Surprised by God

by Chris E W Green

  First, God’s presence does not come and go. Certainly not in response to our desire for it. God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, closer than our own consciousness, nearer than our very being. In the words as Nicholas Cabasilas, God is “more a part of us than our own limbs, more necessary to us than our own heart.” All of us can sing, as St Augustine did, in the realization that God is with and within us even though we are without him. We are the ones who come and go from the presence.

  Of course, at times we find ourselves desiring God, seeking God. But in truth we only seek God because we are already found. The deepest truth is not that we know God, but that we are known by him. And God’s knowing of us is always already previous to our knowing of God. Even our searching is a gift. As Aslan says to Jill in C. S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair: “You would not have called to me if I had not been calling to you.”

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  Second, our desires for God are not always pure. In fact, they never are, even at their best. They must always be redeemed, purified, set right, reconstituted, healed. Eliot (in “East Coker”) gets this right, I believe:

  I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

  For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

  For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

  But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

  Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

  So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

  He can wait in this fashion only because he has already accepted that the darkness that is coming is “the darkness of God,” a darkness that is like the dimming of the lights in the theatre so the scene can be changed. Surely, that is why God lets the darkness come, leads us into “dark night.” Only there can God effect the changes necessary to move us from the false to the true, from selfishness to charity.

  And we can trust that God will over time effect the necessary changes. The physician will heal us. The teacher will train us. But we must be ready for the trouble of that healing and training. As Rowan Williams warns, “If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your ‘religious’ world shattered.” God will be against us for our sake. God is our friend, and, as Scripture promises, “faithful are the wounds of a friend.”

  How does God shatter these illusions? By showing us, again and again, the image of Christ the crucified one. By showing us the beauty of the one who is undesirable by all our standards. As we “with unveiled faces” behold that image—in the face of the stranger, in the face of the enemy, in the face of the neighbor—we begin slowly to be transformed from glory to glory into its likeness.

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  Third, God’s presence is not something simply to be enjoyed. God’s presence is glorious—heavy, burdensome. “The hand of the Lord was heavy upon me,” the prophets say. If, like David, we pray for God not to take his Holy Spirit from us (Ps 51:11), it is not because we always enjoy what the Spirit brings to us. So much of what he gives us to drink has a bitter taste. How could we possibly enjoy loving our enemies, turning the other cheek to those who abuse us, going the extra mile for those who take advantage us?

  J. H. King, an early Pentecostal missionary and churchman, drew on the story of Ishmael and Isaac to show how God requires us to give up not only what should never have been in our lives at all but also that which is in our lives only because of God’s goodness. Our experience of God must be crucified, King says, because we will find the “ecstasies of joy,” the “peace of heaven” so sweet we begin to feel that the experience is essential to our living faithfully. But “we shall come to the point where God will lead us away from these ecstasies . . . and as a result we shall sink deeper into him.”

  As King recognizes, many of us too often want simply to forget our responsibilities to our neighbors and throw ourselves down in the sweetness of the experience of God. Meister Eckert, the medieval German theologian, recognized this dynamic in Mary’s devotion to Jesus and Martha’s complaints about her sister in Luke 10:38–42.

  Martha was afraid her sister would remain clinging to consolation and sweetness, and she wished her to become as she herself was. This is why Christ said, “She has chosen the best part,” as if to say, “Cheer up, Martha; this will leave her. The most sublime thing that can happen to a creature shall happen to her: She shall become as happy as you.”

  Mary did learn as she listened to the Lord’s teaching. But what she learned was the calling to live prayerfully in the world, amidst the goings-on of day-to-day life. And this, Eckhart says, is how the saints become saints: they learn to serve their neighbors prayerfully, rather than turning from their neighbors to prayer and the experience of God.

  Mary, like “Doubting” Thomas, needed to learn how to practice the absence of God. She had to come to understand, as he did, that it is more blessed not to see. She had to recognize that the “presence” she had known was nothing compared to the “absence” she was about to experience, an absence created so she would not only be with Christ but in him. Before this moment, Jesus was simply another body in the room for her, one more person in her life. After this moment, Mary recognized Jesus as the room itself, the Father’s house, and the very source of her life. And we, like St Thomas, like Mary, and like her sister, Martha, must come to know that we are called not to enjoy the presence but to be that presence for others.

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  Job complains that no matter where he turns, God remains hidden from him: “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him” (Job 23:8–9). But Paul reveals why it is that God is neither here nor there for us: “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:19–20). The truth is, we cannot locate God as an object of perception because we are held in the infinite dimensions of his love for us. And not only held—we are opened up to receive that very fullness so that we become the site of God’s presence as it is happening in the world. God may be hidden from us, but that is only because God is so near to our neighbor that who he is and who we are have become inseparably bound up together. As Bonhoeffer says, “The Christian person achieves his true nature when God no longer confronts him as Thou but ‘enters in’ to him as I.” The absence of God is nothing but God being present in and through us to those most in need.

  Chapter Five

  Blessed Are Those Who Do Not See

  “The devil dazzles; Christ does not.”

  Miroslav Volf

  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

  John 20:29

  Everything comes down to how we perceive and interpret the world. Everything depends on our seeing—and our not-seeing. Tragically, we have not as a rule developed the knowledge, skills, and character necessary for faithful discernment and sound judgment. We have not been trained to see and not-see as Christ himself does. What is more, we have been stupified by the cares of this life, by the attacks of the enemy, and by pride in our own moral and religious efforts so that we are increasingly desensitized to the reality of the Holy Spirit and hyper-sensitized to the realities of the spirit of the age. As a result, we are ever at risk of leaning on our own understanding while assuming that we are trusting in the Lord.

