Surprised by God

by Chris E W Green

  The Epistle also reminds us that we hope to “share in the glory of God” (Rom 5:2)—the very God who identifies himself as the one who does not share his glory with another (Isa 42:8)! How can this be? Just because, in Christ, we in fact are not another. We are flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, his joint-heirs and co-operants. What is his is ours. What happens to him, happens to us. Nothing that the Father means for him is not also meant for us. Everything the Spirit does for him is also done for us. In the words of Paul, “God’s love”—the Father’s love for the Son and the Son’s love for the Father, as well as their love for creation—“has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:5).

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  The Gospel of John has a remarkably strange accounting of time. The past and the future are present in ways we’d never expect. “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), Jesus says, and leaves everyone in confusion. And prior to his crucifixion, he prays, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed” (John 17:4–5). In his epistle to the Romans, Paul insists that Christ died “at the right time for the ungodly” (Rom 5:6). And he then immediately makes clear that this “right time” is the moment of our weakness, the moment of our estrangement from God and enmity against God. God proves the authenticity of his love by coming just when we cannot be thought to deserve it.

  John’s Gospel, in turn, shows that the one who comes at the right time, in the fullness of time (Gal 4:4), is the one who brings all things with him into his “hour” (John 12:20–26), the moment of his strength, the moment of his triumph over evil and death, the moment in which he estranges us from all estrangement by bringing us into his oneness with the Father. The one who is in the embrace of the Father (John 1:18) has gone to prepare a place for us, that where he is, we may be too (John 14:3). “God makes all things beautiful in his time” (Eccl 3:11). How does he do that? By drawing us into Christ’s “hour,” so that his beautification beautifies us as well.

  “Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband” (John 4:16). It is easy to infer from the woman’s confession that she has no husband that this woman has had a tumultuous and scandalous sexual history. St Augustine, for example, suggests that after all her husbands she has finally taken up with an illicit lover. But of course we do not know why or how her story played out the way that it did. Perhaps each of her husbands had died, and someone had taken her in pity? Regardless, this reference to marriage cannot be insignificant. Brant Pitre, in his Jesus the Bridegroom, suggests that this story is a retelling of Jacob’s encounter with Rachel at the well (Gen 29:1–9). In the Gospel’s retelling, as Pitre reads it, Jesus, like Jacob, encounters this woman as his bride-to-be. But unlike Rachel, who was a beauty, this woman is not conventionally desirable. She is more like Rachel’s undesirable sister, Leah. She is a Samaritan. She has had five husbands. For whatever reason and under whatever conditions, she is now living with a man who is not her husband.

  Pitre points out that 2 Kings 17 describes the Samaritans as committing idolatry with five foreign gods, a detail that perhaps informs John’s account of this woman’s history. Be that as it may, the suggestiveness is wildly scandalous: Jesus—the new Jacob—is seen to be falling for a Samaritan—and one with a questionable history at that! The disciples are astonished for good reason. But that, in a word, is the gospel: Christ, our bridegroom, seeks out only the ungodly, sinners, the enemies of God (Rom 5:6–10). God finds us lovely when we are anything but desirable, and in that very finding, he makes us what we otherwise are not and could never be. His desire for us is what makes us desirable. He beautifies us with his confession of love for us.

  “What you have said is true” (John 4:17). The events at Meribah (Exod 17:1–7) led to judgment against both Israel and Moses. But Jesus’s exchange with the Samaritan leads to a different kind of judgment altogether, a judgment that leads not to death but to life. Jesus reveals the woman’s condition precisely by making space for her to confess it in her own words. Just as she says what is true, she opens herself up to the one who is the Truth.

  At first, her vision is blurred (like the blind man in Mark 8, who sees people like trees walking). She sees that Jesus is a prophet, but like Nicodemus and so many others in John’s Gospel, she has no sense of what that means. Like Israel at Meribah, she fails to realize that the Lord is present. She knows that the Messiah is coming, but does not recognize that he has already come. The same, of course, is true for all of us. It is never God who is absent. We are the ones who fail to be present. God is not silent. We are the ones who cannot hear what is spoken. Like Jacob, we all have to confess, “Surely the Lord was in this place, and I was unaware of it” (Gen 28:16). Lent is a time for remembering how little we truly understand, how much we have still to learn.

  And yet, unlike Israel, the Samaritan woman is open to the presence she does not yet recognize. He is not only the new Jacob, but also the new Moses. Jacob’s Well is the burning bush, and so Christ declares himself to her: “I Am is speaking to you.” She suddenly finds herself on holy ground.

