What is God like?

There is something at the heart of Christianity that refuses abstraction. We take a baby, put him into water, and say that everything is different now: our, relationship to the baby, his relationship to us, our responsibility before God. This action makes the baby one with Christ's life and death. The water itself is not an abstraction, but a sign of life and death, of quiet rain and raging flood, cleansing and drowning, the womb and the sailor's grave. Theology in the academic sense of the word always chases after this concreteness, generalizing about it, never completely adequately.

But the religious questions we encounter seem to demand abstractions, if only because this is the way we have grown used to talking about God. "What is God like? If you say God is loving, what does that mean? What is love?" Et cetera. I think it can be argued that no one was ever brought to God by good answers to these questions - though maybe relatively decent answers brought some people a bit closer. As important as it may be to offer (for example) decent courses of instruction to people who are interested in joining the church, it is probably more important to tell them to hang around for awhile, worshiping as much as it is possible for a non-member to worship with the community, joining in the life of the church, making reading and instruction only part of the process - a part that may occasionally be illuminating but is hardly as important as watching baptism, celebrating eucharistically, seeing a wedding. This is risky, because when the potential church member meets the real community in its dailiness - all those quarrelsome, imperfect, and sometimes downright annoying people - she may decide that it is all pretty meaningless, and look elsewhere. But it seems right, because the reality of belief does exist at this level, and nowhere else. And if the reality does not exist at all, it is here that its nonexistence will become apparent.

I realize here that I am running up against the idea that the value of sacraments (for example) is not dependent on the worthiness of the minister, the ancient and important ex opere operato idea. It has to be remembered, though, that this argument arose in the context of questions of rebaptizing people who had been baptized by people who were not considered to have been faithful Christians, and had primarily to do with whether it was appropriate to consider such baptisms worthless - an important pastoral question, but not a norm by which the church should judge its performance. The major question regarding our fidelity on the Last Day will not be, "Were the sacraments validly administered?" The question will more likely be, "Were you faithful in such a way that anyone could tell?" Jesus asks Peter not for a discussion of what the Incarnation means; he asks, "Who do you say that I am?"

Here again we encounter something that opposes abstraction. In answer to the question, "What is God like?" the church answers by pointing to a specific person. This is it. "He who sees me, sees the Father." What is love? We are shown Christ crucified.

This is one reason that the not uncommon effort to abstract Jesus from the context of his times and culture is so problematic. He spoke of God (rather unusually) as Father, saw things in the light of a narrowly Jewish perspective, referred everything to that tradition - but, some would argue, he can in theory be thought of as someone who might equally have come from another kind of background, in another era, with other values ... and perhaps we could have been redeemed another way....

It doesn't work. Incarnation is not only a challenge to abstraction of this sort, but a refutation of it. Love is someone nailed to wood and bleeding. You can talk about it, but a certain kind of talk avoids what happened. A Jewish male born into a society dominated by imperial Rome taught, healed the sick, preached forgiveness and love of enemies, and was killed by religious and political leaders who found everything about him threatening. His followers, among whom we are invited to count ourselves, say that God raised him from the dead, to show that the one Israel waited for had come. This is the only Messiah we will have. This is the truth about the world: the Lord of glory has been crucified. If you want to see what God is like, what love is like, this is where you have to look. If you find this hard to see, you have to look deeper.

And this is the message of Christmas. God's message to us in Christ begins with a young woman's willingness to accept him, and he comes among us not as a power, a force, but an absolutely dependent baby. The power God exercises to bring us to God's own life is not the power you would expect of one who (being in some way responsible for being itself, the Horsehead Nebula, the galaxies, light, gravity, thunder, lightning, cancer, plague) could terrify us into understanding that he is Lord. He confronts us as a baby whose being depended on a woman who said yes. He invites us to see him first as someone absolutely little. Any parent knows how heartbreaking this is, and how wonderful, if it is true.

If it is true ... because it is hard to believe that God loves this way, and we are not compelled to believe it, but invited to believe it by someone who first reveals himself as a child. The Resurrection has no direct witnesses, and can't. This is a vision we are not yet capable of seeing. But there is something poignant almost beyond our being able to bear it in the vision of the God who created everything from nothing coming to us this way - now in a life shared with us as bread and wine, which we can take as food; in history, as a child whose dependence invites us to look at him the way God looks at us.