  St. John weaves themes of seeing/not seeing from beginning to end of his Gospel. He bookends the stories of Moses and Thomas, insisting, first, that no one has ever seen God—not even Moses, who according to the Scripture beheld God’s glory (1:17–18)—and then concluding that it is truly more blessed not to see and still to believe (20:29).

  Arguably, the story of the man born blind in John
9 brings the Johannine understanding of vision/blindness most forcefully to bear. The story emphasizes the characters’ frames of interpretation, the hidden convictions that predetermine what they can and cannot see in one another and in Christ. We might take this story, then, as paradigmatic, allowing it to put our own moral vision, our capacity for discerning the truth, to the test.

  As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.” But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.” They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath.” But others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.”

  Jesus’s miracle, stunning and spectacular as it is, convinces exactly no one of his messiahship. Indeed, it could not convince anyone because it was not seen in the light of faith. On this score, the disciples turn out to be no less blind than the Pharisees are. The former cannot see Jesus in his glory because they assume this man has sinned and has been blinded by God as a punishment for his sins. The latter cannot see Jesus in his glory because they suspect that he healed the man through some devious power. Even the man himself, after being healed, remains unaware of who Jesus is and what exactly has happened to him. He knows no more than the crowds who are dumbstruck by what has happened. Tellingly, he makes no confession of faith. He simply states the facts as he experienced them: “I was blind, and now I see.” When he’s forced finally to give an opinion, he says only that Jesus must be a prophet.

  The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” His parents answered, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.” So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.” He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out. Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

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  What do we learn from his story? We learn that Christ opens the eyes of the blind, and that he does so simply because he desires good for us and not in response to our faith or faithfulness. We learn that his ways of healing us are often strange, even bizarre, at least compared to what we’ve known as normal. We learn that our blindness is not the result of our failures, but the result of a condition into which we are thrown from birth; we are not only sinners but also—and even more deeply, more primally—sinned against. We learn that we can and should be as disarmingly honest as this blind man, owning without pretense what we in fact do not know or cannot comprehend, never claiming to believe more than we in fact do. After all, what makes our witness faithful is not our expertise or our certainty, but the constant acknowledgment of our (at best) imperfect understanding of what the Lord is doing and the constant trust that we are known and loved even as we are ignorant and unfaithful. As St Paul puts it, “Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him” (1 Cor 8:2). Finally, we learn not only that we must have our eyes opened so that we can see the glory of God, but also that we must be blinded to the vainglorious illusions of the world. The vision Christ gives is both enlightening and blinding.

  An old altar song promises that if we turn our eyes upon Jesus the “things of this earth/will grow strangely dim/in the light of his glory and grace.” At first blush, the message seems to be all wrong. Surely, we might say—as I in fact have often said—it is in the light of Christ’s glory that our eyes are opened to reality, not closed to it. As Scripture declares, in his light we see light. Only in Christ are we enabled to see God and neighbor as they truly are. And yet, there is a truth in the song’s message. The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ does blind us—to the unrealities of the world, to the lies we have been told and tell ourselves, to the fantasies that our enemy uses to our destruction. In Christ, we are closed to racist stereotypes and to the obtuse standards of attractiveness that oppress our sisters and our mothers, our wives and our daughters. In Christ, we find we are turned toward the fullness of God and neighbor, and turned away from the emptiness of worldly power and selfish ambition. Enlightened by his love, we refuse to regard the borders drawn by political powers as finally authoritative in our care for refugees and immigrants. And in times of war, we refuse to allow patriotic sentimentality to sanction hatred for a supposed enemy.

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  Rowan Williams argues that what makes the saints saintly is their openness to judgment, their “readiness to be questioned, judged, stripped naked, and left speechless by that which lies at the center of their faith.” To be holy, in other words, is to live blinded by the truth. And this is because they share in Jesus’s love-blindness. In the language of Isaiah (42:18–20):

  Listen, you that are deaf; and you that are blind, loo
k up and see!Who is blind but my servant, or deaf like my messenger whom I send?Who is blind like my dedicated one, or blind like the servant of the Lord?He sees many things, but does not observe them; his ears are open, but he does not hear.

  The Gospels make it clear: Jesus saw people in the fullness of their humanity. He did not see “the poor”; he saw a particular poor man; he did not see “widows and orphans”; he saw this particular widow, that particular orphan. In the same way, we can love one another with Christ’s love only if we are also blind to the “issues” that are used to define people. We must not see “the sick” or “the oppressed” or “the marginalized” but specific people suffering in particular ways. We must come alongside them and be to them the providence of God. We must look at them and see what God says is true about them—nothing more, and nothing less. After all, this is how we ourselves are known. And remembering this, we recognize what it means to be blessed because we do not see.

  Chapter Six

  God Is Not in Control

  “I am God, and . . . there is no one who can deliver from my hand; I work and who can hinder it?”

  Isaiah 43:13

  “I am the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no god.”

  Isaiah 45:5

  Let me begin by defending the devil. Strange as such a move may seem, it is easy to underestimate how masterfully devious he in fact is. Only Jesus’s victory over him can expose his tricks for what they are. And what we find when we read the story of the wilderness temptations closely is that Satan is not so much tempting us to disbelieve as to believe unfaithfully. Again and again, he entices Jesus to use God’s word against him, to claim God’s truth in a false way. And the same holds for our temptations: Satan wants us to take God’s promises to mean what they do not in fact mean, so that we are confused about what we can and should expect from God.