|
Today's passages from John’s Gospel and from Amos, like so much of Scripture, place us in the front row of a drama where the characters (who just might be us) contend with the discrepancy between the God that they know that they know and a messenger’s proclamation that shatters what they have known. What will happen? Will anyone be changed?
Who I believe God is ultimately underwrites all that I believe about who and what you are, who I am, and how we are to live together in the world. Cain, for instance, believed God’s love was finite and contingent, so when God favored Abel’s offering, believing that God had abandoned him, Cain resolved his pain by murdering his brother (Genesis 4:1-18). What we do, we ultimately do according to the God we hold to be true.
Am I courageous enough listen to Jesus speak of who God is and then face the possibility that the God that I now hold and the life I have lived unto that God is unlike the God I encounter in Jesus? Will I? When? At what cost and how? The poet W. H. Auden piercingly expressed in The Age of Anxiety the depths to which we cling to the God we know that we know:
We would rather be ruined
Than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
We may believe it is difficult and perhaps too difficult to accept the wild freedom of the good news of God in Christ, but in letting go of the illusions to which we have clung, we will discover that God’s absolute love only ever and always has been our true heart center, expectantly awaiting our return.
| 
