Vulnerable Power

Living in a Community can bring you face to face with your less admirable side. It is very easy to blame other people, rather harder to work out what is going on inside you that leads you to react in a particular way. If followed through, it can be a great gift. One psychological mechanism that often comes up is our habit of projecting onto other people our own shadow side or particular dislikes. Not being in any way psychologically trained, I am not going to go into detail about this, but it has led me to reflect on whether we react to God in the same way. It seems likely; another idea that came up fairly frequently was that we relate to God in the same way that we relate to other people. This is also not at all comfortable! But does have biblical backup (see 1 John 4:19-20).

It might go a long way to explain how we can worship a God of love, while, in many ways, following or believing in a God who is angry and ready to condemn us at the slightest infraction; why we seem sometimes to follow a demanding God who expects perfection; why the all-powerful God we worship seems to have all the characteristics of a dictator. Why we worship a God who has given us everything, yet so often portray that God as actually not very nice, to say the least. Is it possible that we are creating a God in our own image? Or putting behaviours onto God that we are hiding from ourselves? Could we possibly be creating God in the image of those powerful people we know or have grown up with, rather than the God who is love? Could we possibly have got the all-powerful part of God completely wrong?

For God is all-powerful; I do not deny that. But I suspect that God’s way of being powerful is very different from human ways. We so often misuse and abuse power. That is not true of God. How can we truly tell what God is like? Well, to start with, we can look at Jesus, who is God incarnate. We could look at Jesus who came into our world, took complete power, insisted on absolute obedience and killed anyone who dared to disagree …. Yet it did not happen like that, did it?

Could we possibly have a God who let go of everything in order to become human? (see Philippians 2). A God who became as weak and vulnerable as a baby, in a country that was occupied by a foreign power, and who was visited not by the rich and powerful but by shepherds and strangers. A God whose way of being was so strange to his cousin the forerunner that John the Baptist actually sent his disciples to query if Jesus really was the one who was to come (see Matthew 11). What was Jesus’ answer? The blind see, the lame walk and poor have good news preached. We have a God whose message was ‘the kingdom of God is near’, not ‘repent, you miserable sinners’; not that repentance is bad, mind you. But Jesus’ focus was on bringing people into the kingdom of God. He was, of course, quite capable of calling out sin, when needed (see, again, Matthew 11). 

When arrested, Jesus did not fight or call out legions of angels to defend himself, but followed the path to the Cross, however much he had struggled with that in the garden of Gethsemane; following that path through death to resurrection. Jesus went through all that not because he had to, but because he chose to; he went through all that because he loved us, because God wanted to draw us back and, in the fullness of time, set all right again.

God is our judge, but it is a judgement of one who loves us far more than we can ever ask or imagine. God is all powerful, but it is a power filled with total love. A very different kind of power to that which we now associate with the word. Could it possibly be the case that while we are idolising a false god, the God whom we profess to worship is actually there, ready for us to realise and accept the totality and wonder of his love? Waiting in vulnerability for us to stop projecting mistaken ideas of power and strength and connect with the God who is Love and just longs for us to know that? To grasp that the idea we have of God’s judgement is often far more influenced by human anger and disdain than it is by the reality of being judged by a God who loves us. Even the word ‘judge’ has negative connotations; ideas that are simply not part of who God our judge is.

Maybe it is time for us to take the time of year seriously. To lay aside slightly sentimental ideas of Christmas as being about a baby, sweet little Jesus in the hay. But to really think about the fact that this baby, whose birth we celebrate every year, is God incarnate, with all that means; that this baby was born far from home, with all the pain that goes with giving birth; that this child, totally vulnerable to those around him, totally dependent on them for life, is our God. To really and truly allow some time this year for that to penetrate and deepen, that we might respond, not at a surface level, but with our total selves to this God we follow. That just as Jesus came and gave his self, we may follow in his footsteps in our own giving, wherever it may lead.

This will be the last blog this year, so many blessings for Christmas, and see you in 2025!