I have often wondered about the diverse descriptions that the Scriptures provide us for the One we call God.  Many times in the Hebrew Testament, we have seemingly conflicting images of the Creator God.  At times God is described as wrathful and exacting in punishment for misdeeds and what is considered bad conduct.  In some of those descriptions God’s intended wrath elicits a response from the offenders that seems to change God’s mind about the course of action to be taken.  At other times, God is the One who takes us back and invites us home no matter what (the prophet Hosea for one of many examples).

If we start to look at these sometimes contradictory images of God, we can quickly become lost in confusion and frustration.  How can a God, who we are told created us out of and in love, take offense at our behavior?  Many times we may not even ask this question, because that type of behavior seems so akin to our own behavior, specifically the measure with which we judge others actions.  I wonder if, at a deeper level, the seeming disparity in the descriptions of God has more to do with how we image God?

Our experiences of life color our image of God.  If we do our homework when we read the bible, we will find that this is true throughout all of Scripture, from the Torah through the Psalms to the Prophets.  We can only know the God we experience.  And that’s where it gets tricky, because outside of private revelations, the way that we encounter God, comes in our everyday life experiences with each other.  Now, we many times may think of going to ‘visit’ God at Church on Sundays as an experience of God, but I would venture to say that the reality of any visit with God must be grounded or flow from an ongoing relationship with God.   In other words, everything in between the Sundays.  It’s the spaces between the Sunday gatherings that truly give life to anything that happens to us in a church building.

If we attempt to limit our experience of God to the worship that we give on Sundays in a church building, we will ultimately though perhaps unconsciously exclude a lot!  This exclusion comes in the form of confinement and compartmentalization that can reduce the size of God such that the Loving One who created us waits timidly for us behind doors that remain locked during most of the week.  Then what happens in Church takes on a role of loftiness that can cause us to lose the ability to translate or indeed RELATE to and within our experience of everyday life.  We can easily grow to appreciate the comfortableness of standing inside a structure that seems to delineate the sacred from the profane, the good from the bad, who is in and who is out.

Please do not misunderstand.  I am not propounding that we abandon church worship or coming together to praise God in a community of belief.  I am expressing my sense that if we try to leave it there, it will become static and stagnant, and it will seem like punctuated visits with someone to Whom we think we relate well, but indeed, we are only scratching the surface of the depths that can truly be experienced.

If you think of someone whom you love deeply.  This could be your spouse, your companion, your child, your parents, a friend…whomever.  Have you ever noticed how your concern for them goes beyond the time and space that you actually are with them physically?  The depth of the love permeates your very being, so that it stretches beyond the confinement of distance and time, and has the capacity of infusing the way in which you encounter everything and everyone.  On the other hand, think of times that you feel isolated and alone.  When these experiences occur, it many times coincides with feelings of abandonment, disrespect, marginalization, a sense of being cut off or shut out.  This too spreads out beyond simply your immediate experience of it.  Both concern and segregation vibrate out into the world.

Love by its very nature must relate, and when we attempt to thwart this, everything splits apart!  Things, actions, and people are viewed as either good or bad, right or wrong, to be embraced or to be avoided.   We have called this morality many times, but again without trying to relativize everything, I am simply asking the question of whether our morality is deep enough.

Is Jesus asking the same kind of question in today’s Gospel Mt 5:43-48?

Jesus said to his disciples:
“You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?
Do not the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet your brothers only,
what is unusual about that?
Do not the pagans do the same?
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Jesus is not knocking the Hebrew testament and what was said there, but it does seem that he is filling it out more.  There is always a more when we are talking about Love.  If there isn’t more, then we settle for comfortable judgments that really end up being a matter of preference.  I will love my neighbor but hate my enemy.  I will love you because you love me.  I will greet these people because they have shown welcome to me.  As Jesus asks, “what is unusual about that?”  Isn’t God more than this?  How could God not be more than this?  Jesus seems to be saying that Love is about more than my loved ones.   Remember, “he makes the sun rise on the bad and the good,” and “causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”  This is some radical stuff that I believe we often skim over.

A friend of mine constantly reminds me of the question that this Gospel seems to beg…”How big is your God?”  It’s the question of how we image or imagine God.  The images we have of God are first of all given to us by our history, tradition, family, religion, and most definitely life experiences.  We sometimes prefer one image of God over another because it seems to fit better with everything else.  But, I’m not sure that this is what Jesus may be pointing to in today’s Gospel?  This LOVE seems to be about stretching, painfully stretching, beyond the comfortable boundaries that justify everything about our lives and afford us the presumed right to judge everything and everyone along those same lines.

And then there is that curious ending to the Gospel…”be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  It is curious that Jesus mentions the perfection of God here, but does not say anything about imperfection.  Are we imperfect?  I would say no.  Perhaps a better question is, “do we have to be imperfect?”  Apparently not, for Jesus would not invite us to do something that we cannot possibly do.  What if imperfection is simply our tendency to judge based on the dualities of right and wrong, worthy or unworthy, black or white…the list goes on forever?  Then perfection would seem to mysteriously be tied with this peculiar holistic Love that Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel.

God’s creation IN love includes all, shining on the good and the bad, raining on the just and the unjust.  Is Jesus not proposing here that if we love’ only those who love us, there is no real value in that?  In other words, is this really the sense of love as Jesus manifested it?  Indeed, the Gospel stories are always about healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and ultimately giving one’s life away to those who don’t even seem to get it.  Yet, this is the perfection of God it would seem.  To love your enemies and pray or engage with those who persecute you.  For good or bad, it would seem we are drawn together in this unusual Love whom we call God!

The simple yet difficult task is to find ways to wake each other up to this God, this unusual God?  Where can we find this God who dwells right here in the midst of our confusion, suffering, even violence?  Where is this God who invites us into the perfection of touching, being really present with each other without judgment, but with fully engaged and terribly challenging…Love!  Is this the radical invitation from our Unusual God?  Finding the Whole of God RIGHT HERE!

                              (originally published June 19, 2018)