(or) How Not To Play God!
In yesterday’s post, I picked up on the theme of “searing judgment” found in the reading from Isaiah at yesterday’s Mass. The first readings in today’s Office of Readings (part of the daily Liturgy of the Hours, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it), from Isaiah, places yesterday’s Mass reading in context and includes that reading. Before we get to the promise of “searing judgment”, we see a promise that our God will come to “overawe the earth”. He will lower the arrogant and the proud, humble the mountains and the cedars of Lebanon, and be the only mountain on that day. Then he will grant vindication to His people.
But how does God “overawe the earth” and “lower the arrogant”?
If we read this from our usual perspective, we might be tempted to think that God does so by being bigger than the arrogant and the proud, by out-doing the mighty, by having the biggest ego around. God humbles the proud, so we might suppose, by simply beating them at their own game. God becomes the biggest ego around, in this point of view, who can’t tolerate a rival, but must put everyone else ‘in their place’.
Let’s stay with this image of God for a moment. We might find such an image repugnant. Nevertheless, we may catch ourselves thinking of God and dealing with God as though we believed that this image was true. In fact, at times we might even wish that this image of God were true.
Why?
If God were simply the biggest ego around, we could cope with that. We know how to sweet-talk people with big and sensitive egos. We know how to butter them up in order to get what we want. We suppose that we can do the same with God. We try to butter Him up. We offer Him deals and give Him pretty generous terms, or so we wish Him to believe. What we really mean is that God should consider Himself utterly fortunate to have someone like us on His side. We assume that God feels the same way about us. It’s the expected game; the “way things really are”, or so we tell ourselves. It’s “how things get done”.
This leads to the second reason why we might secretly favor such an image of God. If we are created to be in God’s image, and if God is the biggest ego around, then all of our ego games are not only acceptable; they are good, even Godlike. We feel justified in puffing ourselves up. Supersize me, indeed! Do we not say, when we see someone who acts haughty, that such a person “thinks he (or she) is God”? What are we saying about God – or our conception of God – when we say this? What are we saying about our secret aspirations about ourselves when we say this?
How does God overawe the earth and subdue the mighty? Not by outdoing them at their own game, but by playing a very different game – if we can call it a game. Today’s readings point us in that very different direction. We hear of a humble shoot rising up from the seemingly failed House of David, One who has come to raise up the poor, One who brings about reconciliation and an end to ego games, and One who leads in a childlike way. One who comes in weakness, in humility, even though He comes to us as God. One whose very nature is to give, not to take. We can deal with God as the biggest bully in town, though we may find it inconvenient. What undoes our world is a God who gives and doesn’t take; a God who loves without there being anything in it for Him; a God whose glory, whose joy, comes from helping us become like Him. God’s power comes in creating out of love, not in destroying out of envy.
This doesn’t mean that “anything goes”. Far from it. To place one’s faith in such a God is to choose a radically different life, and to live it with radical trust in God. The only response to such a Giver must be a total gift of self – however halting or incomplete it may seem as we struggle to live that gift every day. That gift of self is lived out by a life of faithfulness to all that the Lord asks of us, no matter how others may react to it. This requires tremendous courage. Don’t believe it? Try it. You’ll see. But never give up. God is faithful, and that means that we can be as well.
A P.S. to all of you: I don’t plan to write a new post every day! But now that I have started this blog, I feel this desire to write often. The practice might be good for me as well.