The uncaged God

Monsignor Ronald Knox, Roman Catholic Chaplain to the University of Oxford in the 1930's, once described a discussion at a students' society: ‘The prevailing attitude ... was one of heavy disagreement with a number of things which the speaker had not said.'

For the last week or so the media have been full of headlines, articles, letters and even cartoons all in profound disagreement with a number of things which the Archbishop of Canterbury did not say in his lecture in the Royal Courts of Justice on 7 February. One of our parishioners, a barrister, was there, and kindly sent me a transcript. It makes fascinating reading. She commented, ‘I was seated between two Muslim barristers, and all three of us thought it was a superb lecture indicating the tolerance, good manners and respect that we all should have for one another in a pluralist society. I feel sad that, yet again, the media have misrepresented [the Archbishop's] views and that even when giving an academic lecture, thought-provoking comments are misinterpreted.'

Well, the pulpit is not the place nor a Sunday service the time to try to give a more accurate account of the Archbishop's lecture than that provided by the media. But I do feel compelled to wonder aloud today whether it is any longer possible to say anything complicated about anything, or to address any complex matter in terms other than simplistic slogans and sound-bites. It is as though everyone has given up on intellectual effort, and even on the courtesy that requires us to try to understand what other people are saying before passing instant judgment upon it, and them.

And for Christians that is, or ought to be, very worrying indeed. Our faith is not something that can be reduced to a series of simple formulae or propositions, precisely because God cannot be contained by purely human categories and definitions. Contemplating the white tiger in Bristol Zoo, R. S. Thomas wrote

   It was beautiful as God

  must be beautiful; glacial

  eyes that had looked on

violence and come to terms

  with it; a body too huge

and majestic for the cage in which

it had been put; up

and down in the shadow

of its own bulk it went,

lifting, as it turned,

the crumpled flower of its face

to look into my own

face without seeing me. It

was the colour of the moonlight

on snow and as quiet

as moonlight, but breathing

as you can imagine that God breathes within the confines of our definitions of him, agonising over immensities that will not return.

And so when Nicodemus, the Pharisee described by Jesus as ‘this famous teacher of Israel' [John 3:10], comes to him by night to discover what it is Jesus is about, what it is he teaches, the first thing he has to discover is a new language, a different way of looking, fresh understanding. He is told by Jesus to learn that the Spirit is like the wind, blowing where it wills. Unless we are prepared to learn this new vocabulary, we will never understand the things of heaven.

So, in the Bible, God is primarily the One-who-acts, who goes before the Israelites in the wilderness as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night: never an object, never static, never an idol to be grasped or possessed or comprehended; but moving, acting. God is loving, caring, saving, grieving, judging, restoring.

When Moses meets God in the burning bush and receives his commission, he demands to know the name of the One who speaks. And God answers, ‘I AM; that is who I am.' Or, as a better translation has it, ‘I will be what I will be.' [Exodus 3:14]

Here, very clearly articulated for all time, is God's own statement about himself, that he is primarily a verb and not a noun. In other words, he simply will not be pinned down. He will not submit to being caged by our definitions and categories. He is too ‘huge and majestic' for any human cage. As the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews asserts, it is an awful thing – a thing full of awe – to fall into the hands of the living God, ‘for our God is a consuming fire.' [Hebrews 12:29]. Still the bush burns. Jesus himself is notoriously reluctant to accept any titles, and the only one he uses of himself is the enigmatic ‘Son of Man'. Time and again he orders those whom he has healed to tell no-one. He prefers to teach through parables which only those with the ears to hear and the hearts to understand will grasp. To the rest, his messianic secret remains hidden, impenetrable. Often he is able to slip through a crowd, and in the end the Temple authorities are only able to lay their hands upon him when he is ready for them and for his destiny.

The problem – and it has been the problem of Christianity almost from the start – is that most people are not content with our enigmatic and elusive God. Do you remember the terrible hoo-ha that greeted the publication back in the 1960's of Sidney Carter's famous hymn I danced in the morning when the world was begun ? People were outraged and scandalised by the notion of Christ dancing through his life and onto the cross, then out of the grave and on into resurrection history. Many choirs walked out rather than sing it, and good church people wrote angry letters of protest about it. And yet is it the most compelling and true theology. That is exactly what Jesus did in his earthly life and what he continues to do today. The trouble is that most people would prefer to have an utterly rock-solid faith in a small, easily-defined god, or no faith at all, rather than put their trust in One who will always be calling them on and leading them into risk and adventure for His sake. So they put God in their cage of agreed definition and limited liability and there endorse him or deny him, knowing that there he will not be able to disturb them too much.

But ‘I will be what I will be' is still our God. Nothing illustrates that more than those precious weeks after his resurrection, when the Jesus of history is becoming the Christ of faith. He is no longer confined by the limitations of his humanity. No locked door can keep him out. Just when the solemn religious folk think they have done their duty and justified the authority invested in them by efficiently disposing once and for all of this dangerous fool, Eternity has the last laugh. As Harry Williams put it in his book Tensions, ‘ Behind their backs, without them having the slightest inkling of what is going on, the fool has popped up again like a jack-in-the-box and is dancing about even more vigorously than before and even more compellingly. People here, there and everywhere are falling under his spell. But the brass hats and stuffed shirts are facing the other way and can't see what is going on. So they continue with their dignified mutual congratulation and their serious business.'

In the garden, when Jesus appears to Mary of Magdala, he utters a command which echoes through history, ‘Do not cling to me'. He wants us to engage with him and adventure with him as he leads us on in the dance of faith, the glorious, risky exploration of resurrection living. It will require intellectual effort, to be sure, because he wants to engage our minds. And it will require a willingness to love, because he wants to engage our hearts. That was what Moses glimpsed at the burning bush. It is what is true for us today. Still God goes ahead of us, dancing just beyond our grasp, leading us on. And unless we follow, we will never reach the Promised Land.