Who Is Your God?
A priest in Colombia, Juan Jaime Escobar, is an extraordinary speaker, combining profound insights into his subjects, humor, and a keen sense of what people are actually thinking and doing.
If you speak Spanish, you can type in his name on YouTube’s web site and watch many of his best presentations.
In one of them, Escobar comments on our practice of replacing the God of the New Testament with the god of our imaginations. In other words, instead of us being “God-like” – for which I advocate regularly in these blogs for people searching for God – we insist that God be “human-like.”
To get close to God, he advises, “We have to pluck from our minds the illusions about God that we’ve nurtured since our childhood.”
The God Who Regularly Punishes
Among the most difficult of these fantasies to banish is the God who regularly punishes people in this life for a myriad of infractions. We enthrone God, the judge, over the God of mercy, the tyrannical despot over the God of Jesus – the father in the story of the Prodigal Son.
No matter how many times we hear about the God of mercy, from the pulpit, in our reading, in presentations, we cling to the notion that God is the great master of arbitrariness, that as we go about our business unawares, he/she is keeping track of the most insignificant of our faults. God, we imagine, rewards some and punishes others in this life besides demanding retribution in the next.
We imagine, says Escobar, arriving at the gate of heaven and being confronted with “the list.”
“Oh no, says an angel, when you were three you drank three bottles of milk more than you needed when other children in the world were starving.”
Lavishly Forgiving
This idea persists, he says, no matter what Jesus says about his Father. Besides the lavishly forgiving father in the story of the Prodigal Son, Jesus had this to say about God’s response to prayer.
“…What man of you,” he asks in Mathew’s gospel, “if his son asks him for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him?”
Ok, we have to acknowledge that there’s a serious discrepancy between the Gods of the New and Old Testaments. The God of the Hebrew Bible is often presented as violent, vengeful and jealous, in other words, like us.
“Pass through the city after him and smite” says the book of the prophet Ezekiel; “your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity; slay old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women but touch no one upon whom is the mark.”
Ezekiel is describing a vision in which he sees God commanding “the man clothed in linen” to mark foreheads of people who are to be spared in Jerusalem because they abhorred the city’s abominations.
Ordering Mass Executions
There are lots of passages in the Old Testament in which God is presented as kind and merciful but also many in in which he is presented as ordering mass executions and other atrocities. That’s because the biblical authors imagine God as the kind of tyrant that was common in their experience. You would think that the God presented in the New Testament would disabuse us of that idea, wouldn’t you?
That God doesn’t, perhaps because God is so completely “other” than us we just can’t imagine him/her apart from our own experience with people who have power. And that’s why people searching for God, especially in the Christian experience, should take pains to discover the real God of the New Testament.
As he said in Mathew’s Gospel, Jesus didn’t come to abolish “the law and the prophets” of the Hebrew Bible but “to fulfill them.” And among the most important ways Jesus fulfills them is to present God as the loving, merciful parent that he/she is.
