Spiritual Hiccups - God's Complicated Life

The God I came to know growing up was constructed from two primary sources.  There was Jesus, although he always seemed to me distinct from God in some way.  And then there was a very Western, philosophical, conceptual notion of divinity.  It was taught the Bible in church and probably knew it better than many people do today.  But somehow God always seemed more idea, more concept than some One.  And in my admittedly hazy recollection of worship as a child, the typical sermon was a reflection on some Pauline letter, a philosophical, theological treatise with an illustration or two.

I learned many Old Testament stories growing up, but for some reasons the God the Hebrews knew didn't impact my picture of God very much.  The Hebrews had a complicated relationship with a complicated God.  And I sometimes wonder if Christians' tendency to avoid the Old Testament is because we prefer to avoid these complications.

Israel understood that they had been "chosen" by God, but also that they have a covenant relationship with God that was contingent on their keeping their covenant obligations.  But they also spoke of a God who commitment to Israel caused God all sorts of trouble.  At times God seems to vacillate between punishing Israel for her covenant failures and continuing to be faithful to Israel despite her unfaithfulness.  God can come across as a spouse in a bad marriage who can't decide whether to get a divorce or reconcile.

A small glimpse of this complicated relationship is in one of today's psalms.  

   You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle.

      Are they not in your record?  

   Then my enemies will retreat in the day when I call.

      This I know, that God is for me.

To say that God is moved by Israel's sufferings is remarkable when you think about it.  God's emotional life is somehow invested in Israel, whose tears are collected and tossings are remembered.  This is no conceptual divinity.  This is a God who has for some reason chosen to have the divine life complicated by these human creatures, creatures who often turn out to make terrible covenant partners.

Some Christians consider these Hebrew images of God as primitive and not binding on them.  The problem with such a view is that Jesus is the example par excellence of God's complicated life.  God's commitment to Israel, and to humanity in general, draws God directly into the complexities and dysfunctions of human life.  In Jesus, basic Western concepts of God-as-perfection are violated.  God suffers.  God dies.

When I think about it, my image of my parents as a small child had some similarities with my picture of God.  It was a flat, uncomplicated picture.  Parents were undisputed rulers of their small universe.  There was nothing complicated about them.  Of course such views gave way to more mature notions of parents as complicated individuals whose commitment to their children complicated their lives in countless ways.

Perhaps Israel's messy, complicated picture of God is not the primitive one, but the more mature view.

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