Posted by Dr. John Mark Reynolds here.
God is totally other than we are, so remote in His Divine Essence from anything human that merely thinking about Him is a kind of blasphemy. Aristotle was right to think that if He exists that He would be so great that no reasonable man could presume He was even aware of our insignificant existence. I cannot press the shift key often enough to express His greatness. God is so holy, has such a piercing beauty, that no man could see Him and live. We would be overwhelmed by Virtue.
And yet, we know one thing of God. God is One and in the Mystery of the Holy Trinity is revealed to us in three persons.
How do we know even this most precious fact?
I hardly dare to speak of it, but this same great God, in the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, became human. Think of it! The Word, the divine Reason, took on a body and lived in our midst. We saw Him. We could touch Him. We beheld His Glory! Though we cannot know God in His Essence we can approach the Incarnate God . . . a Savior who let little children come to Him when the disciples would have kept them away. Rationally He should not have paid attention to our very existence except to condemn our foolish rebellion, but loving us He became one of us to save us from our evil.
In an act of unimaginable elevation, this God-Man called His disciples His friends. He is willing to be my Friend . . . a Friend to a sinner. I don’t deserve, cannot earn it, almost feel like rebuking God for His Divine temerity in loving me, but can only accept it.
And glory in it! Jesus Christ is willing to be my Friend.
When Christians have worshipped this God, they have traditionally brought their best. Like the woman in the New Testament who poured precious oil on the feet of Jesus, we give our best gifts to honor Our Lord. He gave up so much in becoming man that nothing we do could ever express what it means to humanity.
Our Friend is never just our Friend, but also our God, King, Creator, and Lord and yet it is equally wrong to forget that He wept. He was willing to weep for His friend Lazarus and for the women of Jerusalem. He does love us and sentiment is not misplaced. It is a false pride that is unwilling to accept His splendid condescension to us.
It is a cynical age. We are an age that has reduced everything to a marketable commodity. Even the last few paragraphs did not thrill us, but merely cause some to roll their eyes and others to think of how to make a profit on it. Love itself is something to toss aside. If the Victorians were overly sentimental, we have no sentiment left after having Barney and too many cartoons milk it out of us for Happy Meal sales. Christianity has too often followed suit with cheap icons sold for high prices, bobble head Mary for the back of the car, and “Foot Prints in the Sand” bathroom wall hangings.
Prophets must rage against this reduction of the Divine, but in my small minded way I am tempted to mere “sniffery.” Sniffery is the fastidious reaction of the middlebrow against things that offend good taste as defined by our age. It gets its title from the frequent nasal eruptions that occur when we notice some breach of manners. I am so tempted to sniff at everything and in fact, in some circles, learning to sniff at the proper moments is a reasonable substitute for a good education. Having come up from the “lower classes,” the middlebrow man is afraid not to sniff lest his “betters” think he does not know that the Precious Moments Bible is in bad taste.
It is fine to rage against the prophets of mammon who derive profit from the Sacred. It is good to condemn the powerful who give the poor a second rate education that does not educate them to the nature of true Beauty. But it is unworthy and mean hearted to sniff at those left poor by the powerful, in finances and in spirit, when they reach out sentimentally to One who is always Friend to the poor.
It is true that America is overrun with religious sentimentality and Europe is not. It is true that the empty and barren Churches of England rarely witness a thing about which a sensitive soul is tempted to sniff. It is also true that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there will always be bad taste. We cannot react to the Divine well whatever we do. The words of Cranmer’s liturgy, the most beautiful ever written in English, are a fools nonsensical babbling, an ugly blasphemy compared to the worship of High Heaven.
What must the Courts of the Highest think of our clownish marketing? But then one realizes that if all our works are clownish, that Heaven does not think much of the distinction at all. We must bring our best. If for me, it is one thing I must expect that for others it will be something else, but realize that we are all falling short of the glory of God. That is no excuse to bring God “strange fire” or things we know fall short, but it does recognize that all of us will do so whether we mean to do so or not. We all have unclean hands, but we all have been invited to the Great Feast.
I glory in the fact that my own church has sacred spaces. We would never use the altar as a salad bar! (Heaven knows we hardly approved of electric lighting for the nave!) And yet David took the Holy Bread from the altar space and ate it. The priests sniffed, but David was a God’s friend, a man after God’s own heart. I must never condemn the best of someone else, lest his heart, covered by his Christian t-shirt with the tactless religious slogan, beat more purely than my own.
If I must ever pick sides, then put me on the side of the tastless man who with true sentiment loves God, has a heart that burns with evangelical zeal for souls, and desires to love His Divine Friend, rather than on the side of sniffery and empty churches with perfect altars and well run liturgies.
Of course, we need not choose, but sniffery tempts me to such language when I see it in myself. For I am of all men most given to sniffery!
I must not become so drunk in the knowledge of God’s holiness, so keen with the insight of the philosophers into His greatness, that I refuse His offer of Friendship out of a vain attempt to defend His honor.
He comes to every man with this offer of Friendship, even men who take it for granted! He reaches out with His nail scarred hands and wants to love Moses, who disobeyed Him and destroyed an image of His nature; Rahab, the prostitute; Amos, the shepherd from small town Judea; Matthew, the tax collector; Mary, the young girl from Galilee who became the Mother of God; and me. I am not even worthy to be listed amongst the humans, but God still wants to make me His Friend.
I must admit that I am tempted by sniffery again. My nose erupts at this Divine presumption at choosing me. How dare He! How dare He choose me! Doesn’t He know my sins! Doesn’t He know my self-loathing! Doesn’t He know my temptation to mere sentimentality! Isn’t He afraid I will take His Friendship and do something clownish, self-indulgent, and stupid with it?
Yes. He knows. I must bend the knee and accept it. The God-Man who was not afraid to call His Father, Abba (Daddy), is not afraid to risk calling me Friend.
Jesus Christ, son of God, Word, Second Person of the Trinity loves me! Blessed thought, unworthy thought if it were not made true by His Own words, life, and death. Sniff if you must, but I shudder with the joy of it.
