Hello friends.
This is Mark Gladman,
Also known as Brother Frederick James,
Your friendly neighborhood monk in dogs.
Welcome as we continue our series,
God Is.
We're on day nine.
And today we're considering.
.
.
I think Christianity's most audacious claim.
What does Jesus tell us about God?
So let's just steal our hearts and our minds and our bodies.
And enter free into this moment.
Take a nice deep breath in.
Now,
Feel yourself grounded here,
In this space,
In this place.
As we ask God to open our ears and our minds and our hearts to what we might hear today.
So however you might understand it.
The Christian faith makes an incredible claim that Jesus reveals God.
As we heard yesterday,
John's Gospel puts it with real boldness,
The Word became flesh.
And later,
Whoever has seen me,
With Jesus speaking here,
Has seen God.
What this means is that if you want to know what God is like,
Look at Jesus.
Now,
For centuries,
Human beings have imagined gods who look suspiciously like human beings.
They're powerful,
They're territorial,
They're jealous,
They're violent.
The gods have been concerned with honour,
They've demanded loyalty,
They've punished enemies,
They've rewarded their own.
It's easy to create a god in our own image,
Isn't it?
And Christianity's often found it difficult to escape that temptation.
We can say,
God.
And then we can imagine someone who looks like our culture's idea of power.
Someone who wins,
Who dominates,
Who keeps score,
Who needs to be appeased,
Who's primarily concerned with obedience.
Someone who's watching.
The kind of God that we hear spouted by some of the extremes of you know,
Christian faith out there.
And then Jesus,
Though,
Walks into the picture.
And suddenly.
.
.
We,
Including many of those people,
Have a problem because Jesus doesn't seem really interested in behaving like that kind of God.
I mean,
Look at Jesus.
And look at the people Jesus moves towards.
The sick,
The poor,
The outsider,
The so-called sinner,
The Samaritan,
The tax collector.
The woman that everyone else had already judged.
The child that nobody thought was important.
The person who's been excluded.
From the center of religious life.
Jesus keeps moving towards people and he touches them and eats with them and listens to them and restores them and forgives them.
And he tells stories about a God who behaves in exactly the same way.
A father who runs down the road.
A shepherd who goes looking for just one sheep.
A woman who searches her whole house for one lost coin.
A god who appears to be more interested in restoration.
Than retribution.
And so maybe we've been asking the wrong question.
Because Jesus invites us to ask,
What is God like?
Followed by,
Well,
What if God is actually like?
Jesus.
And this is one of the great Christian claims,
That Jesus is God revealed.
That means that when Jesus forgives someone or welcomes someone or refuses revenge or washes feet or weeps and allows him to be crucified,
Rather than respond to violence with violence,
We learn something about the very heart of God.
And this is where the image of God can become very,
Very difficult.
Different.
Because humans instinctively associate power with domination.
The powerful person's the one who gets their way,
Controls the room,
Wins.
We've all seen those leaders,
Particularly in the political sphere,
But Jesus reveals a different kind of power.
He kneels.
He serves,
He touches,
He gives,
He refuses.
To retaliate.
He doesn't conquer Rome.
He doesn't build an army.
He doesn't demand that everyone recognizes his status.
Rather,
He tells his disciples,
The greatest among you will be your servant.
And then he demonstrates it by washing their feet.
So if Jesus reveals God.
That maybe God is most clearly seen in self-giving love.
But what about judgment?
Because Jesus speaks.
About judgment.
But notice what happens to judgment when you place it inside the whole story.
Jesus' deepest concern is for restoration and for life and for freedom and for healing.
For people to return and to come into relationship and to be reconciled.
And because of this.
.
.
He confronts the things that destroy human beings.
He challenges hypocrisy.
He exposes systems that are crushing people.
He calls people into truth.
But he doesn't seem to delight in punishment.
And he doesn't seem to wait,
Watching closely and.
.
.
Looking for people to fail so that God can finally get them.
You know,
Instead.
He keeps opening doors,
Come,
Follow me,
Come and see,
Come home.
And the invitations keep coming and coming and coming.
And then the cross.
I mean if we really want to know what God's like.
Christianity eventually takes us to the cross where the whole thing becomes pretty unbearable.
The God revealed in Jesus doesn't stand at a safe distance from human violence.
This God enters it and absorbs it and refuses to retaliate and return that violence.
And notice that the resurrection story doesn't erase the wounds.
The risen Jesus still has scars.
The wounds become a part of the revelation.
Which leaves us with a very,
Very different image of divine power.
You will obey me because I can destroy you is not the way God works.
This God.
Wields a power that says,
I will love you even when you destroy me.
And that's a very different God.
So when we find ourselves wondering what God's like.
Maybe we should spend less time imagining and more time watching Jesus.
Watching what he does with power,
What he does with suffering,
What he does with so-called sinners,
What he does with enemies,
What he does with children.
What he does with the outsider,
What he does when people fail,
What he does when people succeed.
We should be watching how he prays,
And how he eats,
And how he touches,
And how he laughs,
And then ask if this is what God looks like.
What does that do to the God I've been carrying around in my head?
And when you do.
.
.
Maybe some of that inherited image won't survive and that's okay.
Because maybe some of those inherited images need.
To die.
Because if God looks,
Nothing like Jesus.
Then maybe we're dealing with our own imagination.
And not God.
Which brings us right back to where we've been going.
God is mystery.
God is more.
God's not a thing.
God's beyond every image.
And then the mystery comes close in Jesus.
The infinite chooses intimacy.
The God that we can't contain gives us a face,
A human face.
And when we look at that face,
The most surprising thing that we discover isn't power and domination and distance and exclusion,
But love and self-giving and presence and invitation.
And then the final question becomes.
If Jesus is God.
Am I prepared to let Jesus change what I mean?
By God.
And may grace,
Peace and love hold us and be with us as we sit with that question today.
And always.
Grace and peace,
Friends.
Until tomorrow.
Bye for now.
