Your mission: a documentary film series about religion for PBS. Great. One more yawner of an assignment. “Explore images of God through the ages,” or some such abstraction, they say. Just fine. Who comes up with these schemes? For starters, the central character is invisible. Well, until someone thinks of a way to arrange an interview with God himself, they’ll have to settle for vignettes about God.
Fourteenth century B.C. Begin with helicopter shot of the Sinai peaks. Uninhabited area, so no TV antennas to dismantle, etc. Zoom to a clump of Bedouin extras impersonating ancient Hebrews. Voice-over on how they eat, what they wear. Camera settles on a Jewish boy about 12 years old. Interrupt him from play and call him over.
“Tell me about your God. What’s he like?” narrator asks.
Boy’s eyes widen. “You mean . . . you mean . . .” Can’t bring himself to say the word.
“That’s right, Yahweh, the God you worship.”
“What’s he like? Him? See that mountain over there? [Cut to volcano. Lots of steam, smoke. Close-up of magma.] That’s where he lives. Don’t go near it or you’ll die! He’s . . . he’s . . . well, most of all he’s scary. Real scary.”
A.D. First century. Pan across the broad, flat horizons of Palestine. Same Bedouins, now milling around the desert in a group. Oasis in the background. Tighten in on a clump of bystanders, then on a woman along the edge, sitting down, leaning against a desert shrub. Prompt her with a question about the nature of God.
“God? I’m still trying to figure him out for myself. I thought I knew, but when I started following this teacher around, I got confused. He claims he’s the Messiah. My friends laugh. But I was there when he fed five thousand people-who else could do that? I ate a piece of the fish. And with my own eyes I saw him heal a blind man. Somehow God is like that man named Jesus, over there.”
A.D. Twentieth century. Move film crew to picturesque church in Smalltown, U.S.A. Pan across the faces of people in the pews.
Voiceover from narrator, “And what is God like now?”
The New Testament asks us to believe that the answer lies in that ordinary church, in those ordinary people in the pews. God in Christ is one thing, but in us? The only way to sense the shock of it is to read the Bible straight through, from Genesis to Revelation, as I did not long ago during several snowy days in Colorado.
The mighty, awesome Lord of the universe, full of passion and fire and holiness, dominates the first 900 pages. Four Gospels follow, about 100 pages long, recounting Jesus’ life on earth. But after Acts, the Bible shifts to a series of personal letters. Grecians, Romans, Jews, slaves, slaveowners, women, men, children-the letters address all these diverse groups, and yet each letter assumes its readers belong to an overarching new identity. They are all “in Christ.”
“The Church is nothing but a section of humanity in which Christ has really taken form,” said Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The apostle Paul expressed much the same thought with his phrase “the body of Christ.” The way he saw it, a new species of humanity was emerging on earth, in whom God himself-the Holy Spirit-was living. They formed the arms and legs and eyes of God himself on earth. What’s more, Paul acted as if that had been God’s goal all along.
“Don’t you know that you yourself are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” Paul wrote to the ornery bunch at Corinth. To the Jews, of course, the temple was an actual building, the central place on earth where the Presence of God dwelt. Was Paul claiming, to put it plainly, that God had “moved”? Three temples appear in the Bible, and, taken together, they illustrate a progression: God revealed himself first as Father, then as Son, and finally as Holy Spirit. The first temple was a magnificent structure built first by Solomon and rebuilt by Herod. The second was the “temple” of Jesus’ body (“Destroy it,” he said, “and I will raise it again in three days”). And now a third temple has taken shape, fashioned out of individual human beings.
God, the Giver, Delegates
He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye.
Creation seems to be delegation through and through. I suppose this is because He is a giver.
-C. S. Lewis
The progression-Father, Son, Spirit-represents a profound advance in intimacy. At Sinai the people shrank from God and begged Moses to approach him on their behalf. But in Jesus’ day, people could hold a conversation with the Son of God, and touch him, and even hurt him. And after Pentecost the same flawed disciples who had fled from Jesus’ trial became carriers of the Living God. In an act of delegation beyond fathom, Jesus turned over the kingdom of God to the likes of his disciples-and to us.
But enough. All these misty ideas about the Spirit must somehow be reconciled with the sobering reality of the actual church. Look around at those who call themselves Christians. Look at the faces of the people in the pews of any church. Is this what God had in mind?
Delegation always involves risk, as any employer soon learns. When you turn over a job, you let go. And when God “makes his appeal through us” (Paul’s phrase), he takes an awful risk, the risk that we will badly misrepresent him. Slavery, the Crusades, pogroms against the Jews, colonialism, wars, the Ku Klux Klan-all these movements have claimed the sanction of Christ for their cause. The world God wants to love, the world God is appealing to, may never see him; our own faces may get in the way.
