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A friend of mine once had some difficulty in her own relationship with God. She had gotten to the point where she was spiritually tired, and her personal relationship with God felt a little stagnated.
Fortunately, she had the chance to go on a retreat and see a spiritual director. It was through her conversations with that director she figured out what the issue was. She had been viewing God as a commanding officer, and one who see didn’t really like. She realized to move forward with God in her relationship with Him, her view of God needed to change. She needed to project less of her view on Him and to listen more. To see some of the other aspects of God too.
All of us have a particular view of God in our head. And sometimes that can be fine. It can help us relate to God better. It can help us to be closer to Him.
But other times our vision of God can become an problem. It can make it harder for us to see other aspects of God that would help us grow in our relation to Him. Or we make our view of Him into an idol. Sometimes, we can push ourselves away from God because we think we are the only ones with the right answer about who He is or even because we think our characterization of Him isn’t worth following.
But God is so much bigger than even all of our pictures of Him put together. In the words of St. Anselm of Canterbury, He is “Greater than anything that can be thought.”
Those words ring true with what Jesus Himself tells us in the Gospel this morning. “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.”
We can know nothing of God, except what God reveals to us.
That is why we often become confused by how we see God acting through Jesus. We’ve come to expect God to act a certain way, either because we think God would act as we expect Him to or perhaps because we really don’t understand God at all.
That is the reason for Jesus’ words at the beginning of the Gospel. “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say ‘He has a demon’: the Son of man came eating and drinking and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”
This goes back to the lessons we have had the past several weeks. Jesus can’t seem to win. Either He and His servants are criticized for doing one thing, or they get criticized for doing the other. This is not even noting Jesus’ own words concerning Himself and John the Baptist, that John was there to help us repent, and just as we fast in Lent to prepare ourselves for Easter, so too did John and his disciples fast. But Jesus is the bridegroom for all our souls, and when the bridegroom is present, as Jesus tells us in Matthew 9:15, you celebrate His presence.
But this isn’t what we expect of God. We expect Him to be ‘prim and proper’, whatever that means for us. Maybe we expect Him to be a killjoy. Or maybe just not someone who is so ‘down to earth’ or approachable.
One of the biggest upsets for any expectations of God comes in the prophecy listed in Zechariah this morning. God, the king, comes in triumphantly, but not on a war horse. He comes in not proud, but on the humblest of animals to ride: a donkey. He doesn’t come in as the conquering war king, destroying all His enemies and bathing each town in fire. He comes in bringing peace, and removing the tools of war.
He’s not a conquering warmonger, or even a deliverer of righteous judgement. He’s a humble man, entering triumphantly not as a winner, but a man who is about to die to bring peace between us and Himself, and thus with each other as well.
But we can’t see that if we don’t open up and listen to God. And we can’t listen if we aren’t ready to let God in to change us from our sinful natures into the bright and glorious people He wants us to be. The kind of people that follow the example He gives to us. The kind of people who when they fall into sin pick themselves back up and return on the path God has given us to follow.
God is so much bigger than any of can imagine. So don’t make Him into something He isn’t. Let Him reveal Himself to you. Listen to Him, and hear what He has to say about Himself. And allow yourself, when you truly hear what He has to say, to be changed back into the people God wants us to be. To be not children of Sin and Death but the children of God, adopted through Christ’s death and resurrection for us all.