Can God Be Present in a Rage?
The Reverend Beth Knowlton
January 28, 2006
Cathedral of St. Philip
Luke 4: 21 - 30
One gift from the season of Epiphany is the chance to reflect on what has been made manifest through the birth of Christ. What can we see now more clearly than before the Nativity? Space to really marvel and wonder at a God who has come so close as to be enfleshed is a gift. We can stop and notice the presence of Christ in the beauty surrounding us and within the eyes of those we meet.
Before we enter the more somber journey of Lent, we have a chance to catch our breath. We can think about the full arc of the incarnation. We do not have to skip ahead to the cross too quickly. We can imagine the baby, the toddler, the young boy in the temple, or the adolescent that was before baptism and the temptation in the wilderness.
But while this space is welcome, I’m not sure I always take advantage of it. I have a tendency to fall into a comfortable image of Jesus. I suspect most of us even have a favorite version of Jesus---a favorite painting, a favorite story that you feel best captures the essence of Christ’s presence in your own journey. It might be Christ the teacher, the one who molds the disciples. It might be Christ the healer, the one who works miracles and with whom nothing is impossible. It might be the Christ who reaches to those on the margins and thus forms a new community. It might be the tattered and well worn picture from your first bible.
If asked, we certainly concede that our favorite image is only meant to be an entryway. We know there is more to God made manifest than what we can speak. As long as we keep the entryway open, we are fine. But all too often the expansive opening becomes a solid door. A door of idolatry which quietly emerges when our backs is turned. Our attempt to capture the essence of God has instead yielded a nice comfortable pocket-sized God. Easily accessible, close to the heart, but prone to ink stains. Not a God who has radically overturned everything we know by joining us in flesh and blood.
One of my favorite passages from C.S. Lewis’ the The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is when Mr. and Mrs. Beaver attempt to describe the Christ figure Aslan to the children who have never met him. The youngest, Lucy, asks “Is - he a man?” “Aslan a Man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the- Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion--the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh,” replies Lucy’s older sister Susan “I’d thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” That you will dearie, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there is anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking they’re either braver than most or just silly.” “Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy. “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver, “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King I tell you.”
While we yearn to trust in that goodness, the temptation to replace it with safety is almost irresistible. We do this in most of our relationships, not just our images of God. We assign roles out to members of our families, those with whom we work, and our friends. We enter the dance with the idea that we know what all the steps will be and often we’re right. But it can become overly rigid and we can cut off the possibility of growth in ourselves and others.
So how do we know when we’ve slipped into that safe comfortable pocket sized sense of the Almighty? Frankly, it is often when something happens to challenge it profoundly. And the best clue we have that this has happened is when we find ourselves inexplicably in a rage. Our switch is flipped and we can’t quite figure out what happened.
My first grade son the other week had a play date with a friend. They were having a great time. No arguments--and they had been playing for hours. It was looking like a good day all around. Until I heard a blood curdling scream. My son had morphed from a polite nice host for his six-year-old guest to an enraged, red-faced monster. I was frankly a little shocked, because this shift had seemed to come out of no where and there had been no obvious altercation. My first response before I intervened was to feel my own anger rising at the sight of this red-faced ogre.
Once he finally settled down all he could say was that he and his friend had an agreement about how they were going to play a game. Somehow during the game, his friend had violated these expectations and crossed a line. Gone was any image of this playmate as friend. He had become the enemy and there was no convincing Matthew in the moment that perhaps there had just been a misunderstanding.
His anger took a long time to subside and frankly seemed a little out of proportion to the level of the offence. As an outsider, I really couldn’t quite understand why he had to lay on his bed screaming for five minutes to process this offense. It is not unlike our reading the reaction of the crowd to Jesus from a distance in Luke today. The reading this week should probably, be entitled, “now for the rest of the story,” or “crowds behaving badly.”
Last week we were left with the anointed Son of God reading from the prophet Isaiah. Prophetic fulfillment was manifest in our guy and we were prepared to sit back and marvel at the home town boy made good.
Within limits of course. He can be successful, erudite, modest, and grateful for the nurturing community we all provided him. We’ll let him emerge a bit from that memory we have of him running through town with the other boys whooping and hollering in the streets. As long as he stays basically the way we want him too. Rabbi? Sure. But in all likelihood we don’t have a lot of interest in his becoming a prophet. When was the last time we really wanted to hear from a prophet?
We are just fine until we start to suspect that something is radically altered in front of us. I mean, it almost seems like this Jesus is trying to provoke a reaction out of us. So who can really blame us if we go from being proud to a lynch mob in about three seconds?
Huh? From where we sit, with a little distance, what on earth does he say that is so bad? Are we annoyed that he would suggest that we are about to approach with our Miracle to Do List? Or is there just something in his attitude that seems a bit too much of the showoff as he quotes scripture right and left? Is it his startling reprimand that the grace of God might extend to people we might not pick or even know?
While merit exists for these explanations, it still doesn’t capture the rapidity with which the switch is flipped. Any attempt to come up with a rational explanation for the crowd’s reaction seems to miss the point.
To go that quickly from gracious admiration to desire to fling him off the cliff seems to indicate that a primal assumption of the crowd has been violated. We no longer have the ability to reflect rationally, we can only think about our own survival. Our image of what this prophet from our home town has to tell us is deeply unsettling, perhaps even life threatening.
So we react. We take matters into our own hands and we manage to form a unified mob that seems basically of the same opinion. The rage is obviously contagious. We certainly haven’t had time to sit and talk about what we are enraged about, what heresy has been named in our presence. But here we are all running along the road together, adrenaline pumping, forcing Jesus forward towards the cliff. We may not recognize the person running next to us, and we most certainly do not recognize the piece of our self running right alongside them. We have been pulled into a collective madness that will only be satisfied by getting rid of the problem. That cliff looks pretty good and we start to imagine that once we get rid of this nut, life can resume as normal.
“They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”
This is frankly even more confusing than the crowd’s violent reaction. We are told nothing about how or why he can pass through the midst of them. Are they so consumed with rage they lose sight of him and he just walks by as they pile up on one another like a failed football tackle? Is there something in his non-violent presence that allows him to calm them and pass through? Is his power so evident that they just part and give way?
Maybe. We just don’t know. We don’t hear if he said something, looked at them a particular way, or what happened to the mood of the mob. We shift from the cliff to his being gone with not much of a sense of what happened.
So it seems to me we have a number of choices. We can speculate and vote on what is our favorite version of what happened between the lines. We can insert our favorite image of Christ into the gap and take that where it leads us. We can become enraged that the text clearly has an omission that biblical scholars should identify or search for the missing fragment.
Or maybe we need to take a deep breath and recognize the crowd in ourselves. We need to without shame recognize the ability of ourselves to be transported into a rage when we feel threatened or as if our safe God has gotten considerably less knowable. Perhaps we need to set aside our cognitive speculation and realize that if we are in a rage it probably doesn’t matter what the most powerful positions are to choose from.
But we don’t need to stop there. Maybe someday we can even be grateful for the flood of rage. If we can learn to recognize that we are flooded, perhaps we can become curious about what is being challenged within ourselves. Maybe it is our best entree into a deeper understanding of the mystery of God. Maybe we can move from an easily defined sense of safety to a deeper sense of the Lion-like God who is good.
This is not an easily won transition. It requires a deeper sense of trust than is available through a guarantee of the known. But it is available from the God who tells Jeremiah that we have been known and consecrated from before we were in the womb.
God made manifest indeed.
Amen
Comments? Contact Beth Knowlton at: BKnowlton@stphilipscathedral.org