Important qualifications:
- I use YHWH (God) because it saves me from calling YHWH by any male/female pronoun. I am also a cousin to YHWH’s people and so a better respect for YHWH is due.
- This text, like the others, are works in progress. If someone writes to let me know of a misspelled word etc or some other grammar-like possible correction necessary, i will change it. I will do the same if I find or am told that there is a logical problem within the context of the argument.
- There are footnotes to these texts, for further reading or from which direct quotes were derived.
The third test faced by Jesus is the most powerful, most difficult one to face. Let us explore the biblical background to this test.
Jesus’ daemon tells him to throw himself down from a high place because YHWH will not allow him, his daemon says, to be injured. The author of the text quotes Deuteronomy (6:16), Psalms 91 and 95 and Exodus (17:2-17) to make his point. The answer Jesus gives is: “You shall not put the Lord your YHWH to the test.” This is a peculiar answer, at least I have always wondered about it. What does it mean?
The set of quotations imbedded in this part of the tale comes from a story in Exodus. When the people of Israel had reached a certain point on their journey out of Egypt they stopped and complained to Moses: “Have you brought us out of Egypt to kill us in the desert by thirst and hunger?” Moses, out of sheer frustration and anger, strikes a rock at YHWH’s direction. Fresh water pours out to slake the peoples’ thirst. He called the place Massah and Meribah, two words meaning ‘quarrel’ and ‘test’ because, ‘the people tested the Lord, saying, ‘is the Lord really among us or not?’
Why did this question arise? It did because the people doubted whether YHWH was with them, or more precisely, they acted on the doubt by requiring the test. Here then is the test or the temptation for both Jesus and ourselves: Is YHWH really among us? Are we alone as a species in a vast, indifferent universe? A modern person might ask the question this way: ‘does God exist?’
In the first reflection to this series three weeks ago it was suggested that the desert into which Jesus was driven may have been as much or more a desert of the soul, an inward experience for him as much as it may have been a real experience of going into a physical desert. It was also suggested that we, too, have all been in the desert of the soul or mind or spirit, whether because of a difficult relationship break-up, a death, or even a welcome and positive life-change (such as a new and better job). At other times we voluntarily go into the desert to face our daemons and unpack our baggage, in the hope that we come out of it more healthy and whole than we have been, in the past, with daemons running loose and our baggage still packed and on our backs or in our hands.
We all have daemons or tempters which test us to our limits, and beyond. One that is common today for people who are sensitive to the movements of history and their impact on human life in all its narrative, is one that arises from this temptation. Is faith is a delusion because YHWH is not with us, because YHWH does not exist? Modern persons sometimes wonder if YHWH, should YHWH actually exist, cares or if YHWH, like the universe itself, does not particularly care about you, or me or humanity in general. Actually, it is not doubt that is the test but the desire to test YHWH in some way that is at the root of this human temptation. Doubt is normal. That is one of the great daemons of our age, if you are a theist.
Christian theologian Martin E. Marty wrote a small book called A Cry of Absence in which he distinguishes between two types of spirituality. The first is that within which a person lives in a perpetual summer-time of unthinking bliss. The second is one in which the absence of YHWH is a wintry and profound and haunting reality. The daemon comes from the latter.
As Marty discusses, that wintry perspective comes from persons who cannot look away from the 20th century, which for them is the most egregious example of humans tossing over YHWH in favour of themselves. As such these humans created a twisted, anti-human theology of humankind that led directly to the horrors and death of millions, far more than at any other point in (theistic) history.**
For the wintry souled Christian, that time and elements of it have continued to today, has killed the simplistic, unquestioning, unthinking understanding of the love of YHWH, the accuracy of the Scriptures and the entire theological construct of the Christian faith. In particular, for Jews and some Christians a kind of naïve assumption in either the goodness of YHWH or the righteousness of human beings cannot be wholly trusted because of the Sho’ah, the destruction of European Jewry in the Second World War.
For those of us who feel keenly that lack of simplicity in belief, we come face to face with a question that asks, demands, YHWH to justify him/her/itself for these events. In effect, those with that ‘wintry’ sense of faith, wanted, and still want, to do exactly what the daemon wanted Jesus to do: test YHWH.
Like John the Baptist (Luke 7:18-20) we wintry types want to know, “are you the one, or should we look for another?” Like Job we want YHWH to provide evidence for who it is claimed that YHWH is. Not being able to do that, we sometimes wonder therefore if we are indeed, as a species, alone in a hostile universe, that YHWH is not among us. Perhaps the less angry, less bloodthirsty atheists are correct.
If I were to live with any sense of equilibrium or balance, I have to do one of three incompatible things: a) accept the daemon as a messenger of knowledge, and walk away, b) banish the daemon (only YHWH could do this) or c) chain the daemon down in order to know where it is all the time. For some reason (which I do not understand) the first option has been unacceptable to me. The second, getting rid of the daemon, I do not know how to do and so I wait for YHWH. The only viable option is to do the third. And so, at first quite unconsciously, I began to fashion links for a chain that would tie this daemon down. These links are a set of rationalizations, explanations into which new understanding had to come and some older, more traditional ones had to be left behind.
The first of these was that YHWH is not all-powerful. YHWH cannot stop time. YHWH cannot make gravity stop functioning. YHWH cannot stop evil people from doing evil. YHWH cannot stop evil people from becoming evil by changing either their genetic or sociological make-up. I had to choose: either YHWH is all-powerful and can stop evil and suffering but chooses not to or YHWH has chosen a way that demonstrates that YHWH is not all-powerful and has some other mechanism or means whereby YHWH influences the world.