  “Just then his disciples came” (John 4:27). Precisely in that moment—before we’re told a word of her response to Jesus’s self-revelation—the disciples return. We should live as if this is always true: we arrive in every moment just after the One Who Is has made himself known. Whomever we encounter, and whenever we encounter them, we already find ourselves having returned to holy ground. Because the I Am is always there before us.

  Upon their return, the disciples are astonished to see what is happening, and the questions they have to ask are bad ones. But at least they have enough sense not to say anything. More often than not, that’s our greatest evangelistic act: simply not asking the question that comes to mind. As Bonhoeffer says in Life Together, the first, and in many ways the most important, ministry we offer to others is the ministry of holding our tongues: “It must be a decisive rule of every Christian fellowship that each individual is prohibited from saying much that occurs to him.”

  Then “the woman left her water jar” and returned to the town (4:21). The Samaritan leaves her jar just as the other disciples had left their fishing nets, their tax tables, their swords and daggers to follow Jesus. This is surely a sign of what Christ’s self-revelation inevitably does to all of us: it disrupts our lives, makes it so that we find ourselves caught up in a strange new world of concerns. Remembering him, we forget everything we once thought important and definitive for our lives. When he lays hold of us, we lose touch with everything that we once grasped so tightly (cf. Phil 3:13–14).

  She returns to the city without her water-jar but with an invitation and an inviting question: “Come see someone who told me everything I have ever done. He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” (John 4:29). As Chrysostom says, “winged by joy,” this Samaritan woman “performs the office of Evangelists.” And “she calls not one or two, as did Andrew and Philip, but having aroused a whole city and people, so brought them to him.”

  Her witness is harmless as a dove and cunning as a serpent. Chrysostom continues:

  Observe here the great wisdom of the woman; she neither declared the fact plainly, nor was she silent, for she desired not to bring them in by her own assertion, but to make them to share in this opinion by hearing him for themselves. . . . Nor did she say, Come, believe but, Come, see; a gentler expression than the other, and one more attractive to them. Do you see the wisdom of this woman? She knew, and knew with certainty, that if they had only tasted from Jacob’s Well, they would be affected in the same manner as she herself had been.

  She was tactful—overjoyed, but neither overeager nor pushy. With her testimony, she gently created the same space of possibility for her neighbors that Christ had created for her. John says that many believed on him because of her witness, although they make it clear to her, �
��It is no longer because of your words that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves . . .” (4:41–42a). And, astonishingly, they come to understand him in a way she had not even suggested. He is not only Israel’s Messiah but the Savior of the world (4:42b).

  We have much to learn from her witness. Not least that our task is not to convince our neighbors to believe in Jesus, much less to accept our beliefs and way of life as their own. We need to remember that our calling is nothing more or less than to bear witness to what God has done in our lives in ways true to his character—his humility, his gentleness, his mercy, his patience, his compassion.

  In evangelization, the how and the what are inseparable and mutually determined. The kindness of God leads to repentance, Scripture says. So it is only as we kindly bear witness to God’s kindness that we can help others find the way to repentance. We are at most only midwives: we do not create life in others; we merely come alongside them to help them give birth to the Christ the Spirit has formed in them.

  Chapter Twelve

  How God Becomes Human

  “I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.”

  Galatians 4:19

  “We were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children”

  1 Thessalonians 2:7

  The good news: Christ will not leave us alone. He is always already present, ever nearer than we imagine—of course differently than we either expect or desire. As a result, we are called not simply to patience but to deep attentiveness. During Advent, especially, we learn again to receive the gifts God wants to give rather than the gifts we’ve asked to receive, because we know that what God has prepared for us is better by far than anything we could think to ask for ourselves. Advent is a time to attune our awareness to Christ in his “second coming.”

  Most of us, I’m sure, are accustomed to thinking of only two comings of Christ, the first coming of incarnation and the second coming, which we expect at the end of history. But Bernard of Clairvaux suggests we think instead of three comings of Christ:

  We know that there are three comings of the Lord. The third lies between the other two. It is invisible, while the other two are visible. In the first coming he was seen on earth, dwelling among men. . . . In the final coming all flesh will see the salvation of our God, and they will look on him whom they pierced. . . . In his first coming our Lord came in our flesh and in our weakness; in this middle coming he comes in spirit and in power; in the final coming he will be seen in glory and majesty.

  What Bernard calls “the intermediate coming” is, he says, always “hidden,” one that the elect find within themselves in the experience of contemplation. If he is right, and I am convinced that he is, then Christ is always coming to us—meekly, secretly, with graceful awkwardness. Indeed, he comes not so much to us as through us.

  Christ “appears” in this sense only through our laboring. He “comes again” and is present to us and to others just as we bring him to bear. In other words, we are not only children of God; we also have to become theotokoi—mothers of God. Or to say the same thing another way, we can become like Christ only by first becoming like Mary, his mother.

