THE HIDDEN GOD - All-powerful, & vanquished.

The rhetoric of some atheists and agnostics makes it appear that there is a fine line-if indeed there is any line at all-between religion and superstition. Religious people should be careful not to be too defensive about this, because it is often true. There is, in fact, a form of religion which is akin to carrying a lucky rabbit's foot or knocking on wood, and it is more pervasive in our churches than we want to acknowledge. You encounter it when people find themselves in some personal crisis and ask, "How could this happen to me? I have always gone to church, tried to live a Christian life..." as if we will be rewarded for such things. Life may be an automatic death sentence, but some of us are apparently supposed to get time off for good behavior.

You have to sympathize with people who ask this sort of naive question, because they are in real pain, and are genuinely baffled: the God who is supposed to make good things happen if you are nice isn't coming through. This has to be dealt with pastorally and sensitively, but it does confirm the agnostic view of religion as a crutch, a shield against the harsh realities of the world, a comforting illusion. The atheist or agnostic looks at people crowding their way toward the shrine at Guadalupe or venerating a wonderworking icon, and can't help contrasting this with a starving child, whose parents are no doubt praying for her survival as fervently as anyone ever prayed. It is easy to find something obscene in the idea that God arbitrarily rewards some while others suffer horribly. There is no comfort, or even any convincing answer, in the idea that God's ways are not our ways. That's true, in spades, but it is hardly an argument.

Part of the problem with any theodicy is the notion that God is powerful in the sense that we ordinarily give that word. Theodicy has been reduced to the formula, "If God is God he is not good; if God is good he is not God." God being God here means God being the one who makes everything happen the way it happens, God as the scene designer, playwright, director, puppet-master. There is something of this picture of God in the Bible itself, but there are other strands there that also need attention. Christians too often see the revelation of Jesus Christ as something added to this picture of God as all-powerful (in the directorial sense mentioned above), and not as something that radically inverts and challenges it. Such attempts as process theology or Teilhard's evolving cosmos continue the attempt to explain God in ways that try to save his virtue, while making him less than completely powerful: the idea is that the picture is not yet complete.

This sort of thinking should be resisted. The power revealed in Christ upsets all ideas of power as control, even evolving control. What I want to suggest involves no more than a couple of hints, and maybe that's as good as we'll ever get. God's presence is made manifest not only in acts of compassion and self-sacrifice; it is present to us only when we place ourselves there, where God has been in the flesh. We can begin to discern God's presence and God's will only when we are, to some extent, like God; and any attempt to go beyond that-in explanation, in thought-is vain. Jesus tells us that we will not be forgiven if we do not forgive, that we are to love even our enemies, that whatever we do for the least human being is done for God. God's strength is revealed in absolute powerlessness (from our point of view), in the death of Christ on the cross. He has collapsed the distance between divine immutability and human suffering, and the initiative is all from his side; but we are invited to participate, and told that the consequences will be serious if we do not.

Beyond this, I think we should be willing to know nothing. We have to answer, "How could a good God permit such suffering?" with a nonanswer: "I have no idea, except that he stood where the suffering are, and suffered with them." When Jesus says, "He who has seen me has seen the Father," he tells us both that this is the kind of God we have, and also that this is all we can know of him. The rest is hidden, and is meant to be. The hiddenness calls us to trust, to a living, and therefore risky, relationship. As in any serious relationship-like marriage or parenthood-we live with the faith and hope that things will turn out wonderfully, but, this side of the end, we can't be absolutely sure. It isn't our place, at this point, to know the results or the end of the story, other than to try to trust the one who tells us.

It is fascinating that Jesus is, in a sense, hidden, following the Resurrection. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener; the disciples on the shore do not recognize him until they fill their nets; the disciples on the road to Emmaus do not know the one to whom they are talking until they recognize him in the breaking of the bread. And most significantly, at the end of Matthew's Gospel, he has gathered them on the mountain: "And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted." Some doubted: it is clear that something was not entirely clear. It was not obvious that this was the risen Lord Jesus, the same one who had been crucified. This hiddenness may be the way in which he initiates us into the reality that whatever we do for the least of these, we do for him. And our doubtfulness-our ordinary half- hoping, half-doubting, faith-is not an excuse to avoid the mission: to all of those on the mountain, including those who doubted, he says, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations...."

The criticism of atheists and agnostics, mentioned above, is not about to vanish-not even if Christians begin to act as if they took the gospel seriously. The belief that life has any inherent meaning is itself an act of faith and can't be demonstrated. Chesterton says, somewhere, that the problem many agnostics have with Christianity is not that it is good news, but rather that the news is too good to be true. There is something bracing about the idea of trying to live an honest and moral life in a universe where honesty and morality are fragile but essential human traits, played out against an indifferent background. Even the noblest Christian looks, to someone who sincerely thinks this way, a bit like a child with an imaginary friend. Our hope for these people is that in the end they will be wonderfully surprised.

"For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory" (Colossians 3:3). The hiddenness that is an essential aspect of the risen Christ applies also to us, and to our own lives this side of death. We are largely hidden from ourselves. We do not know how we might react if put to the test, though we may imagine we would be noble; and we pray, appropriately, in words the Lord gave us, "Do not put us to the test...." Those who have been forced to witness, and have come through, give us hope. They reflect the reality we see in Christ crucified, and in the hope of his Resurrection. The only contact that we will have with this reality, on this side of our resurrection, is found in the face of anyone suffering-anyone, finally, born and on the way to death. The rest is as hidden from us as it is from any agnostic, which should make us understand our brotherhood.