Holy Longing
Texts: Isaiah 1.1, 10-20; Ps 50.1-8; 22-23;
Hebrews
11.1-3; 8-16; Luke 12.32-40
The God we encounter in today’s lections is, in many ways, a pretty
angry
God. In the passage we read from Isaiah,
the Lord tells
Now, there have always been some Christians who are very uncomfortable with all this anger from God. From the second century there was a crowd known as the Marcionites who wanted to excise the Hebrew Bible from the Christian canon altogether. In their view, the God of the Old Testament was not the God of Jesus Christ. The God of the Old Testament was an angry demiurge who breathed fire and vengeance, while the God of Jesus was loving, forgiving, regarding human foibles always with a smiling tolerance. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, with a characteristically northern European distaste for strong emotions of any kind, many learned theologians and ministers argued that it was wrong to associate anger with God—for God is our best name for all that is calm and peaceful in the cosmos, a kind of mystical still-point around which the chaos and anger of the universe turns. In more recent decades, a whole swag of theologians have argued that the biblical anger of God should be regarded as nothing more than a projection of our all-too-human anger. ‘God does not get angry,’ they argue, ‘WE get angry and then anthropomorphise God so that we can enlist him to our cause.’
What are we to make of these claims? Well, what can I say except that even the most appalling theology has some truth in it! Marcion wanted to emphasise that God was a God of love, which—surprise surprise!— I think is right. God is love, and God does love us. That is the clear message of both the New Testament and the Old, I would have thought. But stay with me now. Isn’t it precisely because God loves us that God gets angry with us sometimes? Wouldn’t a God who never got angry be evidence that God is actually entirely indifferent to what we do—cold, unaffected and distant like the stars in the sky? I think so. Indeed, these days it is widely recognised by both Jews and Christians that the kind of theology that wants to remove every human characteristic or emotion from God is dodgy theology, for it fails to take account of the deepest meaning of the biblical covenants: that is, that God has thrown his lot in with us, for better or for worse, that God has chosen to become corrigible, indeed vulnerable, to all that human beings decide and do.
For Christians, of course, this covenant logic reaches its fulfilment in the fleshly career of one Jesus of Nazareth. What we learn from Jesus, let me suggest, is that it is in the very nature of God to become human, and therefore vulnerable to all that being human actually means. Like getting hurt and disappointed in love, like becoming angry and wishing that one could die. Every one of those emotions, and a whole lot more, were seen in Jesus of Nazareth who, in Christian theology, is the best picture of God that we have. And if the best picture of God that we have is a human being, why should it be wrong to think of a God who is vulnerable to all that we do or don’t do in response to his love? Love, you see, does not make one strong and indifferent. It makes one vulnerable to being hurt.
A few years ago I threw a ‘Thank-God-I-survived-my-doctorate’ party. Some of you were there. Now you have to understand that this was a very important celebration for my family and I. For it’s not every day that an Irish-Aboriginal kid who grew up in poverty (and continues to struggle with all kinds of psychological shite every day of his life) earns a doctorate. That night therefore represented a wonderful celebration of what God is able to do in us. But I had one disappointment. A close friend, a friend whom I love a great deal, did not turn up even though she had promised she would. I looked for her all night, but my looking was in vane, and the excuses she gave after the fact were really, really lame. I still feel rather hurt and angry about that. I will get over it, of course, but I am hurt and angry nevertheless. Love is like that. If you get close to someone, if you make yourself vulnerable, you can experience great joy. If that someone betrays you, however, the wound goes very deep. For when your guard is down, the knife strikes much deeper.
That is how it is with God, too, I think. God loves us more deeply that anyone. God has come so close to us, in Christ and the Spirit, that God has rendered Godself almost powerless in the face of our wavering loyalties. When we make a promise to God, but then we break it, God is really affected. The cross of Christ is our best icon or image of this, for there God is not only wounded by our faithlessness, but mortally so. In Christ God dies the horrible death of unrequited love.
The good news, of course, is that love is not
without its
own power. It is, as the very heart of
what God is, actually stronger than death.
The same passages that present us with a hurt and angry God also
assure
us that God will always be waiting to forgive our faithlessness and
renew the
relationship. God is not one, we are
told, who will hang on to the bitterness of God’s disappointment
forever,
real and visceral as that disappointment actually is.
God’s holy longing for us indeed makes
God vulnerable. But our sin does not, we
are told, kill off God’s longing altogether. God
never will become cold and
indifferent. God will always be waiting
for that time when we come to our senses in a far off country. God will always be waiting to embrace us in
forgiving, reconciling love. God will
always stand before us and beside us, in Christ, to show us what a
truly
redeemed humanity actually looks like.
In Christ, you see, God has been pleased to place in our hands
the very
The strictly theological point to make from this is of course that while God may indeed be different to human beings, and we should therefore be very careful to avoid making God into whatever serves our ideological purposes, a very large part of that classical problematic stems from the fact that, in Christ, God is actually more human than we are. In Christ, God shows us what a human being infused by divine love actually longs for in the face of the very great inhumanity that shadows our world.
Let me conclude by pointing out that this precisely human longing of God also finds a mirror and embodiment in the longing of God’s baptised people for justice, peace and reconciliation in the world. The dismay and anger that we, as God’s people, feel in the face of the troubles all about us reflects the dismay and anger of God. The longing we feel for that ‘better country’ described by the writer to the Hebrews, may be understood as an expression and sacramental embodiment of God’s own longing. For, in the end, it is not that God is slow in bringing about the revolution we so long for. It is not that God has made a promise but is slow to keep it. In the end, our longing is that longing that God has placed in our hearts. It is a longing that motivates us to get off our arses and do something for this world which God loves so passionately and for which Christ died.
The challenge for us this afternoon is therefore this: as God’s child, God has placed God’s longing in your heart. Will you allow that longing to take flesh, as Christ has taken flesh? Will you engage the world anew, with all its soiled relationships, in the faith, hope and love of Jesus? Will you go from this chapel and actually keep the promises you made in your baptism, to turn from evil and do good, to stop being part of the problem and start becoming part of the new humanity inaugurated in Christ? Will you care enough even to become hurt and angry? It’s up to you. Remember that God is not the kind of God who will bully you into anything. God will rail with anger, certainly, remonstrating passionately with all in your life and your world that is less than the humanity revealed in Jesus. But the choice, and all that follows from that choice, is still with you. The way of God’s Spirit in the world is that of longing and lamenting, of hoping and imagining. So, will you answer God’s prayers? Will you light your lamp and keep it burning, that the world may be transfigured in love?
Blessed be God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so now and forever. Amen.
Garry
Deverell
10th Sunday after Pentecost