God as Trascendently Intimate
When we considered the biblical image of God as Holy, we made passing reference to the notion that to equate the biblical understanding of holiness with transcendence per se would be to misunderstand it. Biblical references to “holiness” refer, yes, to “otherness”, but to that “otherness” which is already in our midst and not something which is beyond us. This otherness-in-our-midst is an otherness which confronts us, prompting us to respond. Biblical “transcendence” of the divine is not something “out there” but, again, a transcendence-in-our-midst. If immanence is understood as somehow the opposite of transcendence, then the scriptures are an attempt to give voice to that which is essentially a paradoxical mystery. At the heart of biblical experience is a transcendent immanence which is primarily, among other things, one of intimacy.
Biblical Jewish theology (and this includes the Jewish-Christian theology of the early Church - particularly the Christian scriptures) rarely has any interest in what we might call conceptional or philosophical theology. Delving into what constitutes the Godhead simply does not interest their witness or concern. The entire focus of biblical theology is experiential. The witness of scripture wants to shine a light on those experiences of ours that prompts us to think that we are experiencing the presence and activity of God among us. (I would add here that the development and meaning of the so-called Nicene Creed is grossly misunderstood if viewed through the lens of a speculative theological perspective on the Godhead. Trinitarian theology is the fruit of a purely experiential theology, arguably wrestling less with the actual experience than with the implications of what it means to have experienced God’s presence and activity among us.) The books of the Bible should open us up to the continual and continuing experience of a “beyond-in-our-midst” which is both immanent and intimate. this is what undergirds the witness of the scriptures, both Jewish and Christian. Derived from these experiences come, among others, the biblical images of God as a parental figure, a father, a nursing mother, as womb, as friend, as lover, and as love.
When Jesus entertained a request from his disciples to teach them to pray, it was not because they had never prayed before. They, like most of us, had been exposed to a lot of ritualized prayer. Theirs was a culture with a great many opportunities to be immersed in organized, authorized, cerebral, and somewhat performative experiences of prayer which, for all the ways we might be put off by such, was also deeply meaningful and beautifully composed. They were well-steeped in this. However, their request of Jesus suggests that they wanted something more, something either in addition or to complement the traditions of their communal experience. Jesus replies by saying, “When you pray, pray something like this, holding these things on the lips of your heart and your mind.” And with that, Jesus delivers them the outline of what we now identify as The Lord’s Prayer. It is somewhat ironic how we took the rather informalized suggestion for prayer by Jesus and have turned it into what we might claim is the predominantly most formal prayer of all time. However, we need only go to the first words of that prayer to get back to the gist of Jesus’ suggestion of how we ought to enter all prayer, communally or personally: “Our Father…”
The Lord’s Prayer, first and foremost, suggests that our spiritual reality is founded on a multiplicity of intimacy. The intimacy we share with God is not really personal. It’s not about me and my Jesus. It is an intimacy shared with the multitude. WE are communing, even when we privately recite these words, with OUR Father. The intimacy we share with God, we share with one another. Later, when Jesus is himself depicted as entering prayer with God, he initiates that prayer with the word “Abba”. Abba, presumed to derive from Aramaic which was the common street language of the time, is most certainly not part of the formal vocabulary of the time. It is less of a word than an attempt to vocalize one. It is akin to the first utterings that a child in almost every culture will express. It is the equivalent of “dada” or “mama”. We are, and remain - in prayer as in life, the intimately loved and radically vulnerable and dependent infants of God.
Lastly, I want to revisit a particular building which stands in modern-day Istanbul, Turkey. Originally built as a Byzantine church in the early 4th century during Constantine’s reign, the building is now, and for almost as long as it was a Christian church, an Islamic mosque. Sometime in the early 14th century the interior of the church was decorated with some of the finest surviving Christian mosaics and frescoes of the Byzantine era. Throughout the centuries of Islamic use, these images of Christian faith were preserved in plain sight. It is still often referred to today as the Chora Church. This is because a good deal of the interior design depicts the life of Mary who is identified as the Mother of God. And Mary, as the Mother of God, receives further identification as the “Container” of God. Chora, in Greek, means container. However, understood as the Container of God, Mary becomes identified as “The Container of the Uncontainable”.
It would be difficult to identify a greater image to contemplate the paradoxical mystery of intimately experiencing the penetratingly transcendent beyond-in-our-midst than the incarnation we claim occurred in Mary’s womb. As the Container of the Uncontainable, Mary is waiting to give birth to the Uncontainable. Of course, once Mary gives birth, the world itself becomes the Container of the Uncontainable. Further contemplation of this paradoxical mystery will only take us deeper into the wonder of this incredible intimate nature of this transcendence among us.
Christian iconography and art has often put before us an image of the Madonna with the infant Jesus. Some of these depictions suggest that Mary is holding out the infant toward us as if inquiring if we would like to hold her baby. Imagine accepting that invitation. Imagine to be invited to hold the Uncontainable. In some sense, that is exactly the invitation we accept every time we accept communion. We, like Mary, become the Container of the Uncontainable, the womb from which that which is Uncontainable is waiting to be given birth.
In the previous biblical image we considered, we identified how the images of spirit, breath, wind, and word were all a means by which biblical people spoke of the creative presence and activity of God in their midst. There are few biblical images which convey a greater sense of God’s intimacy with us than that of claiming that that creative Word of God has become flesh and pitched a tent among us….
