The Hiddenness of God

Ah Lord! do not withdraw,
Lest want of awe
Make Sin appear;
And when thou dost but shine less clear,
Say, that thou art not here.

And then what life I have,
While Sin doth rave,
And fals’ly boast,
That I may seek, but thou art lost;
Thou and alone thou know’st.

George Herbert (from “A Parody”)

“I s the Lord among us or not?” That is the question that the people of Israel asked Moses, according to this morning’s Old Testament reading. The God of Moses had delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt; he had rescued them from the hotly pursuing armies of Pharoah as they crossed the Reed Sea; he then entered into a signed legal contract with them, if you will, at the mountain called Sinai, a contract in which God promised the people that if they would keep his commandments, he would take care of them. That’s the background to this morning’s reading from the Book of Exodus. But between the rescue at the Reed Sea and the Sinai story are sandwiched a series of other stories that are almost comical if you read them one right after another, and this morning’s story is one of them. The first thing that happens is that the water tastes bad, so the people complain. Moses calls on God, and God fixes the water. Then there’s nothing to eat. So the people complain again: “In Egypt, we were slaves, but at least we had three square meals a day.” So that night, a huge flock of quails arrive, and everyone has poultry for dinner. In the morning, God provides a special kind of bread, called manna, and he provides it every morning in the desert for the next forty years. So the people never go hungry again.

Then comes this morning’s story, and we know what’s going to happen. The Israelites move to a new camp, there’s no water, and the people complain: “Did you bring us here so that we and our children and our cattle could die of thirst?” Moses prays to the Lord, Moses strikes a rock with his rod, and God gives the people water. On the one hand, in one’s better moments, perhaps, one can appreciate the perspective that the Psalmist provides in Ps. 95 when he has God say: “Harden not your hearts, as your forebears did in the wilderness. . . forty years long I detested that generation . . .” I don’t have God’s patience, but at one time I worked day in and day out with some of the most brilliant university faculty and students in the world, and I can appreciate a point of view that asks: “When will these people ever learn?”

On the other hand, the concerns of the people of Israel are not unlike our own, and one can appreciate their dilemma. After all, if a God can’t at least provide the basic necessities of life for one’s children and one’s cattle, then what good is he? Where is he? The question of God’s presence is an ongoing one because God remains ever hidden. Although God gave his law to the Israelites, and eventually provided them with food and water in the desert, he still remained hidden. One must remember how stark was this new way of worshipping the divine that the God of Moses proposed to the people of Israel. The second commandment of the ten given at Sinai forbade the making of carved or molded images to represent God. Other nations had gods they could see and touch, but Israel had only a law and first a tent and later a temple in which there was no image of their God. God may be God, but the desert is still the desert. The God of Israel remained hidden for forty years in the desert, and the desert is lonely; it is frightening; it is uncertain; the overwhelming realities of life are only too real in the desert. As for God, in the desert, God is the unknown, the God who remains hidden. “Is the Lord among us or not?” is a question that one might still ask, even today, even as we face our own deserts.

It is possible to read the Gospel of John, where we find this morning’s story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, in a way that too easily answers this question: Is God among us or not? Where is God? From the beginning to the end of John’s gospel, Jesus is portrayed as the incarnate Son of God, the “Word” who was “in the beginning with God,” and who “was God” (1:1). “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14), John says, and “these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God . . .” (20:31). John’s answer to our question is simple: where is God? God is right here. Jesus is God, right here, for us.

