God is not like us

Sep 22, 2023

Reflecting on our Sunday Readings with Fr Dr Lawrence Ng

25th Sunday of
Ordinary Time (A)
Readings: Isaiah 55:6-9;
Philippians 1:20-24, 27;
Gospel: Matthew 20:1-16

God is beyond us. That is what the readings point to this weekend. The fact that God is a mystery and beyond our thinking is not something that should frustrate or disappoint us but, rather, it should be a source of our hope and the ground that we walk on as Christians.

When I was a seminarian, our class was sent to visit the home for the elderly. This was something that every second-year philosophy class did. While there, I always spent time with an elderly lady who was partially blind and bed ridden. Our conversation always started out pleasant but then it always turned to sadness because she would talk about her past and her sorrow over her many sins. Then she would go into this rhetoric of how God would reject her and punish her for her sins.

As she was a Catholic, I used to quote the exact passage from Isaiah found in the first reading, that there is still hope and it is not too late. I said something along the lines of how we cannot imagine that God thinks like us. God is generous and forgiving. God’s ways are utterly different from human thinking. That seemed to make her feel better. However, I discovered that this would be the pattern of my visit with her over the next months. It would start out pleasant, but then she would start crying again. I did not visit her again after second year philosophy as we were sent to do pastoral year after that. Whenever I thought of her or told her story sometimes, I would say a simple prayer that she would now be in God’s love and joy. I still wonder until today if she ever felt liberated from what weighed her down.

A scripture author writes that in many ways, it is comforting to think that God is not like us. One reason why we cling to God is to be liberated from ourselves and be brought into God’s marvellous light, living a life freed from the restrictions, frustrations and self-centredness that surrounds and penetrates us. While our love may always be tinged with self-interest and concern for ourselves, God’s love is entirely generous and out-going, a limitless cascade of love, overflowing and penetrating us.

In the second reading, St Paul speaks of another dimension to living a Christian life. St Paul states that his life in Christ will only be completed by death. St Paul speaks often of the mystery of Christ’s resurrection and how we, who share in Christ’s death by our baptism, will also share in Christ’s resurrection. If we are as convinced as St Paul, then it gives a new perspective to our life which is rooted in Christ. For us then, death is not the end but a rising to share in the glory of Christ’s resurrection in ways that we cannot understand or fully comprehend now.

Jesus reaffirms the idea of how God’s thinking is vastly different from ours in terms of what we think is fair and just. This parable would surely make the leaders of Jesus’ time angry as they may think that God operates on their own terms and thinking.

We can ask whether we still fall into the same trap within ourselves or in how we relate to one another. For example, is our understanding of God our own projection? Sometimes, I hear people talk about God as if they have God figured out. When they ask me what I think, I can only reply “I don’t know.”

It is true that we can get to know God. We believe that there is a God and Jesus Christ is His Son. However, it is also true that this objective understanding of God is filtered through our own human experiences. We understand God in relation to ourselves. This is why we say “God is love, forgiving and understanding.”

What we mean is that God is these things to us, or these are our experiences of the divine. They only describe who God is for us and not the totality of God. What we cannot do is reduce God to only the length, depth, and breath of our understanding.

There are two points we can reflect on from the readings this weekend. First, we can reflect on whether we boxed ourselves in by our understanding of God. Is our image of God only according to our own thinking? If that is so, then we are trapping ourselves or putting ourselves on an island. We can only grow as big as the island we put ourselves in and what a small world that is.

Or instead of only depending on our own frame of thinking which can be our prison, we can consider that our understanding of God is limited. However, that is not a bad thing because while we seek understanding, we also realise that God is a mystery and is beyond us. To embrace God is to embrace the length, depth, and breath of God. German theologian Karl Rahner always uses the phrase that Christians who open themselves to the wide horizon of God transcend onto the mystery of God.

The first stifles us but the second opens us to the active dynamic presence of God who continues to engage us. It becomes for us an infinite wellspring of grace, hope, strength, liberation, and healing.