Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

In the current issue of Time magazine, Professor Richard Dawkins ventures out of his academic specialty of evolutionary biology into the theological fray with the statement:

If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

This does not recommened Prof. Dawkins' theological library to me. In fact, most theologians I’ve known or read would take issue with this sweeping generalization. Saint Anselm, for whom God was by definition greater than anything imaginable, might debate Prof. Dawkins on philosophical principle, as would Evagrius, who insisted that we must renounce all images we have of God, who (again by definition) is greater than anything we can imagine. Gregory of Nyssa’s writing are littered with terms for God like ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘ineffable’. I could go on, but you get the point.

So science and theology actually seem to agree on what God is like, that is, if God exists. Thankfully, in this gathering, we can assume that God exists, and so take up this definition. God is greater than anything we can imagine. Any attempted definition of God needs to take the form of non-definition, since definition means literally ‘drawing limits’, from the Latin finis: end or border.

Making peace with this reality about God is a first step in solving many of our human preoccupations. Let us take as an example Jesus’ observation about the poor widow. She gave more than the others because she gave everything she had to live on. On one hand, this is a nice, pious statement. Yet for those of us who have had to pay mortgages and remodeling expenses, is there not a nagging voice somewhere inside saying, “Well and good, Lord, but you can’t maintain a temple on a few widow’s pennies.”

That the apostles didn’t quite appreciate what Jesus was teaching is evident by the next episode in Mark’s gospel. “As they were leaving the temple,” Mark writes, “one of his disciples said him, ‘Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!’” At this, of course, Jesus begins to prophesy the destruction of the temple building.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews teaches us that Jesus entered the temple, the sanctuary, but not the one made by human hands. What kind of dwelling can we build God? Answer: we cannot build Him any suitable dwelling place. How can we reasonably build something that would limit the unlimited God whom we worship? God dwells in heaven, the sanctuary into which Jesus Christ ascended when He offered His great sacrifice on our behalf. We should note that most of us, in addition to un-defining God, need to do the same with heaven. Too often people reject what they believe heaven is without remembering that it is beyond our comprehension, just as God is beyond our comprehension.

However, God can and does communicate with us, and out of a kind consideration for our limits, he limits Himself because He loves humankind and loves to be with us. So He gave Moses a pattern for the temple, a kind of projection of God’s majesty into a human plane, almost like a projection of a three-dimensional view into a two-dimensional painting. Yet like a portrait artist who prefers the beauty of his painting to that of his models, we have a tendency to prefer a tame and domesticated God to the God of Abraham. A beautiful church makes us feel good! That’s not so bad, but are we experiencing God or aesthetics?

Why did the widow then make any gift at all? Wouldn’t she be better off keeping that money? Perhaps if she had let the rich make all the contributions, she could have kept her pennies and invested them and not be poor today. But the question then would be: would she have been worshipping God?

Perhaps she could just worship God in spirit, as Jesus says that God wants us to. Then again, Paul taught us to glorify God in our bodies. We can surely do both if we put our bodies at the service of our spirits, much as God has put the visible temple or church building at the service of the invisible. The point of the widow’s mite is that her giving, painful and difficult as it was, trained her to give true spiritual worship, whereas the best the scribes could do was to recite lengthy prayers as a pretext. If we let the body go its way and try to worship in a merely spiritual way, how do we understand the very real and bodily suffering of Christ as He entered into the true sanctuary? Like Christ, the widow gave the entirety of her life—the word Bios in Greek literally means that she gave her whole life. Can we say that we do the same when we give only the life of our souls as if they were not connected with the life of our bodies?

We should conclude by noting that Jesus Christ ascended into heaven bodily and comes to us today in the Eucharist in a body. The Body of Christ is the means by which we enter into communion with the incomprehensible who is God. This is an astounding piece of evidence of God’s love for us humble creatures, not to mention His tendency to confound all of our expectations. This happens to be the sticking point for Professor Dawkins. He says, “I don’t see…Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of…grandeur.” Clearly God is more incomprehensible to some than they can comprehend.