Hidden God

Twenty-sixth Sunday, 1996

Hidden God

I think there is a connection between the theme, or the implied common theme, of the three readings and those of last Sunday ... when I talked -I tried to talk about, and I don't think I did it very well -about the incomprehensibility of God as a religious position. Perhaps I'd like to make another stab at it because I think that that's what can be read in these texts today, only I'd like to use a more familiar Biblical motif-way of talking about that, which is to speak of the "hiddenness of God." The "hiddenness" you can talk about in all three readings, as Jesus talked about, as something that's totally unexpected .... totally unpredictable .... and therefore in that sense "hidden" from us. But I'd like to propose that even in ahh ... the career of Jesus himself there is a great manifestation of the "hiddenness" of God ... and you can get at this in a whole bunch of ways.

If the world makes sense, the world is logically understandable, then try to make sense of the death of this man ... If the world makes sense, and in this progressivist myth that we, especially in North America, work under, then explain this the most murderous century in the history of humanity ... Hitler's 10 million, Stalin's 20 million, the Cambodian's 2 million ... talking of lives ... If life is penetrable, then make sense of all this. It is impossible, and it is beginning with that we can come at least to one way of understanding the "hiddenness of God." And I'd like to get at this by going through this text from the Philippians that we've all heard over and over again: "Jesus was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God, etc..." I've gone through this before but I think today that it is useful to go through it again, word by word almost, precisely to open up this notion of the hiddenness of God and then to draw some implications from that.

I grew up with the interpretation of this text that said: "Well, Jesus and the Father were sitting around and then the Father had the idea that 'well, You really ought to go down and die and then come back up ... "I And that seems straight forward ... Jesus was not grabbing at equality with the Father. But I think it is true that today most scholars see that that is precisely a misreading of the text. Rather, what Paul was doing was taking his normal, favorite understanding of the life and the meaning of Jesus' existence and casting him in the role of a new Adam ... Because if you this text in that light, then all kinds of things start looking different. -What do I mean? Who was in the form of God, as far as the Biblical message goes? -Adam: "Let Us create man in Our image" and so God created male and female. God created human beings ... What was the great failure of the human race, its ultimate discontent with its humanity and its aspirations of the something that was both unreal and phony? "Eat this fruit and you will be as God." Jesus, on the other hand, the Jesus as Paul understood him to be as the new Adam, then He did not look to some kind of equality with God ... but emptied Himself. It is that notion of "emptying himself" that is crucial. What does it mean for Jesus to "empty himself?" He didn't empty Himself of humanity ... He "emptied Himself" in that in his human career He refused all the normal dishonesties, evasions, compromises ... that are available to all of us, which all of us have taken advantage of in our lives to create a self. So that's the first issue here. But far beyond that, Jesus did not do that within the context of a world in which that was standard operating procedure ... which that level of fear-driven, cowardly dishonesty is the stock and trade of us human beings. And so it is not surprising that Jesus was killed... He came obedient to the point of death because Jesus was killed precisely because that manner of behaviour .... that resistance to the normal way that we human beings "get by" and make a life is extremely disruptive. Nothing so upsets us as a human being of ... utter integrity because they stand as judgement of our own lack of integrity. It is for this reason that "God exalted Him and gave Him the name, etc..."

I want to focus on the very crucial moment of Jesus' obedience to his own humanity, to his own time and place .... to his refusal to lie, to run away, to compromise, to evade, to deceive either Himself or anybody else ... And that of course was the moment of his crucifixion. The three gospels put into His mouth, and perhaps the dying Jesus really said this: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken me..." -And here we get to the point. God was hidden from Jesus. What does it mean for God to be hidden from Jesus? Then all of the most pious expectations of how things ought to go, of how life ought to work out, of how God ought to act ... crumble before the reality that God is truly hidden, as Isaiah said ...

I don't think most of us are comfortable with that especially -I've taught for a long time in this institution and I can remember my own early adolescence well enough to know how absolutely vital it is for me to have some sense of certainty, of fullness, of self possession, of power -even if I have to fake it to do that... And as an adolescent, I did. And even in my late adolescence, in my present stage in life, I still do. Or at least I recognize the temptation somewhat more readily than I used to do ... For these reasons it is very hard to say God, and therefore the very character of my life, and the very meaning of human existence is also hidden -because if God is hidden and I truly believe in God, and if my knowledge of myself comes through my belief in God ... then I too am hidden from myself, necessarily, as is the meaning of life ...

How does this play out then? What are the implications of this? I mean we who exist in the world and seem to need in this world certainties, stabilities, securities ... Well, to understand that God is hidden is, first of all, the result of the religious quest. You know, it's the people who precisely do not know God who say, it seems to me, that they know God absolutely. -Front and back, side to side ... Therefore all the fundamentalisms in the world today, and they are massive, have as their common root their absolute certainty as to who God is and how life is. Whether it is Catholic Fundamentalism, Buddhist Fundamentalism, Islamic Fundamentalism, Jewish Fundamentalism ... That ought to put the skids to that impulse. Because what the Fundamentalist is looking for is, basically, premature certainty, a hold on the truth. So that's one enormously valuable beginning because every institution particularly, and the Roman Church is certainly no exception, is always prone to leap over a great sea of uncertainty to land securely on some rock-like stable place. -We cannot do it. We cannot do it personally, we cannot do it as an institution ...

Another, and with this I will end finally, another thing that is very valuable, even to just hear this, because I am not profound enough a religious person to have come to that insight of the hiddenness of God at an appropriate depth ... but as I read the lives of the Saints, as I look every day at the crowd of witnesses around us, as I think about the figure of Jesus .... and I think about that cry of agony .... as I think about a world in which 35 000 children die every day under the age of five for lack of proper nourishment ... that I try to put all of that together. Then at least I get a kind of warning to myself that any sort of certainty that I think I can land on and plant myself within... -I must be very careful of that. Whether it is the certainty about my own opinions, even my own sense of who I am and, certainly, it ought to make me very cautious about the institutions with which I began and their premature claims of infallibility and absolute sureness. Truly, as Isaiah said, at least the God of the Bible, the God of Jesus, is a hidden God.

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