Yet God took that risk, and because he did, the world will know him primarily through Christians. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the doctrine of the church: God living in us. Such a plan is the “foolishness of God,” as Paul says in one place, and writer Frederick Buechner marvels at the folly: “to choose for his holy work in the world . . . lamebrains and misfits and nitpickers and holier-than-thous and stuffed shirts and odd ducks and egomaniacs and milquetoasts and closet sensualists.”
“And yet,” Paul continues, “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.”
We who live among the flawed, ordinary people of the church, we who are the lamebrains and misfits and odd ducks of the church, may want to water down the Bible’s extravagant statements about the body of Christ. We know how poorly we embody him. But the Bible is unequivocal. Consider just two examples.
1. We represent God’s holiness on earth. Holiness, above all else, is the reason for the great distance between God and human beings. It’s what made the Most Holy Place forbidden ground. But the New Testament insists that a seismic change has taken place. A perfect God now lives inside very imperfect human beings. And because he respects our freedom, the Spirit in effect “subjects himself” to our behavior. The New Testament tells of a Spirit we can lie to, or grieve, or quench. And when we choose wrongly, we quite literally subject God to that wrong choice.
No passage illustrates this strange truth more forcefully than 1 Corinthians 6, where Paul is scolding the randy members of the church at Corinth for hiring prostitutes. One by one, he knocks down all their rationalizations. Then, finally, he settles on the most sobering warning of all: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?” Paul seems to mean this in the most literal sense, and he does not shrink from the next, astounding conclusion: “Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never!”
You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to see the contrast. In the Old Testament, adulterers were stoned to death for disobeying God’s law. But in the age of the Spirit, God delegates his reputation, even his essence, to us. We incarnate God in the world; what happens to us happens to him.
2. Human beings do the work of God on earth. Or, to be strictly accurate, God does his work through us-the tension comes into play as soon as you try to phrase it. “Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not,” said Augustine. In a similar vein, Paul wrote, “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” in one clause, and “for it is God who works in you” in the next. Whatever else they mean, such conundrums surely contradict a “leave it up to God” attitude.
God provided food for the Israelites wandering through the Sinai Desert, and even made sure their shoes would not wear out. Jesus, too, fed hungry people and ministered directly to their needs. Many Christians who read those thrilling stories look back with a sense of nostalgia, or even disappointment. Why doesn’t God act like that now? they wonder. Why doesn’t he miraculously provide for my needs?
But the New Testament letters seem to show a different pattern at work. In a cold dungeon, Paul turned to his long-time friend Timothy to meet his physical needs. “Bring my cloak,” he wrote, “and also bring Mark, who has always been so helpful.” Another time Paul received “God’s comfort” in the form of a visit from Titus. And when a famine broke out in Jerusalem, Paul himself led the response: he collected money from all the churches he had founded. God was meeting the needs of the young church, but he was doing so indirectly, through fellow members of his body. Paul made no such distinction as “the church did this, but God did that.” Such a division would miss the point he had made so often. The church is Christ’s body; therefore if the church did it, God did it.
Paul’s strong emphasis on this truth may trace back to his first, dramatic personal encounter with God. At the time, he was a fierce persecutor of Christians, a notorious bounty hunter. But on the road to Damascus he saw a light bright enough to blind him for three days, and heard a voice from heaven: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
Persecute you? Persecute who? I’m only after those heretics, the Christians.
“Who are you, Lord?” asked Saul at last, knocked flat on the ground.
“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” came the reply.
That sentence summarizes as well as anything the change brought about by the Holy Spirit. Jesus had been executed months before. It was the Christians Saul was after, not Jesus. But Jesus, alive again, informed Saul that those people were in fact his own body. What hurt them, hurt him. It was a lesson the apostle Paul would never forget.
The Uncomfortable Application
I dare not leave this thought without applying its meaning in a most personal way. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit has great significance for us. A friend of mine, Richard, refuses to believe in God because he can’t see him. He once asked me, “Where is God? Show me. I want to see him.” Surely at least part of the answer to his question is this: If you want to see God, then look at the people who belong to him-they are his “bodies.” They are the body of Christ.
“His disciples will have to look more saved if I am to believe in their Savior,” said Nietzsche to such a challenge. But maybe if Richard could find a saint, someone like Mother Teresa, to embody the qualities of love and grace, maybe then he would believe. There-see her? That is what God is like. She is doing the work of God.
Richard does not know Mother Teresa, but he does know me. And that is the most humbling aspect of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Richard probably will not hear a voice from a whirlwind that drowns out all questions. He will likely never get a personal glimpse of God in this life. He will only see me.
