God: Almighty and Way Out There as well as Up Close and Personal: Jesus is the Bridge

John 1: 18                                           February 8, 2021

¹⁵(John testified to him and cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” ’) ¹⁶From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

19 This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ ²⁰He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, ‘I am not the Messiah.’ ²¹And they asked him, ‘What then? Are you Elijah?’ He said, ‘I am not.’ ‘Are you the prophet?’ He answered, ‘No.’ ²²Then they said to him, ‘Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’ ²³He said,
‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
“Make straight the way of the Lord” ’,
as the prophet Isaiah said.

24 Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. ²⁵They asked him, ‘Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?’ ²⁶John answered them, ‘I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, ²⁷the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.’ ²⁸This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.

            Being humans, we seem to love dualities.  Black or white, good or evil, all or nothing.  That works, to a point, putting the endpoints on a continuum.  This finds application in our experience of God as well.  Because we like two dollar words to describe things when we are thinking about God “in the trade”, generally accepted are the terms “transcendent” and “imminent”.  The one is God huge and far away.  The second is up close and personal.  This is the focus of this verse.

            John begins by telling us that no one has seen God.  That is drawn from the Jewish experience, from the law of Moses, when God came down to Mt. Sinai.  The whole mountain was declared Holy.  Even Moses, when he went up the mountain to commune with the Almighty, it was in a transcendent way, for he saw only the back of God’s ‘head’.  Moments of transcendence are powerful as a religious experience, touching something that is bigger than yourself.  It is not something easily quantifiable in human existence. 

            But the point of Jesus is to overcome that distance to bring about immanence, “Emmanuel”, God with us.  It is, as the sentence says, “God the Only Son”, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made ‘him’, God the Father, known. 

            Drawing on the previous verse, where it distinguishes between law and grace, between Moses and Jesus, the Mt. Sinai experience takes on a new perspective.  The giving of the law was a transcendent experience.  God on High giving the law to the people through Moses as a mediating figure.  But grace comes through Jesus, comes as an immanent experience, an experience that is up close and personal.  And Jesus comes with a purpose.  He has come to make the Father known to us, moves God from the transcendent to the immanent. 

            Again, it is in the human relationship terminology of “Father” and “Son”.  This is not a divine category, but a human description of a divine presence.  And it is recurring in the gospel of John.  “Spoilers”, Jesus will talk a lot about being one with the Father and, in turn, linked to us, so that grace flows up and down the conduit of Jesus. 

            There is a verse toward the end of the Love Passage in 1 Corinthians 13, where Jesus is called the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  Here, John is laying out for us how Jesus is the ‘way’ to God, something that will be laid out in far more detail in the chapters to come.

Sidebar:  God, translation, and gender identification.  What follows is more a reflection of my own thoughts and considerations on this topic, a summary of the present location of this ongoing reflection of my own experience.

So, God is not a man.  Simply put, a man is a created being and, therefore, entirely other from God, the Creator.  But a male dominant metaphoric representation of God is laid out for us, God the Father.  This defines how translations of Scripture use male dominant language in the use of ‘he’ and ‘him’ in designation of God.

            The abuses of that tradition are described earlier so I am not going to repeat them here.  But I am going to lay out my presuppositions in terms of referring to God.

            I do not dismiss the use of “Our Father” from traditional renderings, as in the Lord’s Prayer.  And “Father” is so ingrained into my expression of the First Person of the Trinity, that I use it a lot in personal renderings-but I work on lessening that frequency.  I work harder at removing male pronouns in my language when referring to the First Person of the Trinity because of the abuse that has come down to us in the sins of gender hierarchy. 

            I struggle between avoiding abusive language and redeeming a Biblically-given referential system to the Divine.

            In terms of the Second Person of the Trinity, of God the Son, of Jesus, for me that is far clearer.  God came to earth in the form of a male and that is how I feel comfortable following through with pronouns and other gender identifications.  There is, in Jesus, a clear line to the redemptive nature of God in gender relations.

            When it comes to Holy Spirit, that seems most clearly ‘gender neutral’ in how God expresses Godself in this Third Person of the Trinity.  There has been controversy here.  In the rendering of “Wisdom”, an expression of the Third Person of the Trinity, it is of the feminine gender-grammatically speaking.  For a time, the idea of the a feminine third person of God to balance the masculine first (and second) person of God, the divine “sofia”, made its way in PCUSA theological thinking.   

            Recently, a theologian expressed the Holy Spirit as the Divine Love, an attempt to describe in human terms what it means that “God is Love”, essentially an intelligent manifestation of Love in immanent-up close and personal-relationship with us.  So up close that it indwells us.  That makes some powerful sense to me. 

            So, this sidebar is an attempt to capture a moment in my own thinking.  Here is how I relate to God in terms of gender and the expression of God as a religious leader.