Surprised by God

by Chris E W Green

  We can picture these movements, these conversions, this inhalation and exhalation, by comparing the figures in Fritz Eichenberg’s The Christ of the Breadlines and David Jones’s Christ Sending Forth the Disciples.

  Notice, all the figures are bowed, even Christ. But some are bowed in desperation, the others in reflection. The former are burdened with need; the latter, with a calling to serve those in need. Christ shares both burdens, just as he stands in both lines—at the head of one, and in the midst of the other. He is both source of the life of good religion, and its guide. We care for others in him. And in going out from him we find him again in “the least of these.”

  Worship—and in particular, the Eucharist—marks the turn of these movements. Every week, at the table, we find ourselves drawn to Christ by his Father and driven out by his Spirit. We come to church just because those pressures—that pull, that push—carry us in and carry us out like the tides. No one has seen this more clearly or said it more forcefully than Mother Maria of Paris:

  It would be a great lie to tell those who are searching: “Go to church, because there you will find peace.” The opposite is true. The Church tells those who are at peace and asleep: “Go to church, because there you will feel real anguish for your sin and the world’s sin. There you will feel an insatiable hunger for Christ’s truth. There, instead of becoming lukewarm, you’ll be set on fire; instead of being pacified, you’ll become alarmed; instead of learning the wisdom of this world, you will become fools for Christ.”

  ***

  We must hear this call to turn from God for God’s sake as a word of gospel, not law. It is a word of permission and possibility, not demand or judgment. Because Christ is risen and ascended, because he is in us and we are in him, because his Spirit rests on us as we rest in his Father, we may turn from God to the world both for God’s sake and the world’s. In fact, because God is the living God, turning from him is just another way of turning to him. With that realization in mind, we are freed to engage the difficult, never-ending work of caring for those in need in hope, not optimism; in faith, not idealism; in love, not ambition.

  In Isaiah’s prophesy, God promises not only to provide for us, but also that we will ourselves be the provision—always, of course, in the barren, parched places to which we are called and sent. We know we are not going to “fix” the world, however heroically we try. But we also know that we can do some good for our neighbors, precisely because in them we come face-to-face with the one who is our good.

  Chapter Ten

  Loving Obedience

  “For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments.”

  1 John 5:3

  “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

  John 15:12

  It is difficult for Christians in our time and place to know how to talk about obedience. For one thing, it is easy for us to confuse all talk about obedience with a call for dominance or subjugation. For another, it is tempting for us to think of grace and faith as inherently at odds with obedience, at least in part because we have been taught, implicitly if not explicitly, to associate obedience with “works” and “self righteousness.” But we are called to obedience, and that means we have to find some way to talk intelligibly about what it means to obey.

  As always, we must begin and end with Christ. First and foremost, he said he obeyed by doing what he saw the Father doing, so we know obedience is godly attentiveness to what God wants for us and for others in a given moment. This attentiveness, this tuned-in-ness, makes us (as John Ruysbroek says) “ready and supple” to participate with the Spirit’s work in the world.

  From careful attention to Christ’s life as the Scriptures reveal it, we also learn that obedience isn’t a necessary evil, much less inimical to our integrity as creatures. Instead, obedience is the form creaturely freedom necessarily takes. We don’t obey instead of living in freedom, and we don’t obey until we earn our freedom. Freedom simply is in obedience and obedience is in freedom. As Rowan Williams says, “To submit to God is to be most directly in touch with what is most real. To refuse that submission is not to be free of an alien violence but to become an alien to yourself.”

  We cannot reimagine obedience without reimagining power, as well. And God’s power is not coercive or violent. Indeed, God, as creator, cannot do violence any more than he can lie. God does not overpower or defeat, does not forcefully overcome resistances. God has no opposites or equals; hence, divine power has no obstacles to its fulfillment. God does not have to overcome or defeat any resisting powers; after all, the only realities that exist do so at the mercy of God. There is only God and everything that God creates and holds in being; therefore, for God to get his will done he has only to will it: no struggle against rival powers or victory over enemies is necessary.

  To be sure, we need God to be powerful. We begin truly to discover this need through our experiences of power and powerpowerlessness, especially death. And we need that power to be absolute. Otherwise, our existence as creatures is not sheer grace, and we have no ground for our hope in God’s promises, and in particular the promise to raise us from the dead. But that very neediness works against us. We can invent for ourselves and/or impose on others ways of living with God that lead to us imagining that God’s power is at our disposal, for our use, and/or that God’s power is a looming threat.

  If we’re going to have our imaginations of God’s power converted, then we’re going to have to look to Christ. Only in him are God’s being-act and creaturely powers perfectly at-one-ed. This is why we trust not our experiences with God, but Jesus’s.