The Head of an Imperfect Body
Jesus Christ, said Paul, now serves as the Head of the body. We know how a human head accomplishes its will: by translating orders downward in a code that the hands and eyes and mouth can understand. A healthy body is one that follows the will of the head. In that same way, the risen Christ accomplishes his will on earth, through us, the members of his body. We are his mouthpiece, his designated vocal chords on earth.
A plan of such awesome delegation guarantees that God’s message will sometimes seem garbled or incoherent, and guarantees that God will sometimes seem silent. But embodiment was his goal, and in that light the Day of Pentecost becomes a perfect metaphor: God’s voice on earth, speaking through human beings in ways even they could not comprehend.
I have a bright, talented, and very funny friend in Seattle named Carolyn Martin. But Carolyn has cerebral palsy, and it is the peculiar tragedy of her condition that its outward signs-floppy arm movements, drooling, inarticulate speech, a bobbing head-cause people who meet her to wonder if she is retarded. Actually, her mind is the one part of her that works perfectly; it is muscular control that she lacks.
Carolyn lived for fifteen years in a home for the mentally retarded, because the state had no other place for her. Her closest friends were people like Larry, who tore all his clothes off and ate the institution’s house plants, and Arelene, who knew only three sentences and called everyone “Mama.” Carolyn determined to escape from that home and to find a meaningful place for herself in the outside world.
Eventually, she did manage to move out and establish a home of her own. There, the simplest chores posed an overwhelming challenge for Carolyn. It took her three months to learn to brew a pot of tea and pour it into cups without scalding herself. But she mastered that feat, and many others. She enrolled in high school, graduated, and then signed up for community college.
Everyone on campus knew Carolyn as “the disabled person.” They would see her sitting in a wheelchair, hunched over, painstakingly typing out notes on a device called a Canon Communicator. Few felt comfortable talking with her; they could not follow her jumbled sounds. But Carolyn persevered, stretching out a two-year Associate of Arts degree program over seven years. Next, she enrolled in a Lutheran college to study the Bible. After two years there, she was asked to speak to her fellow students in chapel.
Carolyn worked many hours on her address. She typed out the final draft-at her average speed of forty-five minutes a page-and asked her friend Josee to read it for her. Josee had a strong, clear voice.
On the day of the chapel service, Carolyn sat slumped in her wheelchair on the left side of the platform. At times her arms jerked uncontrollably, her head lolled to one side so that it almost touched her shoulder, and a stream of saliva sometimes ran down her blouse. Beside her stood Josee, who read the mature and graceful prose Carolyn had composed, centered around this Bible text: “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God but not from us.”
For the first time, some students saw Carolyn as a complete human being, like themselves. Before then her mind, a very good mind, had always been inhibited by a “disobedient” body, and difficulties with speech had masked her intelligence. But hearing her address read aloud as they looked at her onstage, the students could see past the body in a wheelchair and imagine a whole person.
Carolyn told me about that day in her halting speech, and I could understand only about half the words. But the scene she described became for me a kind of parable of the church: a perfect mind locked inside a spastic body, and vocal chords that failed at every second syllable. The New Testament image of Christ as Head of the body took on new meaning for me. I gained a sense of both the humiliation that Christ undergoes in his role as head, and also the exaltation that he allows us, the members of his body.
Sadly, like Carolyn’s body, we in the church sometimes obscure rather than convey God’s love and glory. But the church is the reason behind the entire human experiment, the reason there are human beings in the first place: to somehow let creatures other than God bear the image of God. He deemed it well worth the risk and the humiliation.
But Carolyn also illustrates what even an imperfect body can do.
At one point, she worked at Crestview Developmental Center, a workshop for the disabled. Only Carolyn and one other were physically disabled; the others had either mental or severe emotional problems.
Several airlines had granted the center a contract to clean and repackage stereo headphones. Some of the older men would just stand and stare at their work all day, insulated in a hopeless daze. Carolyn told me later, “I would watch them and shudder, wondering if I too was heading that direction. Those old men sometimes showed up in my dreams at night, with me among them.”
At first Carolyn could not communicate with her fellow workers. Her loud voice made most of them uneasy, especially when they couldn’t understand her words.
“I could write notes,” said Carolyn, “but none of them could read. So I learned to reach out and touch them, and this shattered the wall of ice. The more I touched, the more they responded.”
She reflects: “The workers at Crestview were the most lovable and yet the most volatile people I have ever known. In reading class, often the young men became so utterly frustrated trying to remember words that they would pound their fists on the tables and run off into the forest behind Crestview.
“Yet despite the emotional scars, they received affection openly and gladly. I was surrounded during breaks and lunch hour by people wanting hugs.”
Likewise, even an imperfect body is able to express something of the love and purposes of Christ, the Head.
He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe. It was he who gave some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
Then we will no longer be infants. Instead, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
