"Facing" God and the World
Similar to Jonathan's experience last week with the word, "remember," the word, "face," continues to leap out at me as I read the lectionary passages.
In the Exodus passage, the discussion regards God's presence with Israel. Moses asks to know God's ways that they might please God and be a "distinct" people, a people who both are known by God and who please God. Ultimately, Moses asks to see the fullness of God's glory, which God interprets as seeing his face. It appears that God's ways and God's very being are inseparable. Thus, to see God's face is to see the fullness of God's will and activity. According to Moses', it is inthis facing that Israel becomes a distinct people.
In the Matthew passage, when the Pharisees and Herodians are setting Jesus up by praising him, their literal words are "for you do not look at people's faces." Later, when Jesus escapes the set up, he asks them, "Whose likeness [image] and inscription is this?" Thus, this Jesus, whom they claim does not look at people's faces, but instead speaks and judges truthfully, counters their trick question by asking them whose face is on the coins they obviously carry in their pockets. The question then becomes, "Whose face do you look upon? Mine or Caesar's?" "Whose inscription do you believe? Mine or Tiberius'?"
David Ford has written an interesting book, and although it is not technically Radical Orthodoxy, he does raise interesting questions regarding selfhood and salvation. The book's title is Self and Salvation: Being Transformed. I will close tonight with a quote from this book, and then a few questions I am wrestling with.
Christianity is characterized by the simplicity and complexity of facing: being faced by God, embodied in the face of Christ; turning to face Jesus Christ in faith; being members of a community of the face; seeing the face of God reflected in creation and especially in each human face, with all the faces in our heart related to the presence of the face of Christ; having an ethic of gentleness towards each face; disclaiming any overview of others and being content with massive agnosticism about how God is dealing with them; and having a vision of transformation before the throne of Christ 'from glory to glory' that is cosmic in scope, with endless surprises for both Christians and others" (24-25).Here are some ideas I am wrestling with:
- How does this quote connect with Trinitarian theology, specifically the connection between harmony and difference?
- How would this help us to live out the fullness of baptism with regards to racism, sexism, etc.?
- Does the conception of the church as a community of the face help us to understand the need for both difference and unity in the church? How do we bring many individual faces together into harmony? How do the different faces make our life together more beautiful?
- How does the face of Christ play out in our lives? What does it mean to be faced by Christ? To face Christ? To look upon the face of Christ?
- What is the connection between baptism and the community of the face? How does the grammar of baptism play out in our understanding of the personal and communal aspects of facing?
- How does one render her face to God, when Caesar seeks with such ingenuity to twist her eyes upon the empire?
posted by Scott | 8:30 PM
2 Comments:
I wanted to comment on the following question in regards to the David Ford quotation:
How does this quote connect with Trinitarian theology, specifically the connection between harmony and difference?
The very beginning of the quotation almost seems to speak in a Trinitarian language:
1. "being faced by God, embodied in the face of Christ;": Father, who we see most fully in Jesus, given by the Spirit.
2. "turning to face Jesus Christ in faith;": Son, given from the Father by the Holy Spirit.
3. "being members of a community of the face;": Holy Spirit, as in, God bestows the Holy Spirit upon God's church at Pentecost. As a community we are to allow the Holy Spirit to embody us to be love to the world in the same way that the Holy Spirit is the love between Father and Son, as we are Church to the World.
Also, this question:
Does the conception of the church as a community of the face help us to understand the need for both difference and unity in the church? How do we bring many individual faces together into harmony? How do the different faces make our life together more beautiful?
This one can be a toughie. Because all difference is in God, yet harmoniously together through the Father, Son, and Spirit, we are to acknowledge the flux of difference in our lives together and not try to achieve the working out of all difference by collapsing it into sameness. We are not to posit ourselves above one another, because who are we really to do so? We are not to judge, lest we be judged.
In sum, we are to be one of mind, but that doesn't mean that both hands (or feet!) of the Body of Christ all have to be doing the same thing. This doesn't mean all things are permissible, but it does mean that our differences can and should work themselves out in our facing of Christ together, as we allow the Holy Spirit to work in and through us, directing us to the Father.
If we can't work out our own differences harmoniously, then how can we ever show that we truly are the "distinct" people that Moses asked God to make us?
I wonder if it is because we are all formed by modern technologies to a certain extent. Recently, I've begun to dabble with Jacques Ellul, and in The Technological Society, he makes an interesting case that we become like the technologies we initially create. He claims that capitalism becomes beholden to the technologies she caused to be created to make the system work better. Thus, human society and increasingly even individual lives begin to resemble the machines at work in the economy itself. For Ellul, this means humanity begins to resemble the assembly line.
I wonder if this is what bothers us so much about difference. We live in a cookie cutter, mass production age where variation is viewed negatively (or defined as to be meaningless, i.e. I would like a blue one vs. a red one).
Later in the book, Ford turns to singing and the Eucharist to discover a way for harmony to emanate out of diversity. The body of individual faces brought together in harmony to sing the praise of God, and to receive together their daily bread and then offer themselves up in praise seems to get at what we long for in the church.
I wish that we could shed the Rick Warren-esque understanding of the church as a homogenous unit versus the richness of difference that the church can bring together as one rich and beautiful body capable of singing the heavenly chorus.
This is where I love Jenson's description of the Triune God as a fugue.
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