Such a simplistic reading of John would be understandable, but it would be a misreading. It is true that according to John’s gospel, God has come among us in Jesus. But God does not come in a way that we might expect. For instance, the Jesus in John’s gospel is not like the pagan deities who come to earth in Greek or Norse mythology. He is not a Zeus or a Hercules or a Thor who announces his deity by his sheer power. He does not strike his enemies dead with bolts of lightning, or carry a mighty sword or hammer with which he can destroy his foes. In John’s gospel, Jesus does not walk around saying, “I’m God, so watch out!” When John’s gospel says: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” he uses some interesting imagery. In Hebrew thought, “flesh” does not mean simply the material physical body, in contrast to an immaterial soul or spirit. “Flesh” means all that the human being is, in all of its weakness and ordinariness. The word translated “dwelt” or “lived” when John says, that he “dwelt among us,” has the literal meaning of “pitching a tent.” What John says is that in Jesus Christ, God has come among us as one like ourselves, an ordinary human in every respect, and has “pitched his tent” with us.

One of the most ancient writings of the church, The Epistle to Diognetus, written probably in the second or early third century, summarizes well the way in which God’s Son has come among us as one of ourselves, in gentleness and humility:

Now, did [God] send him, as a human mind might assume, to rule by tyranny, fear, and terror? Far from it! He sent him out of kindness and gentleness, like a king sending his son who is himself a king. He sent him as God; he sent him as a human being to humans. He willed to save humanity by persuasion, not by compulsion, for compulsion is not God’s way of working. In sending him, God called humans, but did not pursue them; he sent him in love, not in judgment.

Now if God comes to us as a human being, he does not come to us as a stranger, but as one like ourselves, as one we can know. He has given us knowledge of the hidden and unknowable God in a way we can finally grasp. God is no longer the hidden or the unknown. John’s gospel says: “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” (1:18).

Yes, but . . . if God comes to us in flesh, he also comes to us as one who is still hidden—hidden behind the flesh of an ordinary human being. When the Hebrew people were in the desert for forty years, they worshipped God in a tent, a tabernacle; when God’s glory would descend on that tent, Moses would enter it and Moses alone would experience God’s presence. When John tells us that God’s Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, he is no doubt thinking of those Old Testament stories of God’s glory hidden within that tent. As the tent acted as a pointer to indicate the presence of God’s glory, so the tent also acted as a veil that hid that glory from the people of Israel; similarly, the flesh of Jesus acts as a veil, a veil that both points to God’s presence and hides it at the same time. So a central theme of John’s gospel is that God’s presence, now made available in Jesus, nonetheless remains a hidden presence. John says: “We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (1:14), but John also says: “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.” (1: 10,11).

In John’s gospel, Jesus refers to himself in cryptic symbols: He calls himself the Bread of Life (6:35), the Light of the World, (9:5) the Good Shepherd (10:11), the Resurrection and the Life (11:25), the Way, the Truth and the Life (14:6), the True Vine (15:1). People respond to these symbols in different ways. Some do not understand them; some react violently against them; some, like Nicodemus, whom we heard about in last Sunday’s gospel reading, almost but not quite seem to undertstand what is being meant. Others, like the Samaritan woman in this morning’s gospel reading, are able to see through the veil and come to some kind of awareness that through Jesus, God is truly in their presence.

This morning’s gospel provides a prime example of the way that John incorporates the two themes of both God’s presence and God’s hiddenness in Jesus. When Jesus meets this woman, he is a stranger to her. She is a Samaritan, he is a Jew. In first century Palestine, Jews and Samaritans thought of each other much as modern Israelis and Palestinians think of each other today. To her, he is, if not the enemy, at least one who is not where he belongs. Strange men also did not approach women in ancient first century Palestine. It was inappropriate. In addition, as we find later in the story, she is a woman who has had five husbands, and this would have made her a person who was slightly less than respectable; there would have been no reason for an ordinary Jewish man to enter into conversation with her. Yet Jesus approaches her anyway, not as one who makes a demand on her, who overwhelms her, but as one who asks her a favor, as a fellow human being with a simple human need: “Give me a drink.” He asks her a favor, so that, in turn, he may give her that favor which she most desparately needs.

