Lent IIb - Sunday March 12th, 2006
(by Rev. Glenn Brown)
I received an e-mail from God this week. Along with the usual personal greetings, how are the wife and daughter, etc., God wanted me to pass on to you a major announcement: God has decided, after listening to many complaints, that 2000 years is a long time, and that there should be a new divine self-revelation. God understands that it is difficult to understand in today’s times things that happened so long ago. After all, it was just over half that time between the Ten Commandments and Jesus, so, everything considered, God says, we’ve done quite well. Of course, all other self-revelations have been for God’s purposes – things God wanted us to know and understand. So God certainly paid attention to making the lessons fit for their times, revelations that could be understood right away, even if difficult in later centuries. And generally, God feels that those were successful – attention was paid, and they were recognized for what they were.
But this is different. This time, God will be revealing Godself to meet our needs and expectations. Apparently there isn’t any news that God wants to convey – no new rules, no new exemptions, no new purpose in life (it’s the same as it’s always been), no change to free will, and no powers that we haven’t developed over time. The issue, as God sees it, is credibility – God realizes that after so long we’re not sure that Jesus was indeed divine and, now that we are more keenly aware of other religions, we sometime wonder if there is one that is “truer” than another, so to speak. So, God wants to know what we want by way of a new revelation.
To help us make our list of expectations, I ask this: how would we expect to be able to recognize the divine among us? At the very least, you might say, the divine would have to be significantly different so there would be no mistaking him or her for a human. Now I just want to refer you to a phenomenon which is not to be confused with divine revelation, but which bears on our discussion. If you have ever looked at illustrations of people’s descriptions of alien beings that have kidnapped them, they tend, like E.T., to have slim bodies supporting large heads with emphatically large eyes. Supposedly the large eyes of babies are genetically designed to elicit sympathy from us. That is to say, even when people imagine alien abductions, they tend to anthropomorphize the creatures and make them somewhat sympathetic. We resist accepting things that are too unlike us, and instead try to squeeze them in our imaginations into something more like us. It isn’t at all clear that we would acknowledge a divinity that did not have some resemblance to us. Probably anything too dissimilar would be regarded as of lesser intelligence. This is just the way our minds handle things. I’m not saying that we would demand a human, but something very human-like. But then, why should we seriously expect God to be so approachable? The One is who is responsible for all Creation, how could we conceive of such a one being physically or optically present at all? Given the impossibility of the first task, being approachable to our senses, or at least some of them, we are going to have to accept some sort of proxy. And maybe that’s how we should understand Jesus, as God’s proxy. In that time and culture, that’s exactly what a son was – the father’s proxy; an ambassador plenipotentiary, with the power to speak on behalf of the one whom he represents, but with no identity of his own. Son of God, you see? Jesus is the proxy of God in a very family-oriented way, not in an abstract, or political way, as the term “proxy” would normally connote. The very willingness to express the relationship in family terms says a lot, don’t you think? How do you suggest that these qualities of family relationship be expressed?
Or would you prefer that God assume a more distant relationship with you? The lawyers and prophets of the Old Testament, you know, understood the relationship better as an emperor of great power and military potency; a distant one who could not be seen or heard (save by a few in their dreams or in their thoughts), and who communicated indirectly. Perhaps people would prefer that we return to the distant God? I would point out that in those circumstances, there was always one or more intermediary – someone through whom you had to go to get your answers. Does that meet the modern need?
While you are considering that, let me bring up something else: God said in the e-mail that there is nothing new which is necessary to communicate. But since God is willing to provide a new revelation, let me ask you, is there something you need to know that hasn’t already been provided? Is there a new rule we need? Let me see, God has covered envy, murder, deceit and dissembling, care for the helpless, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, loving others as we love ourselves; God has prescribed for our health one full day a week of rest, which we most firmly ignore. There were ancient rules about diet and sanitary provisions, but we have all that firmly in hand on our own, haven’t we? We’ve also been told how to pray, but, in contrast with other religions, we have not been required to pray a particular number of times or in a certain way. The gospel writers themselves acknowledge that they didn’t include everything Jesus taught. I wonder if it is fair therefore to assume that Jesus answered all their questions satisfactorily? Now, there were lots of books written later than the gospels that sought to answer additional questions, but the so-called answers were very vague, and so the early Church didn’t see fit to include those works in the Bible. So we may assume that there were no more questions not already answered. Well, there is one obvious exception – what is the afterlife like? Most Biblical responses to that are that we would not be able to understand.
That’s it! We want to know what the afterlife is like, don’t we? Now, remember Jesus’ saying that we don’t seem to be able to handle what we have of divine knowledge; why would we expect to be able to understand loftier things? And I guess the normal human answer to that is that we learn by seeing what there is to learn. Knowing what there is to yet understand helps us to grow mentally so that eventually we can take it all in. But perhaps comparisons are necessary to show us why this hasn’t been revealed already. I love my dog and enjoy her company, and I know that she understands some speech, and that she can think and reason and predict and anticipate, and therefore can think abstractly. But I don’t seriously expect to teach her to read, nor certainly to speak English. That would require modification.
Now, how do you feel about being modified? We like being modified temporarily, while drinking or using drugs, but most of us have a sense of self that we want to return to, even if only to escape later to avoid the pains of life or simply because we think the modified us is more desirable. But we do always want to return to ourselves, and to know that our real self is always available.
The desire for divine knowledge has been with us from the beginning. The creation story says that people were forbidden from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil so that they would not be like God in their knowledge. Countless myths of other religions have stories about humans stealing secrets from the gods. Apparently all cultures chafe against the limitations that keep us from being gods. But our story goes on to say that, having eaten of the fruit, we misunderstood. Adam and Eve never realized that what they had done wrong was to disobey God. Instead they concluded that what was wrong was their nakedness. This is a warning that having divine knowledge does not necessarily guarantee understanding it correctly. I think that is true of much that science has already discovered for us.
Now, if understanding of divine knowledge is what you want, well I suggest that there is still a lot for us to understand about this life without getting into the next.
Let’s get back to the original question I posed: what was wrong with Jesus’ witness? We know from the story in this morning’s Scripture reading that people were dissatisfied with his witness at the time – he saved others, let him save himself! I for one think there wasn’t anything wrong with Jesus’ witness. Everything we could handle was covered, and probably more! We’re still trying to understand that. But you know, eating the fruit, the actual knowledge of the divine, didn’t seem to work. I think we’re still chewing that fruit and hiding our nakedness behind the bushes. We still don’t get it, even though Jesus’ witness was not complicated. People killed Jesus rather than accept his witness. He just wasn’t any of the different things they had in mind. Probably that’s why God came in person – God couldn’t justify having someone else come and be killed.
Envy, murder, deceit and dissembling, care for the helpless, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, loving others as we love ourselves. Clearly there is nothing wrong with the message. Jesus got it right. We don’t need him to return. We don’t need a new version.
It’s like he said: if you’ve got ears, listen up! No sense in having someone else come and get killed, too.
