Surprised by God

by Chris E W Green

  The good news is that God is not needy. God is conditioned by nothing, and so is in no way vulnerable to manipulation. And just for that reason we can trust the divine promises, and can rest in the hope that the end purposed for us is good as he is good. God does not need our love, or our worship, or our obedience. God does not create or redeem us to meet some lack in his life. He creates and saves for nothing but our good. All that he does, like all that he is, is gift. To see that is to live in the light.

  Chapter Three

  Saving Desire

  “One thing I have desired of the Lord . . . to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.” Psalm 27:4

  “He had no form or beauty that we should look to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.”

  Isaiah 53:2

  Why do we love God? When we find ourselves desiring God, what is it that we find desirable and lovely? How is it that we come to love this particular God in the first place? And what is the source of this loving? What is its goal? Scripture reveals that we love God because God first loved us. But we should not take this to mean our love for God is a self-determined response. We love God because we are graced to do so. Or, to say the same thing another way, we love God because God loves our love for God into being. All that God requires of us God first makes possible for us, and then leads us into that possibility—and just so into our fulfillment.

  What we love about God is rightly called his beauty. But at least for those of us who believe that the truth about God is revealed in the story of a particularly scandalous Palestinian peasant, what a strange beauty it turns out to be. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised by that strangeness, after all. It is God’s beauty, and precisely for that reason a loveliness we cannot fashion on our own and would not even if we could. This divine beauty is not only unimaginable for us, it is unbecoming by our standards, and we have to suffer it patiently if we ever hope to see it for what it truly is. As St. Paul reminds us, God’s wisdom seems like so much foolishness to our common sense and his power appears weak compared with our illusions of mastery (1 Cor 1:18–31). To be sure, we are creatures made for God, and so in some sense naturally desire him. He is, as Augustine said, our homeland. But what if we are so afraid, so caught up in untruth, so weary with our own failures, so bewildered by the wrongs done to us, that we do not find him desirable? Or, to say the same thing more traditionally, what if we are so diseased by sin that we can’t bring ourselves to love God as God is and love our neighbor as ourselves?

  Before moving on, I do want to say this as clearly as I can: when in worship we confess that we are sinners, we are not engaging in self-hatred or self-abuse. Just the opposite, in fact. We are acknowledging to ourselves and to others before God our absolute helplessness to live the lives we want and need to live. We are acknowledging that we can only receive what we need as God freely graces us to receive it. We are acknowledging that we can only see God’s beauty as God opens our eyes to it.

  That may, at first, sound like bad news. But in fact this is the ground of all our hope: God is not our creation but our creator, not what we make him out to be, but what he in fact is by virtue of his own life wholly apart from us. And just because he is lovely in himself he can make us lovely, awakening us to the truth of his beauty so that we both see him as he is and become like him in that seeing. I said in the previous chapter that nothing is more fitting or freeing for us than contemplating God’s beauty. The good news is that God makes that reality possible by sharing his own life, his own loveliness, with us. What is uniquely his, he makes ours.

  ***

  But we are too easily deceived by our desires—especially by our desires for the transcendence and eternity that determine the ultimate meaning of our lives. The Gospels teach us that many of those who crowded around Jesus, including some of his closest disciples and dearest friends, were drawn to him by false hopes and vain expectations. The hard truth is that we too often find ourselves attracted to what we wrongly think is God. At times, like Simon the Sorcerer, we come seeking God for those powers we find useful, imagining that by professing belief in God we have secured a resource that will afford us the life we want for ourselves (Acts 8:9–25). But for most of us, at least most of the time, the deception is more subtle, less complete. Our desires are not so much out-and-out corrupt as ever-so-slightly bent. We delight in the justice of God, but at least in part because we imagine it means grief for our enemies. We delight in the mercy of God, but at least in part because we imagine it frees us from responsibility to work for justice in the world. We delight in the power of God, but at least in part because we imagine it means we are protected from sufferings others have to face. We delight in the truth of God, but at least in part because we take pride in being right, and we want to be known as knowledgeable and wise. We delight in the law of God, but at least in part because we imagine it provides a moral framework that allows us to sort neatly right from wrong, order from disorder, the good folks from the bad folks. We delight in the calling of God, but at least in part because we imagine it means we can find success in ministry and make a name for ourselves. We delight in the presence and work of God in our lives, but at least in part because we like how that experience leaves us feeling and we want to advance quickly into the depths and heights of our faith.

  We are always, until the end, living at the risk of these deceptions and countless others like them. But we do not need to panic or to despair. If we desire what is good in ways that are not good, we can rest assured that God will gracefully disappoint us. If what we find delightful in God is in fact an illusion, God has promised to go on revealing his true beauty until we find that beauty truly desirable.

