Signposts On The Way

Is God in our religious imagination entirely transcendent or totally immanent? The God we read about in today’s first reading and that of the Gospel tend to have opposite effects on the people around them. There is no room for sinful, mortal humans in the dwelling place of the transcendent God described in the first reading, not even for the priests. But the incarnate God of the New Testament has the opposite effect. Humans are drawn to him and power goes out from him to them, to heal them.

We believe that Jesus reveals to us who God is, in a way that we can understand. What Jesus reveals is the love of God that does not keep its distance no matter how different it is from human love. God, who is complete in Godself, does not need us. Instead, God chooses us, and chooses to be in relationship with us, even to the point of taking on death, our mortal lives.

How do we reconcile these two very different understandings of who God is? One says that mortal being cannot even bear to be in the presence of God whose transcendence overwhelms it and pushes it away. The other shows God taking on mortality, both in terms of entering into relationship with humanity through the incarnation, and by the same token, receiving death as the reward for this complete act of self-giving. Perhaps there is no reconciling these two images of God. Perhaps for us mortals, it is too much to take in, to understand. What we cannot ignore, according to our faith in the Incarnation, is that both images of God are correct and have meaning for us. Most of us can embrace, as it were, the image of a transcendent God. It is a little more challenging to embrace the image of a God who would fully enter the mortal state and “let go of Godliness” (something to be clung to, as Paul observes in Phil 2:6) because he loves us. Today, let us dwell in the loving, immanent Presence of our God.

For reflection: Is the image of God I prefer more transcendent or more immanent? What difference does it make?