  What do we discover when we look to Jesus to see God’s power? We see that God’s power is radically unlike both our power and our powerlessness, our strength and our weakness. God’s power is revealed in the virgin birth and the resurrection, and especially in the forgiveness of sins and the transfiguration of sinners. We understand nothing yet in the light of the gospel until we grasp that God’s power is revealed most completely for us in the weakness of the cross.

  That is, we start to realize the character of God’s power only in our experiences of weakness that bring us into communion with God’s “weakness.” God’s power/weakness sustains where we wish it would deliver, and delivers when we wish it would sustain. St Paul reveals this truth to us in a difficult, if familiar, passage: “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:9–10). In one of his letters from prison, Bonhoeffer articulates this same truth in heartbreaking terms:

  There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve—even in pain—the authentic relationship. Further more, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy.

  God is more concerned for our transformation than with our safety. And God can afford to sustain us until we are transformed because God is not afraid for us. Nothing can resist his will for us: “what can separate us from the love of God?” In sum, then, we face and overcome all resistance to God’s will in our lives by simple reliance upon the power that knows no resistance and so does not need to overcome anything to be itself. Obedience, therefore, is not the breaking of our will by a more powerful will; obedience is the healing of our will by participation in its source. In the words of John Webster:

  Listening means obe
dience, and obedience is not craven submission; it’s not born of fear. Obedience to God is the lifelong task of giving my consent to the shape which God has for my life. Obedience is letting God put me in the place where I can be the sort of person I am made by God to be.

  ***

  Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting The Banjo Lesson (1893) shows what a “listening obedience” is like. The young child, just learning to play, cannot even hold the instrument with ease. But the teacher embraces him and holds the banjo, leaving room for the boy to stand on his own, and allowing him to play by himself. Neither one looks at or even seems aware of the other. Both the boy and the man attend to the instrument, their attentions fused in the effort of making the song.

  No doubt, as this child grows physically and skillfully, the master will give him even more room. And their attentions will continue to fuse, more and more tightly, until the student knows all that the master knows.

  In much the same way, as we go from faith to faith, learning to obey more fully, our attention increasingly fused with God’s, we find ourselves obeying without self-regard. In the wisdom of the prophet Isaiah (30:20–21):

  Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself any more, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

  Following Christ, then, is listening raptly to a teacher’s voice, a teacher who hides behind us, so to speak, making room for us to “play” on our own.

  ***

  But what does this mean? What does Christ command us to do? And how does his command come to us? It comes to us via the Spirit’s illumination of the way of life Jesus embodies, a way of life described in the Sermon on the Mount.

  The Sermon on the Mount is law: it is given to us to obey. And the same goes for the Ten Commandments. But these are Christ’s law—and so come to us not as a series of discrete directives but as articulations of the one command to love our neighbor, the command that fulfills the whole law. We do not and cannot obey Christ by effort or even by intention—only by absorption in wonder at him and his life, which the Sermon and the Ten Commandments describe. When we read the Sermon or hear the Commandments, we should hear them always only as rhapsody to the beauty of Jesus the Galilean, Mary’s son and God’s revelation. We should be absorbed in the music of the Sermon in a self-forgetting way, totally without regard for our keeping or failing to keep it. Instead, our eyes are fixed on Jesus and the wonder of his life lived for others.

  ***

  If in one sense we obey Christ by attending to the wonder of his life lived for us, in another sense we join in his obedience as we attend with him to the wonder of his Father’s love for him and for us. Or to say it slightly different, as we contemplate the glory of the Father, Christ’s obedience begins to happen in us. Where there is wonder for Christ that opens out on wonder for the Father, there the Spirit is brooding, creating new life.

  Saying it in this way brings us close to St John’s way of talking about the intimate interweaving of love, obedience, and the commandments. All the commandments, according to John, are summed up in one commandment: love one another as you have been loved. And the fulfillment of that command is simply participation in the very love that is commanded.

  “Give what you demand, and command what you will,” St Augustine prayed. And we can join him in that prayer, knowing the answer already: God never commands what he doesn’t also by that very command give. God’s command, after all, is God’s own Word, and so every command is a call to be one with that Word, and the call effects what it invites. God summons us to the life he requires of us, and his summons, like Jesus’s call to Peter to step out of the boat and come, enables us to do what it requires.

  In the same way, God’s obedience is also God’s own Word, carried out in God’s own Spirit. And since Christ’s person and work are inseparable, the Son’s human response to the Father is taken up into the dynamics of the Triune life—and by the same Spirit we are taken up with it. For that very reason, our obedience is nothing less or other than a share in God’s own life with God.