  ***

  But how does God do this? If we find God-as-he-is undesirable, if we are attracted to what is merely a projection of immature or confused desires, if we have launched ourselves with all good intentions toward a goal that is not in fact attainable, then how can we receive the good we need to be truly ourselves? Answering that question brings us to the heart of the gospel: we can find God beautiful only as he both makes himself fully present and available to us and creates in us the power to respond in kind. Only God can know God, and only God can lead us into knowing as we are known. We cannot save ourselves from ourselves, and the most precious gifts are those we cannot but receive. We are creatures, and so radically, utterly dependent on God for our salvation no less than for our existence. In fact, if the gospel is true, we are free to be saved only because we are the creatures that we are: finite, temporal, embodied. And God is free to save us just because he is the God he is: infinite, triune, and incarnate. Because God is three-as-one, and has taken our humanity as his own, he can make us beautiful with his own beauty without in any sense violating our creaturely integrity or unmaking our particularities as human persons.

  In taking our humanity as his own, however, God scandalizes and offends us. As Bonhoeffer reminds us in his christology lectures, the incarnation is not a humiliation for God—it is not as if God finds it unbecoming to take humanity as his own! The incarnation is a humiliation for us, because God comes among us as one without beauty, without desirability or comeliness, making nonsense of every frame of reference, every standard of judgment, every order and scheme we have devised for ourselves as a means of giving our lives significance and stability. Simone Weil has it right, I think: “through the operation of the dark night, God withdraws himself in order not to be loved like the treasure is by the miser.”

  What offends us, therefore, is the revelation that God is humble, and that it is only as we humble ourselves—counting as nothing all of the achievements and privileges that assure us of our significance and refusing all of the structures that secure us against the threats of our enemies—that we can truly be ourselves, at home in the world we’ve been given, ready to bear responsibilities for our neighbors. God loves us too much to let us settle for the god of our own imagining. He
scandalizes us in order to deliver us from illusion.

  ***

  Why do we exist? Why does anything at all exist? According to the Scriptures, “all things were created through Christ and for him,” and in the end he, with us—co-laborers in his humiliation and co-inheritors in his exaltation—will return creation to the Father so that God may be “all in all.” This truth is basic to everything else we believe: creation comes about not through any need or lack in the divine life. Creation comes about just because God’s life is an endless, always-excessive exchange of the gift of the divine nature. At every point, therefore, creation remains dependent on the infinite generosity and hospitality of God. And our joy, our fulfillment, comes in participation in that eternally generous and hospitable event.

  With that understanding, we recognize sin as whatever it is that frustrates or defaces our joy, whatever it is that keeps us from resting in the event of God that is the source of our life. Tragically, the power of sin is such that it can and does keep us from that joy, that rest—and just so from being ourselves. If, then, we are to know the life purposed for us, we must be redeemed, delivered, reconciled, healed. How does God do this? In the same way that he exists and creates: by love, triunely given and received.

  That said, it is important to notice that redemption differs from creation in at least one respect: God must take up both the giving and the receiving for us. He cannot simply give himself to us, because sin keeps us from receiving his gift as gift. So he must receive his own gift for us, and do it in such a way that we have generated within us the capacity to enjoy the life we’re purposed to live. For us to be ourselves, God must destroy the power of sin that enslaves us, setting us free to be loved and to love, delivering us to share in the joy unspeakable that the divine life eternally is.

  With creation, God suffers no pain, no loss. With redemption, however, he does. Notice how often the New Testament speaks in terms like these: the Father must give up his Son and the Son must both give himself over for us to death and give himself into the Father’s hands in obedience unto death. In order to destroy sin, the divine life has in the humanity of the Son taken into itself the horrors of sin and death—the thanklessness, the ignorance, the pretension, the fear. Gloriously, however, God’s love is too much for death as light is too much for darkness and laughter too much for weeping. The giving and receiving of the Father, Son, and Spirit triumph in the flesh of Christ over all the powers that would unmake us and our world.

  ***

  Although the triune God is always holding us up, our redemption isn’t complete, isn’t truly ours, until we find ourselves loving as God loves. God’s work in us won’t be consummated until we can love one another, ourselves, and every created thing with the same love that the triune God is and makes possible. That and nothing less than that is what God desires for us and effects in us.

  But so many of our desires are chronically, even fatally, diseased. At times, we find ourselves hyper-aware of what’s happening, eaten up with unholy dissatisfactions, complaining about what we don’t have or grumbling about what we do. Other times, we are almost entirely unaware of what’s happening, hardly sensitive at all to the beauty bursting forth around us, shining in the face of this neighbor, that stranger.

