Mysterium Fidei

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again... The new and everlasting covenant, the mystery of faith.

It is late, I'm rather exhausted if a bit exhilarated, and I have shed more than my share of excited tears at the "Christ is Risen!" part of the wonderful Easter Vigil.

Tonight, listening to the readings from the Hebrew scriptures in the darkened church, obviously I was thinking of far more than 2,000 years. One of the points of ascetic theology, on which all the greatest mystics would agree (and not only the Christian ones), is that one of the most difficult attachments from which we need to be freed is that of our images of God. They are useful, indeed, but never adequate.

As I listened to the verses about creation, about Noah, Abraham, the Exodus, Ezechiel - I realised, once again, that God is so beyond us that we can only catch a glimpse of the glory. Abraham, for example, had an intimacy with God (to the point of haggling - which the former purchasing manager in me loved) which is warm and lovely. Yet Abraham had little 'theology' on which to draw. My impressions, from the Old Testament, is that, for many centuries, the Chosen People were not even sure about monotheism. By the time of Sinai, indeed they would know to 'have no other gods before' the God of Israel - but it seems they still admitted the possibility that others existed, even if they were not to be worshipped. The God of Abraham, even with the puzzling test of the command to sacrifice Isaac, left Abraham with knowing He was not El. The God of Moses would identify himself with "I Am Who Am," and I doubt that He was anticipating Thomas Aquinas' pondering this to decide that the nature of God is to exist.

Throughout salvation history, we can see a great deal of God's gifts - His action within creation, with the Incarnation being the ultimate example. Yet even if we can recognise how God acts, we do not know precisely who God is. Divinity is beyond our comprehension.

I sound pedantic tonight... well, don't think I'm any less confused than the next person. I, too, have nearly lifelong images of God to which I have attachments. Oddly enough, many of these images are far from attractive! A God who loves to inflict suffering - who wants our lives to be an endurance test to prove obedience - who is always looking to make us grovel - I do not 'believe' in such a God intellectually, but the goblins haunt me all too often.

Yet even the beautiful images of God are never adequate. (I shall concede that I sometimes cannot reconcile "love" with divine power doing nothing to stop evil... another topic for another day.) The 'leap in the dark' to admit the limitations of our own vision can be frightening. I'm an avid believer who, in exploring aspects of the divine, could sound agnostic.

I wonder what the feelings were of the women who found the empty tomb - of Mary Magdalene when she saw the Master (whom she did not recognise.) Nothing in the disciples' understanding prepared them for Jesus' resurrection. He certainly met no common images of the Messiah, and the business with Rome was no different after his death (until a few centuries later, of course, when Rome would bow low indeed!) Images of the Messiah never included his being God himself.

The scholastic theologians would debate the aspects till kingdom's come :) (I have it on good authority that 'it's all straw'), but, men of prayer that they were, they knew what could not be defined. God is always full of surprises. Thomas, of course, defined what God was not. And the scriptures make that seem wise indeed: I am not one whose knowledge you can obtain by eating forbidden fruit, I am not El, I am not Ba'al or one of his relatives, I am not the liberator of Israel from Roman domination...

I am beginning to see why Francis of Assisi, whose images of Jesus' humanity endure to this day, had a favourite prayer through the mature years of his short life. "Lord, who are you? Lord, who am I?"