  ***

  We are finally in a position to see why God requires obedience. Barth articulates the divine purpose as revealed in the gospel:

  God wants man to be His creature. Furthermore, He wants him to be His partner. There is a causa Dei in the world. God wants light, not darkness. He wants cosmos, not chaos. He wants peace, not disorder. He wants man to administer and to receive justice rather than to inflict and to suffer injustice. He wants man to live according to the Spirit rather than according to the flesh. He wants man bound and pledged to Him rather than to any other authority. He wants man to live and not to die. Because He wills these things God is Lord, Shepherd, and Redeemer of man, who in His holiness and mercy meets His creature; who judges and forgives, rejects and receives, condemns and saves.

  Why, then does God call us to obey? Because that is simply the form the causa Dei takes as it comes into our lives. God does not require obedience to test us, but to train us, to transform us, to fit us to his own life. God requires obedience not to break us but to make us, to fill us up with his own kenotic glory. In a word, “obedience” is just another way of saying “salvation by grace.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The Needs of God

  “Jesus, tired out from his journey, . . . .”

  John 4:6

  At one level, it comes as no surprise that Jesus is tired. He is, after all, truly human. And yet, there is serious theological depth in this seemingly insignificant detail. Jesus calls those who are weary and overburdened to come to him for rest (Matt 11:28–30). And he does so as the one who recapitulates human experience, including our weariness, our neediness. Jesus needs rest, too.

  As John’s Gospel tells it, Jesus’s encounter with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well re-enacts Israel’s temptation at Meribah (Exod 17; Ps 95). When we read Israel’s story through John’s retelling of it, we are positioned to see what is happening with us, here-and-now. “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction . . .” (Rom 15:4). How can this be? Because Jesus re-lives the human experience, re-enlivening it with the very life of God. What he does as Israel-in-person, he does for each and all. In his own person, he brings the rest of God into communion with the weariness of humanity, so that in that communion death is overcome with life, and darkness is dispelled by light. In him, wandering is transformed into journeying.

  At Rephidim, Israel had no water to drink, and so they protested and complained against Moses (Exod 17:1–7). “Why did you bring us out of Egypt to let us die in this desert?” But where Israel quarreled with Moses, Jesus graciously asks for a drink. His thirst, unlike theirs, does not drive him to anger or imprecation. Israel could not trust Moses—or the God of Moses—to care for them in their need. Jesus, however, as Israel-in-person, entrusts himself to the care of a stranger—a Samaritan woman, no less. He puts himself at her mercy just so that in the end he can have mercy on her.

  That is always the way of God with us. In the life of Jesus, God—impassible, unassailable, unapproachable in power, absolutely unconditioned by any reality outside his own life—makes himself vulnerable and dependent upon us. The creator assumes creation and the infinite one assumes finitude. The one who is life itself, takes on mortality. The one who has no need, makes himself needy. And he does so just for our sake and for our good.

  Think of how often this happens in the Gospels. Not only in the womb of Mary, but also in the home of Joseph. Not only in the waters of baptism, but also at the table of his friends and his enemies. He asks the disciples to pray with him in the garden. He allows a woman to wash his feet with her tears in the Pharisee’s house. He does not carry his own cross.

  Christ continues even now to make him
self needy for us. “God thirsts that we may thirst for him” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2560). As Maximus Confessor says in his Centuries, Christ wants to be conceived as a child in each of us according to the strength of our desire for God. Jesus wants to be as dependent on us as he was on Mary, the God-bearer. Only in that way is his character truly formed in us. As we sanctify him in our hearts (1 Pet 3:15), we find we are the ones being made holy with God’s own divine-human holiness. As we strive to speak lovingly to God about others and about God to others, we find we are ourselves being made true and loving. As we pray, and inevitably find ourselves failing, we are caught up into God’s own intercession for us. As we care for those most in need, we find that we are ourselves receiving the grace we know we need but cannot summon for or offer to ourselves.

  Scripture promises that “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand” (Rom 5:2). But how have we obtained this access? How does Christ win it for us? Not by changing the Father’s will toward us. And not by providing us with an example that shows the possibility of living a better life. He secures this access into grace for us ontologically, by changing the very nature of creaturely existence. As Maximus the Confessor put it, Christ’s human life, death, and resurrection is the “remedy” for all that corrupts creation. Through his “flesh” God restores human nature (and so the nature of all things) to a state of grace. But not merely restores—makes new. What is assumed is not only healed but also filled with the Spirit, brought into the fullness of God. Christ does not open the way back to Eden. Christ opens the way into the life of God.