  So what is our hope? How can we be healed? God saves us from bad desires (what St. Augustine calls disordered loves) by taking us up into God’s own desire—for God and for us. In the incarnation, God humanizes the divine desire and divinizes human desires. Because that work is accomplished, the Spirit now is drawing us into communion with Jesus, the one who embodies human desire wholly aligned with the divine desire, and so reorders our loves. We might even say that the life of the Spirit is nothing other than the movement of the Son’s desire for the Father and the Father’s delight in the Son. And it is that life, that movement, that has taken us up for our good.

  Talking about the Spirit in such terms reminds us that when we tell the story of Jesus’s life and death, we should not talk as if the Father and the Son are the only ones acting. In a sense, it is the Spirit who makes all of their work possible. The Spirit is the freedom through which the Father’ gives and gives up the Son, and through which the Father receives the Son again. The Spirit is the power by which the Son gives himself over to death and offers himself up to the Father in such a way that the Father’s inexhaustible love for the world is made known. The Spirit is the wisdom that makes the Father’s love for us and for his only begotten Son, as well as the Son’s love for his Father and for us, always indivisibly one and the same love. The Spirit is the grace that holds the Father and the divine-human Son in their mutually determining intimacy—even on the cross, even in death. Because the Spirit bridges the empty distance of sin and death, we do not exist outside of the reach of the divine love: this is why nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Because the Spirit is the Spirit, nothing that exists exists outside or apart from the presence of the love that God triunely is. “Even in hell, you are there.”

  This truth comes into stark relief in the juxtaposition of two Pauline texts: First, Romans 8:15–17, 26–27:

  For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. . . . Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

  And then, 1 Corinthians 2:10, 13–16:

  These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny. “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

  Reading these texts closely, we see that the Spirit searches the depths of the Father, and discovers there for us the mind, the character, of Christ. And we see that the Father searches our hearts, coming to know us in and through the Spirit’s intimacy with us as giver and sustainer of our life. The Father searches us as the Spirit searches the Father, and what the Father finds in us is the need for the fullness of divine life which the Spirit discovers for us in the Father’s depths. The Spirit knows God as God is and knows us as we are, and in that knowing draws us into God’s own communion with God so that we are at-one-ed with him, joined to him as bone of Christ’s bone and flesh of his flesh.

  ***

  God is lovely because God is lover, loved, and love itself, giving and receiving love in a way perfectly fitting for his own infinite life. Richard of St. Victor makes the argument something like this: God is love because the Father loves the Son with the love only God can give, and the Son receives and reciprocates this love in the way only God can receive and reciprocate it. In the same way, the Father and the Son together co-love the Spirit, who, in receiving this perfectly shared love, is freed to love the Father and the Son into loving one another beyond selfishness. And because this is the God in whose image we are made, it is only as we come to gaze on this beauty that we begin to become our true selves, bodying forth the fearless love from which and for which we are made.

  A few years ago, I had all of this brought to bear on me unexpectedly and unforgettably. My in-laws had come in from Oklahoma, and my mother-in-law had bro
ught gifts for my kids. Zoë, my oldest, had a gift ready to give back to her. My middle son, Clive, seeing this, left the gift he had just received and ran upstairs to his room, and came back, moments later, with a book—which, believe it or not, my mother-in-law had given to him some other time. I could see that he was torn: he so desperately wanted to give her a gift in return, but he also loved this book that she had given him and he didn’t want to be without it. She saw his hesitation too, and quickly knelt down, put her arm around him, and reassured him: “Thank you for this gift, Clive! I don’t want you to be without it when I’m back at home. Can we keep it here at your house so that whenever I’m here with you, we can read it together?”

  Surely that is the kind of change God means to work in us. To be drawn into God’s beauty is to have our lives so taken up in the moment of gift that we lose all sense of where the giving ends and the receiving begins. Becoming one with the Three whose life is perfect delight, we’re translated into a whole new realm of being, becoming, in ways we would never have even dared to imagine, truly ourselves.

  Chapter Four

  Practicing the Absence of God

  “You are a God who hides himself, God of Israel, Savior.”Isaiah 45:15

  “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you, which shall be the darkness of God.”

  T. S. Eliot

  We talk—too much, arguably—about the presence of God. At least, we often talk too glibly about it. We talk as if that presence comes and goes depending on how intensely we desire it. We talk as if our desires for God’s presence are always a good and pure. We talk as if God’s presence is something simply to be enjoyed. But all of these assumptions, betrayed in myriad ways in our speech and in our actions, need to be challenged.