Living
God
Fr.
Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians
May,
2019
“It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive.’ … [T]his is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘[Our] search for God’!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us!”–C.S. Lewis, Miracles
I had a parishioner once tell me the
hardest thing he experienced in the death of his wife was this: the memory of the beloved was fixed, locked
in the past. No longer could she
surprise him, or actively argue with him, or be changed by his words or change
him with hers. He might have a
conversation with her when no one else was looking, to be sure, but it was a
conversation with his memory of her, the image she had left of herself in his
mind. “When people say the dead live on
in our hearts and our memories, they miss what is most important about
personality—that it grows, responds to change, and acts on its own regardless
of how we expect. I want my wife living and breathing beside me, a subject and
not an object, sharing and capable of accepting sharing from me. The dead we do
not see seem to grow further and further from us.”
Another parishioner, this time one
at Trinity, told me that his greatest problem with how the resurrection of
Jesus was understood by Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan was that though they
accept a post-Easter living Jesus as an object of belief and faith, they seem
to reject him as an active living person, a subject rather than an object. Though this may oversimplify their views,
it makes the point very clear: the
resurrected Lord is not merely a memory or myth. The living Lord is an active personality, the
one who reaches out to us and reacts to us.
One of the main reasons we tend to
reject the idea of a real bodily coming forth of Jesus from among the dead, or
even the idea of Almighty God as personal, living, and active, is this: Jesus as a mere icon or myth and God as an
idealized life-force are both tame, emotionally easier for us to control.
Accepting the reality of the
resurrection and accepting the core Biblical faith of a living God means
putting ourselves at risk. “Watch
out! It’s alive!” The Living God asks us to do hard
things. The Resurrected Jesus leads us
on the Way of the Cross. Now falling in
love or having children both entail great risk, and are scary. But they are rich in their rewards. And so it is with a Living God and the
Resurrected Lord: not bound merely to our conceptions and memories, they can
actively surprise us, challenge us, and give us what we need at the
moment. And the risk? Well, we Christians believe that we see the
face of God in Jesus, the one who said, “I will give you rest. My yoke is easy, my burden light.” In loosing the bonds of death and human
brokenness itself, Jesus makes it possible for us to hope that we may indeed
once again truly be with those we love but now see no longer, not merely as
objects of memory, but as active, living beings.
Thanks be to God.
Fr. Tony+
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