  This is what the apostle Paul models for us in his letter to the Galatians: “My little children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you” (4:19). St Paul’s labor is like Mary’s in that God is being birthed through him. He labors painfully until Christ is formed in them anew. And then he nurses them with the milk of the Word until they are mature.

  Paul makes a similar, but perhaps even more provocative claim in Romans: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (8:22–23). Here, the entire creation joined with the saints as the body of Christ, is imaged as a mother giving birth to new creation. It is as if Christ himself is in labor. Just as he was born of a woman, taken from her as Abel and Cain were taken from Eve, so he carries new creation in his womb, and it will be taken from his side as Eve was taken from Adam.

  ***

  In his New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton says that the only true joy in life is to escape from the prison of our false self. But so long as we are trying to escape from that prison, so long as we are trying to be our “true self,” we are only ever false to our deepest calling; we will be living contrary to the truth of our being. What we need, instead, is a healthy self-forgetfulness—or, better, a holy other-remembrance—a becoming one with the love of God that makes it so that we are not thinking of how we can be our own best selves but how we can attend to and care for those right in front of us who need our mercy and compassion.

  If we can become that kind of attentive, if we can be delightfully absorbed in loving our neighbor, if we can be “rapt with divine love,” if we can act with the abandon that only God’s love makes possible, it is because the life of Jesus is happening in us. That kind of living would mean that we are, in fact, pregnant with Christ. And so, our words and our silences, our expressions and our impressions, our action and our stillness would bespeak him and bring his goodness to bear—all without our knowing it or taking pride in it. Paradoxically, then, we must forget ourselves, and even our relationship with God, to truly be ourselves, to truly be one with the love that has loved us into being. Mothering, after all, is a peculiar kind of attention and care.

  ***

  It may strike you as strange to talk of becoming one with the love of God, and it may seem out-and-out wrong to talk of forgetting ourselves and our relationship with God. But if it does, I suspect that is because so many of us have come to think of God as just one more person in our lives; the most important person, to be sure; but the first among the many, nonetheless. We imagine that loving God is something different from—and at some level in competition with—loving our neighbor, as if God simply takes priority over the neighbor. And we imagine that loving God is easy compared to loving our neighbor. But contemplation teaches us that God saves us from our illusions precisely by throwing us into the care of and responsibility for our neighbor. In the language of 1 John, it is by loving the neighbor whom we can see that we prove—in both senses of the word—that the life of the God whom we cannot see is alive in us. And contemplation teaches us that God is not one more person in our lives: God is our life. God is the one in whom we live, move, and have our being. We are not merely with Christ; we are in him and he is in us in such a way that we are the temple of the Spirit and the Father is at home in us. As St Paul says, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory” (Col 3:2–4).

  We are hidden with Christ in God—from ourselves, as well as from others. And in this way, we are not so much mothers as yet-to-be-children. We should not think of this as poetry: we are held in our faith in God long before that faith becomes our own. We believe only because others believed for us. And we go on believing only as others go on believing for us and in us. We are carried in the womb of others’ faith.

  Merton observes that we hate thinking of ourselves as beginners, and yet in the life of faith and prayer we are always only beginners. And Kierkegaard, meditating on the faith of Abraham, remarks that faith comes not at the beginning, easily, but at the far end of life, after much difficulty. Similarly, St Ignatius describes his impending martyrdom not as his death but as his birth. These are the ways we ought to envision Christian maturity: our maturity lies always ahead of us as promised to us; the possibility of full Christlikeness always drawing us forward into deeper, wider responsibility for those who need our care.

  We are not always giving birth to the work of God in others, of course. We are not only like Paul and Mary, but we a
re also often like Anna: we bear witness to Christ’s coming in the world around us, in the lives of our friends and enemies (Luke 2:36–38). And we are often like Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin: we provide sanctuary for those who are giving birth to Christ, and we ourselves give birth to that which prepares the way for Christ to come through them (1:39–43). We are midwives and nurses, tenderly caring for others as they give birth and tenderly caring for those who are born in their radical vulnerability. In all of these and other ways, our labor is a share in the groaning of creation to give birth to the new-creation work of God.

  List of Books Cited

  Augustine of Hippo. The Confessions. London: Penguin, 2003.

  Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Theo-Drama V. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998.

  Barth, Karl. The Humanity of God. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960.

  Bernard of Clairvaux. St Bernard’s Sermons on the Nativity. Chulmleigh, UK: Augustine, 1985.

  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015.

  ———. Life Together. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1978.

  ———. Sanctorum Communio. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009.

  Coakley, Sarah. God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

  Gunton, Colin. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology. London: T. & T. Clark, 2003.

  Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.