Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
Through Thick and Thin
January 22, 2020
From the earliest of the human
experience, we have always wanted gods—or less ambitiously, guardian spirits—who
look out for us, give us what we need and want, and can deliver the goods. One of the features of polytheism was the
idea that some kinds of higher power had control of different, specific areas
of life, and could deliver the goods in such discrete fields: Astarte or Aphrodite were goddesses of fertility
and sexual voluptuousness; Ares or Mars, success in war and armed struggle; Marduk,
of civic order, prosperity, and might; Caishen, of wealth; Asclepius, of
health. Each nation or city had its own god. Many gods were modeled after forces of
nature, and since nature is so complex and mysterious, gods were seen to be in
competition with each other. The trick
in getting a god to deliver for you lay in worshipping the right god at the
right time.
But a small tribe in the Near East
in the early bronze age had a great insight:
they began to worship a god who created nature itself, who was above and
beneath all things, who stood alone, and who brought all things, both good and
ill, into being. They called him Yahweh,
a verbal form that roughly means “the one who brings everything into existence.” He may have started out as a tribal deity,
but soon was seen as the real god for all nations, one that could bring weal or
woe to his own people. Yahweh stood
above the fray, yet was found in all the polarities and spectra of the time,
space, and things he had created. When
Moses was called, he complained that his stutter made him a bad spokesman Yahweh’s reply tells us much: “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them
mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, Yahweh?” (Exod 4:11).
While solving the problem of gods
not truly worthy of trust and worship because they were so limited and constrained,
this expansive view of God presented its own problems: an all-encompassing and all-powerful God was
to be blessed for the Good, of course, but could also be blamed for the
Bad. You could get him off the hook in different
ways. One extremely popular one is to say
he is the source of all good but no bad.
Bad comes from not following God, and good from following him. Attribute to God rational and just reasons
for bestowing blessing (when you’re good) and cursing (when you’re bad). God thus blesses the righteous and punishes
the wicked. Ethical monotheism declared that how we behave matters to the one
who created us. But it easily devolves
into the simplistic formula of the Deuteronomist: follow the commandments and
God will bless you; disobey, and he will curse.
It can go further into the self-righteous casuistry of the Chronicler: if
you are prospering, it is because God is blessing you for your obedience; if
suffering, because you are being
punished by an angry God.
In the modern church, this line of
thinking takes one the face of capitalistic success: the “prosperity gospel” of some evangelicals
is one of the great heresies of our modern age.
Remember the Book of Job is one great complaint against the idea that if
you are blessed, you are good and if you are suffering, bad. Accepting these distortions of the Deuteronomist,
Chronicler, or Gospel Profiteer means you have again made God limited and a
partisan on one side or the other, rather than beneath and behind all
things.
A better way to understand it, I
think, is to see that bad is not the opposite of good, but rather its
absence. God is wholly good and all good
comes from God. But in order to make
space for a world apart from himself, for creation, God and good must withdraw
in some way. We perceive this absence of
Good and God as Evil and bad things. In
this view, God remains behind and beneath all things, enticing for good and
blessing, but not forcing it. When understood with a confidence that in the
end, God and Good will once again permeate all of creation, you keep God good
and overarching, while saving him from petty tribalism and capricious favoritism. We don’t have to blame God for bad things,
but we don’t have to give up on trusting God.
This, I think, was what Jesus had in
mind when he said that you find God in the very places where you expect him the
least: Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the starving. Blessed are those dying of thirst. Blessed are the downtrodden. Blessed are the persecuted.
It is what Madeline L’Engle meant
when she wrote:
“I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.”
Grace and peace.
Fr. Tony+
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