Epiphany 5: God as Active in History

Isaiah 58:1-12

Psalm 112
1 Corinthians 2:1-16
Matthew 5:13-20

Preparing to preach this morning, I came across this observation in a commentary on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “The object of Christian faith is not God in se [in himself] but as active in history”. It sparked my thinking: “The object of Christian faith is not God [in himself] but as active in history”. The commentator writes this in reference to the 4th and 5th verses of the 2nd chapter of the letter, when Paul writes: “My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 2:4-5)

It is an interesting turn of phrase “active in history”, and rather distinct from how usually talk about God as “acting in history”. A god who simply acts in history is like the gods the ancient classical world, or the gods of the peoples encountered by the ancient Israelites in the Hebrew Scriptures. These gods intervene in history, but they are not involved in history as such. They may swoop in and change the course of a battle or the fortunes of a believer, but there is little sense of the big picture, that the deity is there for the long haul, as it were. The Judeao-Christian God, on the other hand is one who enters into human history, forming relationship, initiating covenant, investing and involving God’s self in the human enterprise. We witness this at the beginning, when God enters into relationship and makes a covenant with Abraham, Sarah and their descendants, and also when God calls those descendants out of slavery in Egypt, renewing that covenant and then leading them to the promised land in order that they might be a beacon to the nations. In Jesus we see God’s continuing activity in history as God joins God’s self to humanity in a distinctive and unique way, and in the gift of the Holy Spirit is revealed God’s abiding promise and desire to be intimately and actively within us.

The God revealed to us in the Scriptures and in the Tradition, in the Church and in our lives, is this God who is indeed “active in history”, but belief in this God has some implications, all of which we human beings – Christians included – sometimes have trouble grasping. One of these is that it means God’s revelation of God’s self and God’s purposes is an ongoing process, and that these are made known not in signs from heaven or obviously extraordinary acts, but within history itself, in the context of human experience and deliberation. Those who prefer clear-cut, once-for-all rules – and that’s most of us – can find this disappointing and dis-orientating. The argument in the early church over circumcision is a case in point. God had made circumcision the sign of the covenant with Abraham, anyone now coming to faith in Christ must certainly be circumcised. However, as more and more non-Jews became Christians the Church was led to understand this was not central to God’s ongoing relationship with humanity. We cannot underestimate how incredibly surprising – even repulsive – was this shift in the mind-set of the early Church.

Equally distasteful – although it may not seem so to us – was the breaking down of the barriers between the social classes. This is some of what Paul is addressing in his letter to the Corinthians. In part, the problem in Corinth stemmed from the fact that at the celebrations of the Eucharists the old social order was still being observed, with the well-to-do and the friends of the host eating at the table and from the choicest foods, while the poorer and not as well connected members received lesser amounts or food of inferior quality, and a distance. The Corinthians had not fully grasped the new social order of equality revealed by Jesus and into which each had been baptised. God’s activity in Jesus was so radically different than the actions of any of the pagan gods, the effects of which were usually to re-enforce the existing social order, the wisdom of the dominant hierarchy and paradigm, what Paul calls the “wisdom of this age and of the rulers of this age”. (1 Corinthians 2:7) Paul reminds the Corinthians that “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him”. (1 Corinthians 2:9) Our God, “active in history” is a God of surprises, not necessarily bound by the old or the conventional, a God who in relationship with us, questions our assumptions. For us, as for the Corinthians, encountering this God may mean we let go of some of our inherited and conventional wisdom, some of social conditioning.

How much more comforting if God simply acted in human history, but left things, for the most part, the way they were already set up, re-enforcing the status quo by those divine acts. However, as idyllic as that may sound, that is not the God we believe in. Moreover, belief in such a god suggests a disturbing of image of relationship, because it would signify human beings as only passive creatures acted upon, merely pawns at the whims of such a being. Instead our God, active in history, draws us in as agents in the cosmic drama, subjects in the process of creation’s groaning as it awaits the fulfillment of God’s purposes. In the Judaeo-Christian narrative human beings are not pawns, but partners with God. In the Hebrew Scriptures it is the prophets who most succinctly present this truth. We heard it today in the reading from Isaiah. God gives the people of Israel a vision of a rebuilt Jerusalem, yet God does not simply step in and accomplish it, but instead presents the city’s restoration as a result of a renewal of the people of Israel themselves and their re-commitment to the core of the covenant: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.” (Isaiah 58:10b-11) Similarly Jesus reminds his followers of God’s continuing revelatory activity in history: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish but to fulfill.” (Matthew 5:17) At the same time he invites people into that movement towards fulfilment and reminds them how instrumental is their participation, our participation: “You are the salt of the salt of the earth….You are the light of the world”; and he dares to suggest that God’s revelation in the world depends on our remaining savoury and bright so that the world “may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven”. (Matthew 5:16) The God who is active in history does not overrun our free will or treat us like pawns, but invites us into covenant and to act as agents in the fulfilling of the divine vision. God doesn’t just act in history, God is always and already active in history. What we have to do is align ourselves to that activity, become fellow-agents with God in order to reveal God’s power and vision for a renewed creation.

Gods who merely act in history are products of the “human wisdom” Paul mentions. They re-enforce the status quo while making human beings mere objects of their actions; and there is a certain comfort in those gods – they make us feel safe and special, and absolve us of responsibility to act. This, however, is not the wisdom of the God we believe in, a wisdom which Paul describes as “secret and hidden” because it is not as obvious and overt as the “wisdom of this age and of the rulers of this age”. (1 Corinthians 2:7) Our God continues always to be active in history and can sometimes pull the rug out from under us, so we cannot hold on too tightly to the status quo, and this God always draws us into the divine activity already initiated. Believing in “God as active in history” means perhaps above all two things: get prepared to be surprised and be ready to be involved.