God Comes Out of Hiding

"The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." —John 1:14

The stories of the Bible speak of a God who is inherently relational, not as a divine entity who sits in heaven at a distance. He is not hiding behind a wall, withholding secrets about his identity that only a special few can fathom. This begins in the very first stories with Adam and Eve, where we learned that God walked with them in the Garden. Then God approached them  after they ate off the tree, even though God said that it was off limits. God did not wait for Adam and Eve to ascend to a religious place and come to a special set apart zone where the divine nature resides. God came to them in their normal spaces of life. God related.

This relational connectivity is demonstrated in story after story. God speaks, loves, gets frustrated, responds, and leads. These are all things that we do in our relationships on a day-to-day basis. The creation story says that God made us in the image of the divine nature. Of course, this does not mean that we are not all ultimate beings like God is the ultimate power of the universe. It means that we are made in the image of divine relationality. We are made to relate, to share life with God and others. This is what lies at the core of what it means to be alive. 

Seeing God as inherently relational can prove to be challenging. We have a long tradition in the church of seeing God as anything but that. When I was in college, I went to Germany and visited the Mainz Cathedral, which is over 1000 years old. 

As I walked through this space that was meant to point people to God, my eyes were drawn to statues of former religious leaders who had stern faces turned down upon those of use who walked the nave and eyes that pierced with spiritual seriousness. I walked away feeling judged and and distant from God.  This was designed to be a place that communicated that God was far from us and that the common person could not experience secrets of God’s life. Only the select few had that privilege. The last thing that I felt was that God was drawing me into relationship. 

Instead of seeing God as relational, we tend to view him as operating through rules. God sits in a secret place in heaven and then disperses commands that he expects us to follow in order to life the kind of life that he wants. Do this. Don’t do that. And then we are left to ourselves to make sure that we get that done. 

Different traditions emphasize different commands, and usually these traditions enjoy criticizing each other because no one else gets it right. Everyone believes that they have the secret insight to God. As a result, we try to connect to God by following the right rules. After all God is inaccessible to us because he is hiding behind a wall. The problem is that this image of God leaves us on our own to try and figure out how to relate to him. It’s the pursuit of a carrot that we can never catch. God is always beyond our reach and it seems that religious people keep changing the rules. 

In the stories of the Bible, God is always the one who initiates relationship. As I wrote in this post, God is the protagonist in the grand drama. God creates. God calls Abraham. God listens to the cry of the Israelite slaves. God sends Moses. God delivers the Israelites from Egypt. God leads them through the wilderness. The action of the story is all about what God does. God wants relationship with Israel just like God wanted relationship with Adam and Eve, walking with them in the cool of the evening. He brought them out of Egypt to show them that they could engage him in this way. 

Ultimately, this relational way of being is manifest in the life of Jesus. The book of John opens by saying that “the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The “word” is a Greek way of saying the nature of the eternal being. One translator put it this way:

The Word became flesh and blood,

    and moved into the neighborhood.

We saw the glory with our own eyes,

    the one-of-a-kind glory,

    like Father, like Son,

Generous inside and out,

    true from start to finish.

God came out of hiding and became one of us in our space and time and showed us what God looks like. God demonstrated that the ultimate being of the universe does not hide behind a wall, requiring us to live up to some kind of mysterious standard that we cannot fully know. Instead, he comes and relates in love, inviting us to engage in this kind of love. .