Conversations with God #2

Conversations with God #2                 07/20/12

This is a summary of the study that took place last Friday

Jesus' Conversation with God

Theresa of Avila said that the only way to discover Jesus’ divinity is through his humanity. Jesus was fully a man. He had to learn the same way as us - went through everything we do. In Mt 11:25-30 we get a glimpse of how Jesus understood himself and his role. This passage has been described as “a thunderbolt from the Johannine heavens” because it seems to fit in more with the Gospel of John than with the Synoptics.

Jesus begins by thanking his Father “Because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” Jesus, in addressing God as Father, already signals the trustful and intimate relationship he feels between himself and God. God’s Wisdom has been hidden from those who have been trained – from the scribes and those who have received the standard teaching. Instead it has been revealed to the illiterate and unlearned. Those like little children – the unformed. Those with already formed ideas and established ideas are not going to get it.

Jesus continues by saying “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him”.

When we have a conversation with God – how do we come in to the presence of God? In our study the following responses to this question were given:

• Humble petitioner, a peanut, aware of my own smallness.
• Hopeful
• Trusting in Jesus’ love – that I will not feel put down
• Aware that I am a work in progress

Some of these responses are already conditioned by the positive relationship from Jesus, but we can still see gaps and lack in our communication with God. Jesus feels that everything has been handed over to him by God! None of us thinks anything like this.

The verses in Matthew echo key passages in the Old Testament. In Daniel 7 there is the figure of “One like a son of man” to whom all dominion is given. Jesus often refers to himself as “Son of Man”. Also in this discourse Jesus appears to identify with the person of Wisdom. (c.f Mt 11:18-19). Wisdom was with God in the beginning, before the beginning of creation (Proverbs 8:22-23). Again there is an implied intimate confidence between Jesus and the Father, signaled by the figure of Wisdom. Job 28:12-23 asks where wisdom can be found. “Where then does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? It is hidden from the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of the air….God understands the way to it, and he knows its place”. Wisdom extends beyond human competence and knowledge. Only God knows it intimately and completely.

At the baptism of Jesus the Spirit of God descends upon Jesus like a dove and a voice from heaven proclaims “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Mt. 3:17). This brings to mind the Suffering/Nonviolent Servant of Isaiah 42:1, “My servant whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations”. The Greek word pais used in the Greek translation of Isaiah can mean both "servant" and "son. The words of love and pleasure recall the Servant verse and suggest Jesus' baptism experience was one associated with the Nonviolent Servant. (Matthew associates Jesus directly with this Servant passage at 12:18-19.)

Jesus studied the Scriptures which enabled him to appropriate for himself these motifs of Wisdom, Servant and Son of Man and gave him the language to express his relationship with God. The intimate relationship must have already have been present. This relationship represents a categorical human breakthrough. In his spirit and in his mind there is no separation or hostility from the Father. He has a consciousness free from the darkness of God that remains in the rest of us. He is the first person free of violence in his relationship with the father. A relationship totally transformed. It is into this relationship that he invites us in the Spirit.

*Note in the previous weeks to this study we contrasted the conversations with God of Jeremiah and the Suffering/Nonviolent Servant of Isaiah. It is evident that Jesus' conversations lay much closer in character to the latter's. "Morning by morning he wakens--wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. The Lord has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward" (50:4-5).

Conversations with God #1

Here is the first Bible Study summary of a short series on the theme Conversations with God.
- Linda


Conversation with God #1                        6/22/12
Abraham

Genesis 12 is where the story of Abraham begins. It follows the first eleven chapters of Genesis which include the chapter-one creation story, and the five primeval histories (Eden, Cain & Abel, Giants, Flood, Babel). These primeval stories set out to diagnose the human problem. The first pure note of hope about a solution to the problem comes in Chapter 12.

In Genesis 11:27 – the end of a two chapter genealogy – we first hear of Abram, son of Terah, immigrants from Ur in Chaldea (modern day Iraq) who has settled in Haran (modern day Syria).

In Chapter 12:1-3 the Lord calls Abram “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”.

