Travel is good, and imagining a blow torch in Antarctica

So far, so good. Travel went well and I arrived at the guest house. Who would have thought we would have a traffic jam in Manila at 1:30am on a Sunday morning! There are lots of people here. I rested well and will be getting a taxi to head to church here shortly. Here's a picture of my room:

I'll get acclimated today and do some review before I begin teaching my course tomorrow morning. Until then, here's a reflection I wrote on the plane. I find that being on a flight offers me some good constraints so that I take some more time to think.

“And they shall call his name, ‘The pretty powerful, fairly caring spirit who is not completely removed from us.’” (a very poor yet all too real understanding of this verse)

Sometimes we encounter tensions in life, such as between justice and mercy. To hold to one of these ideals too closely seems to negate the other. They don’t seem to mix well. It is a bit like being in Antarctica in a swimsuit and a blowtorch. What can you do? When you try to warm yourself up, most of you freezes while a small part gets burned! The best thing to do might be to use the blowtorch to melt a pool of water in the ice and warm up the water. The water mediates between the two extremes and you get to swim in a heated pool or even a hot tub in you work it right! Finding a blend, a middle ground, helps us survive the two extremes.

When Jesus was born, the angel of the Lord told Joseph that his name was to be the prophesied name, “Immanuel” which means “God with us.” (see Matthew 1:23) This simple statement is a bit like the cold of Antarctica and the hot of the blowtorch. You want a bit of both, but the individual parts actually don’t mix very well, and individually they won’t help! The transcendence of God alone seems to make him too big to do us any good. What or who am I that the creator of the universe would care? And like using the space shuttle to help a toddler up into a high chair, or like trying to learn basic math by studying advanced particle physics, God’s infinite size and power and complexity and my tiny size and weakness and simplicity make it a poor match for any help. It seems that God’s transcendence puts him outside of my reach, and me out of his.

The other half of the statement, ‘with us,’ is a bit easier to handle. We can understand the idea of people relating to each other, and we know how people can help us. With ordinary problems, that is. But someone like me cannot solve my biggest problems, like the problem of death. That person will die too. No mere human has tackled, or can tackle, that problem. But even deeper than the problem of death is the problem of alienation from God. No mere human can convince God to forgive me when I’ve offended him. No one could even offer his or her life in place of my own before God. In short, someone like me is a lot easier to understand and experience, yet someone like me can’t solve what really matters most.

Yet there is a radical gulf between being like me and being God. They seem to be mutually exclusive qualities.

But perhaps, I wonder, could we blend them in some useful way? Maybe we can do something like making a warm pool of water with the blowtorch in the Antarctic, a kind of blending of the two extremes, the transcendence of God, the being so unlike me, and the immanence of man, the beings so like me, into a merged middle. So instead of having the transcendent God being present with particular people like me, he becomes “the pretty powerful, fairly caring spirit who is not completely removed from me.” That’s a pool I can swim in without freezing and without getting burned. It fits my world. God is like us, just a bit bigger and nicer.

And yet, it also is a pool that no longer accomplishes either thing that I really want. He isn’t big enough to solve my core problem, since only God could do that, and he isn’t small enough truly to be with me, for only a human can do that. Maybe it’s kind of like a warm shower standing outside in sub-zero temperatures. You can’t immerse yourself in it so the cold still reaches you.

The better solution, I think, is not to merge these two extremes, but rather to recognize the paradox of merging the two in one. The transcendent, creator, perfect, holy God became human. He truly became like us so that he could truly be with us and we with him. Yet he was still the transcendent God, so He could solve our problem with having offended God and our problem with death.

But it’s hard to hold on to these two ideas at once. What does it mean? What does it look like? In a way I can imagine it in the person of Jesus Christ, yet even that is problematic. What does it mean that the eternal God had to sleep and eat or he couldn’t continue to live? And the problem is even greater when the transcendent God isn’t visibly present here today. It is one challenge to imagine the man Jesus of Nazareth as God. It is another problem to imagine the creator God truly being present with me today.

So I tend to merge them in different ways. I suspect that you do the same. I also suspect that you and I have our favorite patterns. For me, my tendency is to emphasize God’s transcendence at the expense of his immanence. He is great. He is all knowing and all powerful. But I then conclude that he is distant from me. He is not really aware of my life and he won’t really do anything about it. And I can offer up plenty of evidence that I think supports my claim that God is distant. I want to believe he is close, but I tend not to keep that in mind. It’s a hard tension to hold, and so it easily slips from my grasp.

I suspect that others see God as like us at the expense of his transcendence. He is compassionate and caring. He understands our struggles. Yet he loses his sacredness, his holiness, his moral perfection.

Generally I end up with a muddle in the middle, a being who isn’t truly holy and sacred and all power, and at the same time is not truly with me in the deepest sense of the word. He is neither wholly other nor wholly with me.

But when I can catch a glimpse of the eternal, almighty, sovereign God specifically compassionate for me, specifically working things for my good, I am awestruck. It brings a deep joy even in the midst of sadness or trouble or risk or danger.

Oh, that I could keep this incredible vision in view! When I do, it transforms ordinary days as well as deeply troublesome days into something far better, even if the conditions don’t actually change. For then the God for whom all of my problems are no problems at all is also the God who is truly concerned about me and taking action, albeit usually unseen, for my deepest good.

You can see it in the life of Christ, the God who became man while still being God. He was at the same time quite ordinary, having to rest and eat and drink, and quite extraordinary, being able to perform miracles and even to raise himself from death!

Thankfully, he is “the transcendent, all-powerful, all holy, sovereign God who sees me not just people like me, who seeks me not just people in other places, who provides for me not just the generic ‘humanity,’ forgives me not just an abstract sense of his children, who lives me not just someone else somewhere else.” Thankfully he is “God with us.” And that reality gives me both a joy for today and a great hope for the future as I trust in him.