God Is With Us

As I read the Bible, I see a long and rich history of Judeo-Christian tradition whose main thrust is about understanding God’s relationship with humanity. From our reading of Genesis to Luke’s references about Jerusalem, we hear of the many ways that people have chosen to understand and worship God.

First, we understand that God creates. Not only did God create the universe, but God also chose to be present in that universe. The story of Abram talking with God about being childless and grieving over not having an heir, tells us that our religious ancestors understood God as one who interacts with human beings, makes promises and covenants, and visits often to ensure that those promises are kept.

As time passed, and Jesus came onto the scene, there was less emphasis on God’s conversations with human beings, and more attention to the nature of God’s relationship with us, that God loved all creation, and God loved human beings in ways that we cannot even imagine.

The poetry of Psalm 27, is about having confidence in and being encouraged by God’s active participation in the world. Just listen to the words, “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh-- my adversaries and foes-- they shall stumble and fall. Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident.”

The God depicted in Psalm 27 is not a distant God, but an ever present and compassionate God, One who knows our hopes and dreams and fears, and One who instills in us a sense of trust that all shall be well if we will keep faithful.

But there is a turning point in the psalm. Suddenly, at verse 9, the psalmist is not so confident. “Do not hide your face from me…Do not cast me off, do not forsake me.”

What has happened that the psalmist has lost courage and is no longer confident in God’s protection?

Paul writes that we understand one another when we share in each other’s sufferings. The psalmist cries out in sure confidence that God wants to know our sufferings.

Why do people suffer? We do not always suffer from physical pain, but emotional pain, loss, loneliness and uncertainty as well. People are afraid, just as the psalmist says:

Afraid of failing at what we love and care about—our place in the family, our job, our community. We fear being taken over by others. For the psalmist. it may have been an invading army, but for us it can be the invasion of age, the invasion of financial stress, the invasion of failing health. We fear that we can be petty and jealous of others, and that God may hold this against us in some way.

Paul reminds us that no one fully understands Christ, but we press on (3:12) towards the goal of being with Christ when he comes again. This is the goal of all “mature” (3:15) Christians: to center our lives on Jesus, not on his popularity and power, but on his sufferings and his choice to share the suffering of others.

Paul says that our bodies, now mortal, will enter eternal life in a changed form. And not just our bodies, but that God will also “transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.”

We cannot fully understand the source of that power, except that it comes from God, and we live in the hope that it will transform us so that we will be present with one another to share each others’ sufferings as Jesus did.

When Jesus is warned that Herod was out to kill him, he responded, "Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.”

In other words, no secular power is strong enough to deter Jesus from his chosen mission to serve and to empower the poor, the friendless and the needy.

And so we come full circle to meet, again, the God who keeps promises and loves us. Theologian Rudolf Bultmann wrote that Jesus’ teaching of God seems no different from that which Jesus himself had been taught: to need and depend on God, even though we are not sure that we can totally trust that God will take care of us. Jesus made it his goal to bring this distant God close to us.. We see this clearly in the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer. God is “our” God, not a distant God. God is a parent, not a remote, fearsome and unpredictable God. And so we have those words that Luke uses to explain God’s relationship to the world, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

I do not see Jesus speaking that to any particular Pharisee, but to the whole of creation. It is as a mother who, when speaking to God about her kids, opens her hands and says, “Where did I go wrong? All I ever wanted was to give them what I never had.” All I want is to love them. That is the God that Jesus preached. Not a God who wishes to command and who demands that we obey, but a God who beckons us to be in relationship with God and with one another. To be in this kind of relationship is everything. To see a model of this, we look to Jesus, how we talked, how he lived and how he died. This is the story we tell during Lent, and the story we hope to make our own.