As they continue in conversation, Jesus does not come right out and say to her: “I am the Son of God.” He does not say to her, “I know you are a sinner.” Rather, he respectfully retains his distance. He remains a stranger, but a stranger who gradually leads her to the point where he offers her not the water of Jacob’s Well, but living water, a water that he promises will cure her thirst forever. We detect a bit of cat-and-mouse game between Jesus and this woman. The conversation goes back and forth. He listens to her objections. We don’t know from the beginning how the story will turn out, whether she will understand his words, or simply turn away. Gradually, and slowly, she penetrates the veil, and she comes to understand what many others in John’s gospel do not understand, that God is somehow present in this man, but the mystery of God’s presence still remains hidden in this Jewish man who asks a Samaritan woman for a drink of water.

How then can we answer for ourselves the question that the people of Israel asked in the desert: “Is the Lord among us or not?” It seems to me that if we are to answer this question as the gospel of John answers it, that we must answer it in two ways. On the one hand, yes, God is among us because God has taken on our humanity in Jesus Christ. He has come among us as an ordinary human being, just like ourselves. As Anglicans, we can point to the many rich symbols that indicate God’s special presence in this, our own rather lavish tent in the desert. There is the gospel book that contains the words of Jesus, in whom we believe that God has become incarnate. There is the cross we carry in procession, pointing to the sacrifice of Jesus’s own flesh for us. There are the elements of bread and wine, in which we believe that we share in the risen Christ’s body and blood. There is the sanctuary lamp that indicates our affirmation of that continuing presence among us, at this place of worship.

But, on the other hand, we must also never forget that that presence is always a hidden presence. Because God comes to us in the veil of the flesh of the incarnate Word, he indeed remains veiled. The incarnation both gives access to God and hides God. Even in the incarnation, God keeps his distance.

This means that there are at least three dangers to avoid. First, it is always possible to lose the distance of the sacred in the familiarity of the trappings. We come to this place week after week. We hear the readings, we go through the motions. We see the same faces week after week. And somehow we forget that God’s presence among us is a hidden presence. We lose the mystery of divine distance in the ordinary everydayness. We forget that it is God who has given himself to us in Christ’s humanity, not we who make God happen when we come to this place. Because God is supposed to be here, we think that God’s presence can be controlled. Because that presence is hidden, we think that it can be safely ignored. We miss the presence of Christ in the humdrum predictability of one another and of ourselves. We forget that each one of us is sacred because we are created in God’s image and we bear the image that the human Christ himself bears.

Second, there is also the danger of fleeing the divine presence lest it become too close. God’s presence among us can make us aware of our own frailty, our own weaknesses, our own sinfulness, our own trespasses against God and against one another. We would rather that God kept his distance because a divine judge who is a stranger is at least more tolerable than a divine judge who is a threat. At times like these, we need to be reminded that God’s presence is a veiled presence, a mediated presence, a presence in which we experience divine judgment only in the gentleness that is the nearness of the Christ who has come as one of us.

Third, somehow, we know not how, we may lose the divine presence completely. Like the children of Israel, we may suddenly find ourselves in a desert we did not ask for, and from which we can find no escape. At such moments, we indeed may be tempted to cry, “Is the Lord among us or not?” At such times, we are reminded by John’s gospel that God’s presence is hidden for us in one who has been crucified, that God’s glory is hidden in the suffering of the cross.

But whether we approach God through the veiledness of the crucified humanity of Christ, or avoid God as the threatening judge, or simply ignore God because we have become too familiar with him, in this life, God will always remain hidden. We can expect no more than glimpses of his presence. Perhaps that presence will become evident to us in the Bread of Life of the eucharist, in the living water with which a child is baptized, in the stranger who meets us and asks us for a cup of water, in the quietness of meditation or even in the desparation of a prayer of loneliness, but even in that presence, God will always remain hidden. That perhaps is why we need Lent. Lent is the reminder that we must come to know God in the desert, through his absence as much as his presence. Even when God comes among us, he comes as the hidden One.