God as Inapparent

Good Friday   C April 15, 2022  
Gen 22:1-18        Ps 22
Heb.10:1-25        John 18:1-19:37

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An invisible God does not seem to be visibly presence, but how would we know if we have never "seen" God?  If from our experience of Plentitude, we abstract a Great God, and we do, we do so because the great Plenitude is present in every particular occasion of the created order for us as human beings, and it is personal, because we are personal.  We live and move as personal beings.  We are personal because we have language the essence of relationship, and personality is born from relationship.  And because we cannot help but use language which is personal, we cannot assume that Great One is anything less than personal.

But within our personal fields of experience, we can experience things which seem contrary to enlightened relationship, personal relationship.

In human experience we can experience situation which we don't think can be associated with a God of love and a God of power.  Things which seem to break "personal" relationships.

These are the events of the inapparency of God, like in the Psalmist words which are the words of Jesus from the God: My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?  My God, why do you see so inapparent?

But God said, "I am going to present myself in human form, in Jesus, and he is going to enter into a completeness of identity with the human experience."  To make the human identity complete, Jesus came to suffering and the death of a criminal."  And so there is the cry of God's Son, who experienced the inapparency of God, in his death upon the cross.

What in human experience seems to represent the obviousness and apparentness of God?  Blessing, Goodness, Safety, Health, Justice, Love, Peace and Kindness.

When the opposite occurs, we can easily, like Jesus label such occasions as the inapparency of the presence of God.

The people of Ukraine in their suffering, seems to lack God's apparent presence.  Putin's evil maniacal atrocities seem to lack God's apparent presence.  The greedy lack of sharing of the world's good so that everyone can have enough seems to lack God's apparent presence.  The lack of justice, the practice of open lying within our country seems to lack God's apparent presence.  The mistiming of the harmful events of nature with human cycles seem to indicate the lack of God's apparent presence.

Good Friday, is the day when we commemorate how God embraces the human experience of the seeming inapparency of God.

Each person, in the cycles and transitions of life within all of the probabilities of what can happen in a world where freedom occurs, has, is, and will know the human experience of the inapparencies of God presence.

And how are we to relate these events when God presence does not seem apparent?  First we confess the validity of true freedom which is needed for true moral significance, and in the face of evil, such freedom is hard to honor.  Next, we need to be committed in our lives of faith, love and justice to cause no harm.  We don't want to be on the side of Pilate, or Caesar, or Putin in being the instruments of harm.  And when we are parts of collective groups where harm is being done in our name, we need to have the courage to speak truth to power.  And speaking truth to power, may bring us harm.  Jesus taught us that it is better to be harmed than to cause harm to others.  Next, when we see the occasions where God may not be apparent to others, we need to be in the work of caring to alleviate pain and suffering.

God gives us the gift of ministry to be relevant to people who are suffering, and we need to learn how to be the apparent presence of God to people who are experiencing conditions which seem to contradict a loving, all powerful God.  The power of God compatible with true freedom, is when we learn how to be the intervening power of care for those who need it.

When and where, we have experienced the apparent absence of God, let us remember those feelings into a profound empathy, so that as God in Jesus came to have full empathy with our human experience, we too might ever expand our ability to have empathy and compassion for the people of our world.  

Today, we say, thank you God for having empathy with us in Jesus Christ.  Let us from our events of seeming forsakenness arise to minister with compassion and empathy to the people in our world.  Amen.