The second link in the chain was that it is not YHWH who does evil. It is not the devil either. Evil happens because human beings do evil. They do evil because there is something in their genes that never enabled them to have a conscience or through their childhood never were able to learn compassion and mercy and therefore are bereft of YHWH, and the most important elements of what it means to be a human being
That third link is that we live in a dangerous universe. Natural disasters, disease simply happens, because we live in such a universe. It and YHWH are not evil; they simply are. Indeed, we live in a universe in which human beings have a part. We are not separate creatures from the world. Our actions and inactions influence creation. Biologically we are dust and to dust we shall return. Therefore we die, some of us tragically, before our time: children, young parents, and young people. Some of us slowly suffer and there is little that we can do. Sometimes there is even less that YHWH can do because YHWH cannot break the laws that YHWH himself has, we believe, put in place.
The fourth link is that YHWH is not absent from suffering, absent from the world. YHWH is not an “unmoved mover,” without passion, without care for creation.
And so, sometimes I feel a bit like a former archbishop (D. Sommerville) of British Columbia: “Occasionally atheism hits me like a very bad flu. Eventually I recover and continue on.” The reason I have spoken at length about this test and about my own daemon associated with it, is because I am certain that I am not alone. I am certain that most people at least a few times in their lives experience serious doubt about whether YHWH is with us, whether we are in fact alone. Some of these, like myself, experience it rather severely, others only in passing. Their baggage and their more significant daemons lie in wait elsewhere.
The other tests or temptations in the story of Jesus in the wilderness had faithful resolutions to them. What then might be the faithful resolution to this particular test? If you are waiting for me to tell you that the faithful resolution to this test is not to doubt or not to question or to encourage you to believe that YHWH is ‘in full control’ of the universe, I cannot tell you those things, for I do not believe that they are faithful resolutions to the test.
I believe that a faithful resolution must include the capacity to doubt and the capacity to question. For when we doubt and when we question, a freedom arises that cannot be had any other way, a freedom that allows us to expand to our deepest understanding of our humanity and of YHWH. I have to say that doubt, when it turns into cynicism, is by far the greatest danger with this test. But even then in some circumstances it is to be wondered at that even cynicism might be an acceptable response. In some cases cynicism stemming from doubt may, oddly enough, be the only possible faithful response.
Along with the capacity to doubt and question, the most important faithful resolution to the question of whether YHWH is with us is what I named as the fourth link in the chain that holds down my personal daemon: that YHWH is not absent from suffering. Perhaps the most famous words in the Christian Scriptures are John 3:16: “For YHWH so loved the world that he gave his only son…” These words essentially underline the point. In Jesus on the cross we believe that YHWH is revealed as not without passion. YHWH is not without knowing suffering. Indeed, the message of the Gospel is that YHWH has taken within YHWH’s very self the essence of humanity, its wonders and its joys, its very dust and its very spirit.
This is why ethics, morality, knowing the difference between righteousness and evil, knowing the difference between darkness and light in our lives is so important. To repeat: YHWH does not have the power of a police officer, a soldier, a fire-fighter or a social worker to stop disasters from happening or to stop evil people from doing evil things. Nor thank YHWH is YHWH a have to. Those are our jobs.
I had earlier suggested that YHWH has some other attraction, some other mechanism or form of ‘power’ at work in the world. This ‘power’ is nothing short of persuasive love, defined as mercy and compassion. How we know this about YHWH is through such statements as John 3:16. But most particularly we know it through the acting out by Christians of their understanding of what YHWH is like: namely a YHWH who takes humanity (its suffering, its joys, its wonders and its dust) into YHWH’s very self. As animated dust we are called to use all our heart, soul, strength and mind to be messengers of compassion, peace, healing and wholeness in the world. To do this is to deal with the daemon of doubt, and indeed all daemons, in a way that cannot be defeated.
There is another piece to this puzzle about how we are to do this, how we are to act as YHWH’s messengers in the world, how as Christians we are to be Christ to the world around us, but of that we must speak next week.
Is YHWH missing? Does YHWH exist? Is the Lord really among us or not? Individually we can answer those questions only in the deserts of our own minds and souls. But when we enter the public arena of relationships (family, friends, business, faith [trust] community), the only way we can answer those questions adequately is how we act towards one another, how much charity we have and act upon, thus dispelling the wind of sand that blow from the deserts of others and perhaps at the same time, our own. As the author of I John, in a desperate moment, put it “Behold, how they love one another”.
Please remain seated as we pray. Holy YHWH, we have a choice when we are confronted by your absence. We either walk away and do the best we can without reference to you, or we choose to seek you in the world around us- in other human beings. This test is about trusting that you are with us, even in absence. Give us the grace to love, for not to love is to fail the test. Amen.
**I believe it was Bertrand Russell (Why I am Not a Christian [?]) who first articulated the specific calumny that, ‘the amount of deaths caused by religion is the highest of any human group’. Besides the lack of evidence accompanying such statements, the deaths of so many in the 20th century alone by atheistic leaders and their worshippers is far higher than any group of religious persons…however, atheists have a point. Every religion has some passing reference to the dictum ‘you shall love your neighbour as [you love] yourself’, but at the same time find any number of realpolitik reasons to kill or cause harm (to sin) against other human beings.