This promise of blessing is a pivotal contrast to the chaos of the prehistories. The idea of blessing appears first in chapter one of Genesis in the creation story. It implies fruitfulness, non-violence, life and peace. The curse in contrast is an absence of these things. The blessing is for all the people of the earth intended right from the beginning and realized in Abraham. Through Abraham all the tribes of the earth (listed already in the genealogies) will be blessed. Abraham’s name is indeed considered great today (part of the promise) in that he is held to be the father of the three main monotheistic religions of the world - Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

While the blessing is universal, the story starts with a single individual. This is a very human way of relating. It is not a call to adopt a program or manifesto - it is a call to relationship and to love. It is the blessing given to an individual that will bring love into the whole world. The United States has championed the ideal of individual freedom and self-determination. This often leads to selfishness and hedonism. The most difficult act of individual freedom is to love.

In Genesis 15 we have the continuing narrative of God’s covenant with Abram. God promises him a child after many barren years and through this child, countless descendants and the Promised Land. God tells Abram to bring him several sacrificial animals which he cuts in two and lays upon the ground. As night falls, Abraham falls into a sacred sleep – dark, deep and terrifying. A smoking pot and a flaming torch (symbols of the presence of the divine) pass between the pieces. God is symbolically saying that if his covenant with Abraham is broken he will call down the same violence visited upon the animals upon himself. This is an unbreakable covenant in which Abraham does not have to do anything but believe. But God puts himself at risk of the terrible human practice of violence.

The narrative continues in Chapter 18 with the story of the three angels (artistically represented in the Rublyev icon, The Trinity). It is this story that expresses most powerfully the heart and depth of the theology of the covenant. It begins with Abraham meeting three strangers by the oaks of Mamre. He offers them hospitality – water and food. Then they promise the birth of a son within the year, a conversation Sarah overhears. She laughs in disbelief at such an unexpected, implausible and ridiculous promise. The three men then turn towards Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom and Gomorrah were places of brutality and oppression to the stranger. The theme is a common one in the Old Testament – the outcry of the oppressed toward God and the Lord’s response. The Lord hears Abel’s blood crying from the ground and the cry of his people in the land of Egypt. The Lord has heard the cry of the victims in Sodom and Gomorrah and is seeking to bring about a violent, righteous vengeance.

The text gives us the imagined psychological process within God. “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?” he decides that he cannot hide his plan from Abraham because of the covenant he has just made. “No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice; so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him” (v.19). He tells Abraham because Abraham is the key to the universal blessing. The covenant makes God vulnerable to humanity – it opens the space that allows humans to be part of the decision making process. The Yahwist (the story’s author) presents this as indecision in God – but the reality is that it is our own understanding of God that changes. The story shows God now vulnerable to the compassion of Abraham, but God chose him precisely for this task--to plead for humanity. Thus the overall story is a subtle meditation on a deeper sense of God. God is entirely vulnerable and committed to human history. The story tells us God can only be God when we ourselves change how we are and how we see him. Full revelation comes in Jesus who says that no-one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom he reveals him. It is when we see Jesus who died non-violently on the cross that we begin to see the Father’s true self.

Abraham bargains with the Lord for Sodom and Gomorrah. His compassion undermines God’s vengeance so that God is willing to consider changing his actions for the sake of even ten righteous people (V.32). Abraham becomes a model to God of compassion and forgiveness. This is the reason that Abraham is our father in faith – not because he is our physical ancestor but because of what he did and believed. Meanwhile, at the end of the story, God does destroy Sodom violently because that was the dominant version of events and the writer could only subtly undermine or deconstruct it.

At its heart Abraham’s story gives us the first glimpse of a God open to compassion. It gives a window into the heart of God. Too often our understanding of God mirrors our own violence. Abraham shows us that the only way to change the way we see God is through forgiveness – anything else returns us to the old, violent vengeful God. It is this compassion that will bring about the universal blessing promised to Abraham. It is Abraham's compassion, along with his faith, that constitutes his righteousness.