Grow up!
“I said, ‘You are gods; you are all sons of the Most High.” (Ps. 82:6).
I read this morning Dietrich Bonhoefer writing, in Letters and Papers from Prison, “We cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur. And this is just what we do recognize – before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15.34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.”
Now, we are given to speaking of God as “father” – Jesus addresses him as “Abba” in Mark 14:36, and prescribes that we pray commencing “Our Father” (Matt. 6:9). Mostly when people develop this metaphor, they are given to treating us as young children, who require constant attention, protection and support from their parents – indeed, the Lord’s Prayer is very much constructed along these lines.
But as a parent of an older child, and a child myself of parents who lived long and productive lives but are now dead, I look on this period of childhood as a rather brief and transitory stage of life. Parents want their children to grow up and to stand on their own feet, albeit with a certain amount of wistful wishing that they were still dependent and were not asserting their independence and leaving home to make their own lives. Would God want less for his children?
In “God, a Biography”, Jack Miles treats the Hebrew Scriptures (our Old Testament) as a piece of literature, ordering it in the Jewish rather than the Christian way (i.e. the first five books, then the prophets, then the other writings), and charts the development of the character of God through the texts, treating them as a single piece of writing. He ends up painting a picture of a God who starts out very active and controlling, and who gradually withdraws from involvement until, in the last books, he is barely a presence at all. This, perhaps, starts sounding like the parent I’ve conceived here, supporting and chastising in early life and then gradually withdrawing to let the children fend for themselves. Indeed, Judaism has a story which is perhaps on point, the Oven of Akhnai. In it, there is a dispute as to the Law between Rabbi Eliezer and a group of other eminent rabbis, in which Eliezer’s approach is supported by a number of miracles, including a divine voice heard by all – but the majority stick to their guns and argue that they are correct in their interpretation of the scriptures and, in essence, God has given them those and should no longer interfere – and God’s response is “my children have defeated me”.
Athanasius of Alexandria wrote “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God”, and was in agreement with very many church fathers (and the Catholic Catechism); perhaps we should now accept the fullness of that concept and determine that we really should now be doing things for ourselves – after all, Teresa de Avila wrote “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes with which Christ looks out his compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.”
Can we accept that we must grow up? I know I had difficulty accepting, in her last decade, that from being the carer and provided for me, I had become the carer and provider for my mother; but I came to terms with it and was glad to be able to give back some of what I’d received (the remainder needs to be “paid forward” via my own children). Thus, perhaps, “Before God and with God we live without God” needs us to accept that perhaps, just perhaps, God may need our help rather than us needing his…