We seem lately quite often to find ourselves meeting aspects
of Christian belief we perhaps generally took for granted, but which seem suddenly
to have become possibly childish or questionable. One of these came up last week. It is our apparent need for a so-called interventionist
God, a God who may reach out and do a miracle.
Does God specially intervene to help me…? This is a troubling one because as soon as we
start talking about it we risk shaking the foundations of good people and their
unexamined assumptions. Quite often the
events of life do that for them without any help from us. I am in favour of being gentle and
understanding, which life often isn’t, but it may be that the foundations of some
belief need shaking. Or if we don’t like
shaking things, perhaps a gentle invitation to bring faith and reality closer together,
to try standing where the wind is blowing.
Either way, a contemplative discipline of silence and stillness will
tend to achieve just that. As St Paul
put it, we need to grow up into Christ.
Centuries before the time of Christ, the Hebrew prophet
Elijah had a dramatic confrontation with the priests of Baal on Mt Carmel. This was a showdown between Elijah’s God, a
stable, caring, God of justice – and the popular religion, Baal the capricious,
the unpredictable, needing always to be flattered, propitiated and
cajoled. When Baal appears to ignore
their sacrifice, Elijah ferociously mocks these priests: Cry
aloud! Surely he is a god… perhaps he is meditating, or he has wandered away,
or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and needs to be wakened… But what we see here in the priests of
Baal uncomfortably resembles much that is quite familiar to us, both within and
beyond the church, even today. God is
perceived as pleased or not pleased. God
rewards or chooses not to reward. God
punishes. God may respond to fervent
prayer, with a miracle – or he may unaccountably not, and we’ll never know why. God may heal someone because everyone prayed,
but not heal someone else because they didn’t or couldn’t or didn’t know they
should, or thought they weren’t good enough…
None of this was ever Jesus’s understanding of God, whom he
called Father. And indeed Jesus explicitly
rejected such cargo-cult, retributive understandings of God. God, he taught, makes the sun to rise, and the rain to fall, on good and bad alike.
St John reports Jesus saying: Whoever has
seen me has seen the Father… So Paul
can write that he, Jesus, is the icon of
the invisible God – in Jesus we glimpse fleetingly through the mystery, the
nature of God. And what we see is
stable, loving, welcoming, inclusive – but also wounded, suffering, dying and
rising -- the Word made flesh, in
John’s incomparable words. It is all a
world away from the Baalism and superstition of much that remains in the church
to this day, popular as it is, even lucrative, in some surprising places -- and
it is rightly rejected by more and more people of faith who know that can’t be
right.
We are to grow up in faith and in Christ. There is nothing of freedom or dignity living
in dependence on a god we must always please, or persuade somehow, like some
parent who won’t otherwise let me have what I want. If we follow the story of Elijah, we read
next how he fled from the religion of Baal and found himself eventually at
Horeb. There was a violent storm, some
cataclysm… and, we learn, God was not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not
in the fire… The word of the Lord came
for Elijah in the sound of silence. God is at the meeting place, the place where
words don’t matter half so much as our heartfelt, steady presence and consent, our
willingness to be mortal, to bear pain and burdens and to set self aside. Growing up, in other words, into Christ.
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