Look, Don't Stare

We talked this past week at Incarnation about a strange story in Exodus 33 in which God refuses to show his face to Moses.  Rather, God covers Moses in a rock and “passes by” him, so that Moses sees the backside, but not the “face” of God.  The image here is one of God “passing by,” the one who is always moving.  And not only is God moving.  God is moving in ways that enable us to see traces of where God has been present.  We see God, but only God moving, moving away; we see God’s backside.  

Moses can’t bear the immediacy of God’s face, can’t manage to experience God’s glory in any direct way.  Yet the earliest Christians confessed something paradoxical: the glory of the God whose face cannot be seen is present to us in the face of Jesus (2 Corinthians 4:6).  So the same God who protects Moses by appearing in a mode Moses could bear now comes to meet us in a form we can bear.  God meets us in the humble and broken face of Jesus.

From time to time, I want to reflect on ways to grow and mature as human beings called by God to live in new ways.  One of the central questions for any spirituality is raised by the story above: how do we look for God?   A few suggestions from the story:

1. Don’t stare.  Since God is the one always in movement, always passing by - you won’t be able to stare.  You will have to settle for flashes, glimpses, traces.

2. Don’t expect to see God directly or exhaustively.  Since God’s face is too glorious for us to bear, expect to encounter God in the form of other things.  God is the one who graciously meets us in forms appropriate to our finite bodies and their senses: in faces and conversation; in music, art, and literature; in our work and parenting, on walks and in dreams.

3. Don’t become “religious.”  Religious people have a hard time seeing the God who is always moving.  A friend sent me the following words from William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury during World War II.  "It is a mistake to assume that God is interested only, or even chiefly, in religion.”  God is interested, rather, in life.  So look there - at your life.

Just don’t stare.