and reproduce. They were certainly in no danger when the only light at night was that of the moon, but now this attraction to the light can prove pretty fatal. Those that dodge the rolled up newspaper have a tendency to fly so close to the light that they are killed by the heat. And if you prefer the softer tones of candle light you can watch moths fly into the flames and cremate themselves. There are, of course, ways of protecting the insects from their self-destructive tendencies. Net curtains or fly screens stop the getting too close to the light to damage themselves.
In the gospel reading this morning Jesus sends his disciple out warning them that they will be maligned, that members of their own families will be against then. They shouldn’t be surprised because they have not recognized who Jesus was and called him Beelzebul, the devil. But why did people not recognise who Jesus was? The persecution that St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and the many others in the early Church suffered seems to have resulted from people not believing what they claimed about Jesus: that he was the son of God, that he was God. Sadly, however strongly these early Christian witnessed to what they had seen and so believed they had no knock down proof that what they believed was true.
Since the time of the early Church things have changed, Christians today tend not to suffer physical suffering and death for their beliefs, at least in this country. Those who wish to attack Christianity tend to use the tools of ridicule or contempt. We still have no definitive proof of what we believe. If you look at the debate between science and theology today there are scientist like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawkins and Carl Sagan who see in the discoveries of modern science the evidence that there is no God and so there nothing in our claims of the divinity of Jesus, but those same scientific discoveries are to the likes of John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke and David Wilkinsonevidence that there is a God and Jesus was his son. The evidence of the natural world does not prove the case one way or the other. Nor are the other forms of evidence, the records of the bible, the witness of the evangelists to Jesus resurrection, the experience of the Christians throughout the centuries, or our own experience. None of these, individually or lumped together provide us with that knock down proof. And while there is doubt there is room for ridicule, contempt and persecution.
This situation is not helped when tragedies like the fire in the Kensington Tower block, or the terrorist attacks in Manchester London or Finsbury Park occur. Such events always raise the question,‘Where is God?’
Why does God make it so difficult for us? Why doesn't he make his existence more obvious? Why is it that there is no event we can point to, no argument we can call upon, no proof that God is God? When we look at the gospels, particularly St Mark's gospel we find that Jesus was not always as helpful as he might have been. There are many times where we find Jesus attempting to keep his identity and actions secret. When he is casting out demons and they cry out 'you are the son of God' he orders them to keep silence. When he raises Jairus daughter from the dead he tells the witness to keep silence, and similarly when he heals a leper and a blind man. But most tellingly at CaesareaPhilippi when Peter identifies Jesus as the Christ, Jesus immediately charges the disciples to tell no one.
Why did Jesus try to keep his identity secret? Why didn’t he want people to report the miracles? Why would he not give the Pharisees the sign they demanded? In one way we can see Jesus putting a veil around himself, keeping people away from the divine light that was inside. Jesus as God incarnate is God's chief revelation of himself to his creation, but like all the other ways that God has revealed himself there is still hiddenness, a deniability. In all his dealings with the world God never forces himself on our attention; he is never so obvious that it would be impossible for us to deny his existence. This is where we come back to the suicidal moths.
If God made himself so obvious that we were unable to deny his existence then we would be like the moth drawn to the candle, drawn so closely into the light that we lose our own identity, consumed by the flame. It is part of the Christian belief that God wants us for who we are, that in our encounter with God we maintain our identity, we are not, as in some other religions, subsumed into the divine being. A veiled God whom we can approach not with certainty but only by faith is the only God who will maintain our autonomy and freedom, freedom to be ourselves, freedom to love him, freedom to be loved by him, freedom to come to him without compulsion or coercion. But to maintain that freedom God must also maintain our freedom not to believe, freedom to deny his existence to live in the world as if there were no God.
God's chose Jesus as the primary means of his revelation of himself to us not to prove to people that he existed, but to show what sort of God he was, a God of love. If he had wished simply to prove to us that he existed there were many other ways he could have used, more spectacular, less costly, avoiding the suffering and death of the cross. Jesus called people to be his disciples and follow him, and those disciples he called friends. They were friends and fellow workers who followed him because they loved him, not slaves who out of fear of the divine power he possessed did what he said. This was the dispensation of the Spirit that brings life, not the letter of the law which through the exercise of judicial power brings death.
'God sent Jesus', so Paul tells us in Galatians, 'that we might receive adoption as his Children. Not a slave but a child and if a child an heir.' or as St Athanasius put it 'God was made man that we might be made like God'. But so that we can receive adoption as heirs; that we can become like God, God has set us apart from himself, veiled himself so that we are not engulfed in his being, but may, glimpsing the light through the veil, choose to come to God, to freely love and serve him and be with him.
AMEN
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