How do we, with our limited minds, come to know the true scale of God’s promise and love to us all?
How do we, as I heard one theologian put it, make sense of the “sheer God-ness of God”. Well theologians have often encouraged us to us philosophical ideas a schemes to make sense of this. Proofs or ways to know who God is whether an “ontological” proof from first principles or from the evidence of creation, and so on. Another approach, born from these theological debates comes in formulas within our worship. The Creed we will use later is full of them – “very God of very God”, “make of all things, seen and unseen”.
If we look for this answer in the bible we find a different approach. Here it is through pictures, images of who God is for us, that our limited minds are drawn into the limitless mystery of God’s love and God’s own self.
Our readings today include two of these powerful images. The first comes in the book of the Genesis. Having heard God’s call, the aged Abram begins on his great journey, but is fearful for how and to whom the promise God has made to him will be fulfilled. Not having a child of his own, and not believing this will now be possible at his age, Abram asks what will be the reality of the very great reward God will give him. To this challenge God presents Abram with one of the most foundational and potent images for God’s promise which he said would be revealed through the promised descendants of Abram.
He brought him outside and said, ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’
In our modern world of street lighting and light pollution some of the potency of this image can be lost on us. But for the generation on generation the vast scale of this promise would not have been lost in this picture. If you have every seen the full expanse of the stars on a clear truly dark night, you will have a sense of the immenseness and vastness of this promise. Stars and points of light to many for anyone to count with the naked eye.
It is an image which, like so many poetic images, doesn’t fall down when interrogated with a modern scientific gaze. Images from modern space telescopes do not undermine this picture, but if anything make it even richer. Even a small snapshot of, what one commentator has described as, a “galactic landscape” shows that the small points of light that we might view as stars with the naked eye are in fact whole galaxies. And that light we see in these images started travelling to us thirteen-billion years ago.
This is not a proof of the existence of God so much as a picture for us to reflect on as we seek to comprehend who God is for us. This image of the vast scope of God’s promise to humanity – which began life in these ancient texts – becomes even greater and larger and more impossibly infinite the more we reflect on it.
Against this vast image of the power of God’s promise we have a very different image in our gospel reading today. Coming within a longer series of teachings on the nature of true value, Jesus encourages us to see the preciousness and intimacy of God’s promise of the kingdom. Although Jesus does not set up this image in this way, it is like one of those hypothetical questions people pose to see what we truly value. Imagine, they might say, your home is burning down, what one object would you save. Some of us might imagine a photograph or album, others a book or precious and sentimental gift. Whatever the thing is, Jesus is asking us to imagine some small precious thing – like a purse holding a thing of incalculable value. But unlike all those things we might imagine saving in our little thought experiment – this is something that will never decay or be stolen. This unfailing treasure in heaven is carried on our heart because as Jesus says:
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Here against the vastness of the heavens we have the promise of God’s kingdom shown to us in the smallness of a tiny purse held close to our hearts.
So, what might we make of these two images?
Well, the first is that both seek to point us to a promise and reality which is beyond the limits of our comprehension. Beyond the finite limits of own experience to the infinite and limitless form of this promise. One image asks us to do this by gazing on something so vast that we can count it or hold it, an image which when we look at it even more closely the vaster and greater and more impossibly infinite it seems. The second asks us to take something familiar and trustworthy but to imagine – beyond our experience – that rust or corruption or decay will never take it away or harm it. Both images, on diametrically opposed scales, draw us beyond the limits of our experience to imagine the truly infinite nature of God’s promise to us.
And it is in the contrast of these images that we also find a deeper truth. That in their difference we are drawn a recognition not only of God’s promise, but also who God is for us in Jesus Christ. To paraphrase the popular worship song The Servant King, the one whose hands flung those stars into space, were also the hands that were nailed, in intimate suffering, to the wood of the cross. That the Word, that was in the beginning and all through whom all things came into being, is also the one who became flesh and dwelt among us first as a tiny and precious baby.
What these readings point us towards is that one true picture we should look to if we want to know who God truly is, and that picture is the person of Jesus we find and encounter in the pages of scripture, in the heart of our faith, and in infinite and intimate promise of the bread and wine we will share in this service. That the seemingly infinite and impossible promise of God’s kingdom is not pie in the sky, or an promise beyond hope. The promise of God’s kingdom comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ which reaches beyond all our understanding and yet is closer to us than the very breath on our lips.
No comments:
Post a Comment