Spiritual Hiccups - A Dynamic God

I grew up with a very static picture of God.  By static I mean things such as unchanging, immutable, immovable, and so on.  And while there is some warrant for this picture in the Bible, it comes mostly from Western, philosophical notions of God as the embodiment of perfection.  And perfection, by its very nature, cannot change.  To change, to become different, would be a move away from perfection.

Interestingly, the ancient Hebrews did not view God this way at all.  In the Hebrew Bible, God is incredibly dynamic, even emotional.  God gets angry, God is pleased, God makes plans, God changes plans, God brings punishment, and God relents from punishing.  In some places God is even said to "repent" of plans to punish.

In today's reading from Joel, the prophet calls the people to change their ways, to come before God with weeping and mourning and fasting.  "Who knows whether (God) will not turn and relent?" 

In the gospel reading, Jesus tells his parable of the lost sheep in response to questions about his hanging out with sinners, ending with this.  "Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance."  Perhaps it is not obvious, but if God experiences joy, then it seems that God can become happier than God was, which presumably means God can become unhappy.  And all of this describes a dynamic rather than static God, a God whose relationship with creation and humanity costs God something, cost God what scholar Walter Brueggeman calls "a disturbed interior life."


I wonder if this isn't a much more helpful way to speak of the cross.  Rather than some sort of sacrifice that God had to offer in order to placate Godself (When I say it that way I like the idea even less.), the cross is the embodiment of God disturbed interior life, the tremendous cost God endures in extending grace to us. 

When we think of "costly grace" rather than "cheap grace," we are usually talking about our accepting God's favor without it requiring anything of us in return, without it changing us.  But it seems that grace costs God quite a bit as well.

Letting go of a static picture of God challenges my Western notions of God as the very embodiment of the concept of perfection.  But not only does a dynamic God appear to be a lot more biblical, the hope of a relationship with a dynamic God seems a lot more plausible.

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