Notes from the Wayside: Perspective: What Then Do We Love?

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What Then Do We Love?

Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and His love is perfected in us.

1 John 4:11-12 (NRSV)

Won't You tell me now when did I see

You in need of water?

Oh, and tell me now, when did I see You

Hungry on the street?

God, I hear You calling out to me

In the voices of the least of these

Calling me to reach beyond my world

To the beautiful stranger

From "Beautiful Stranger" by Rebecca St. James

At the end of the fourth century, St. Augustine wrote a series of introspective writings that came to be known as the Confessions. In the tenth book of these Confessions, Augustine reflects poetically on his own search for God. He approaches everything on the earth and everything above the earth, asking about God. No matter who or what he asks - be it a human, an animal, an ocean, or a star - he always gets some form of the same response: "I am not He, but He made me."

Augustine then raises the question, "What then do I love when I love my God?"¹

The purpose of the field of theology, the study of God, is to help us to figure out who or what God is. Theology can only go so far to accomplish this. We cannot see God with our eyes, nor can we observe God directly with any of our other four senses, so no claim we make about God is scientifically verifiable. In this sense, God is beyond our reach.

Not only are we unable to see God, we are also forbidden to attempt to make any kind of representation of God. The second of the Ten Commandments prohibits the creation of idols or images of deities,² including images of the God who gave us this commandment.³ Many think that such images are prohibited because God is so far beyond human comprehension that any artistic expression of God would fall far short of adequately describing or representing God. I would go so far to say that the images of God we have in our own minds could very well be classified as idols, for the finite human mind is incapable of fully understanding the infinite.

We are not even fully capable of naming or labeling God. When Moses asked for God's name, God gave him a name that we are not able to pronounce.⁴

In short, we do not fully know who or what God is, for God is beyond us.

The Christian faith offers us some Good News, for it teaches us that, though we cannot see God, we have been given a proper "image" of God. We can learn something about the nature of God through Jesus Christ, who is called "the image of the invisible God."⁵ St. John writes that "God is Love,"⁶ and this truth is demonstrated through the life of Jesus. We know that God is a God of grace, love, peace, and mercy because of what we read about the life of Jesus.

So how do we love a God whom we cannot fully comprehend?

The purpose of religion is to help us to answer such questions. The word religion is derived from the Latin word ligare, which means "to bind." It is from this same Latin word that we get the word ligament. In the same way that the ligaments in our bodies connect one bone to another, religion is meant to somehow connect people to God.⁷ Religion can only do so much to connect us to God, for, no matter how much we chase after God, God always seems to remain out of reach. People go to church every Sunday, seeking God, but, after an hour or two, they are thrust back out into the world once again. People seek God through "mountaintop" experiences, but they must inevitably return to the valley.

Has it ever struck you as odd that, for an all-powerful supreme being, God does not seem to call a lot of attention to God's self? In the Bible we read about pillars of fire, voices from Heaven, and other manifestations of the divine, but we don't typically experience such things in our day-to-day lives. Why does God remain so elusive? Why doesn't God show God's self?

In the book The Big Guy Upstairs, Rob Strong suggests that God's elusiveness - that we are unable and even forbidden to see God, that we not allowed to try to make "images" to represent God, that we are unable to pronounce God's name - points us to an important truth revealed to us at the beginning of the Bible.⁸ In the story of the creation of the world, we read, "So God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them."⁹

As human beings, we bear the Imago Dei, the image of God. To say that a child is the "spitting image" of her mother is to say that she looks a lot like her mother. In the same way that children generally look like their parents, we somehow "look like" God, though we might not fully understand how. We are forbidden to make images of God, because the only artistic medium that can adequately represent God is a human being. It took a human, Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh, to show us what God is like. The only way in which we are allowed to make images of God is to have children.

We cast our gaze upward, seeking God, but I wonder if, by remaining elusive, God is redirecting our gaze outward, toward our fellow human beings. St. John writes, "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and His love is perfected in us." He also writes that "those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen."¹⁰ We cannot see God, but we can see God's children, the human beings created in God's image, and, according to John, "Everyone who loves the parent loves the child."¹¹

So, as St. Augustine asked, what then do we love when we love our God?

Jesus was once asked which commandment in the Jewish Law was the most important. Jesus replied, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment." Jesus then said, "And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"¹² The religious scholar who approached Jesus that day only asked for the most important commandment, so why did Jesus offer him the second? Was He just going the extra mile by offering the scholar some bonus information? I wonder if maybe Jesus gave him the second most important commandment because he had to do so. Maybe the first is the "what" while the second is the "how."

Reflecting on the teachings of Jesus, Doug Pagitt writes in his book Flipped,
Jesus often connects the way we live with one another to the way we live with God, as if there is no difference between the two. When you love one another, you love like God. When you curse your brother, you curse God. When you don't forgive, you are not forgiven. In God we are all integrated. There's no pulling one part away from the other. Love is not the reward; it is the norm, the constant. It is the way of God, the perfect way.¹³

As I noted earlier, the purpose of religion is to somehow connect us to God. According to St. James, "religion that is pure and undefiled before God" includes the "care for orphans and widows in their distress."¹⁴ Similarly, Jesus once said that whatever a person does for "the least of these," the people left most vulnerable, he or she does for Him.¹⁵ I would not say that our religious rituals are without value or purpose, but I would argue that what God wants from us most of all is that we love each other and take care of each other.

When we love God, we love our neighbors. We love the neighbors who look and act like us and also the neighbors who don't look and act like us. We love the neighbors we like, the neighbors we don't like, and the neighbors we do our best not to notice. We must remember that all of our fellow human beings bear the image of the God we cannot see nor fully comprehend.

St. Paul wrote, "Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known."¹⁶ It is my hope that someday we will have a more complete understanding of God, that we will someday be able to know what we not yet able to fathom. Until then, we love the God we are unable to imagine by loving those God created in God's image.

Notes:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/augconf/aug10.htm
Exodus 20:4-6
The golden calf that the Israelites got in trouble for worshiping was created as a representation of the God who brought them out of slavery. See Exodus 32:3-5.
Wikipedia: Tetragrammaton
Colossians 1:15 (NRSV)
1 John 4:8 and 1 John 4:16
Kent Dobson. "Religion, Rites + Rituals: Rebind." Mars Hill Bible Church podcast, 04/07/2013.
Rob Strong. The Big Guy Upstairs: You, Him, and How It All Works. 2013, Jericho Books. ch. 7
Genesis 1:27 (NRSV)
1 John 4:20 (NRSV)
1 John 5:1 (NRSV)
Matthew 22:34-40 (NRSV)
Doug Pagitt. Flipped: The Provocative Truth That Changes Everything We Know About God. 2015, Convergent Books. p.116
James 1:27 (NRSV)
Matthew 25:40 (NRSV)
1 Corinthians 13:12 (NRSV)