Unlike Any Other

Readings: Isaiah 11:1-10;  Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19;  Romans 15:4-13;  Matthew 3:1-12

The great British novelist Salman Rushdie once claimed that the retired gods of the pantheon, or other foregone gods of polytheisms, remain more appealing than any divine being hailed by a monotheism. As a reason, he said that the many-gods reflected relative humanity: sometimes they displayed questionable proclivities, or tendencies to falter; they seemed to be absolutely, consistently fallible. But singular gods, he said, including presumably the Christian God, “moralize”; a one god is not “fun,” exactly, or, in Rushdie’s understanding, relatable.


Yet we might instead say that our God has lasted (where others could not) precisely because of God’s transcendence. The many-gods of old might have been more “relatable”, but being human-like also means being subject to life within a span. They were also like us in that they could not last; there’s no god among the Greek pantheon, for example, who could claim our love in the way that God does. Our early Advent readings this week remind us of why.

We’ve never wanted our God to be “like” us: subject to faltering and mistakes, prone to anger or pettiness. The God we love is a figure we aspire to be like, maybe. Our God is one who warrants our love precisely because all of our faults wash away in the figure of God: human imperfections don’t exist in heaven. What is able to remain is divinity, a creator who loves us; a figure who doesn’t exactly moralize, but who instead, in godly love, inspires us to aspire to be more god-like. Such aspirations don’t imply reaching for great power, or grandeur above others; it’s what’s “moral” in God that we love and want to emulate.

The prophet Isaiah anticipated a salvation figure arising among men who was almost god-like. Some have called this anticipated person the messiah. Isaiah offers some bold specifics, including the Israelite house—the house of Jesse—from which this future figure would come (Isaiah 11:1). But other qualities are drawn more generally, and with a much more hopeful stroke: the spirit of God would rest in this person; they would be a person who would fight, with diligence, on behalf of justice for all who are oppressed; their advent would mark, also, the advent of the end of all strife, the coming of a period in which “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard…lie down with the kid” (Isaiah 11:2, 4, 6). The age which this person would usher in was anticipated as one in which all kingdoms would bend ears to hear the word of God, to walk in God’s ways and do righteous deeds. A perfect imprint of God, this “shoot from the house of Jesse” would then not alienate us, but by their very presence make us better, make us want to be godly.

We know how Isaiah has been interpreted; in it, the churches have been inclined to see an anticipation of Christ. That’s why Isaiah comes up in our Advent readings, in the season during which we look forward to the “birth of Christ” part of the Christian story. Whether this interpretation is strong or not almost does not matter: Isaiah has seasonal relevance because, in the person of Jesus, all of these grand qualities came into being. Jesus encouraged justice; Jesus encouraged peace; Jesus did his best to incline the world’s ears toward God.

The 72nd Psalm we receive with the same breathless awe, seeing in the future it anticipated the Christian future. The God we want, the Jesus we love, is one of whom we say, both with longing and confidence, “may [God] judge your people with righteousness…defend the cause of the poor…give deliverance….[and] crush the oppressor” (Psalm 72:2-4). We want that, and believe that, God will nourish us like a gentle rain; we believe that a godly age would be marked by a flourishing of peace, by a joyous calm among the nations (Psalm 72:5, 7). Much different from the gods humanity once believed in: the God we know and love is not arbitrary in dolling out demands and decrees, but rather constant in peace and equanimity. This is who we anticipate. This is who we adore.

Romans sees Jesus as the fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible prophecies, anticipating in the flourishing of Christ’s kingdom all of the wonders which that Bible spoke of. Jesus is the one who leads to the “glorification of God,” who “became a servant” to bring to fruition the “promises to the patriarchs” for the world, entirely (Romans 15:12, 9, 8). Our gospel reading, too, anticipates rather than involves the person of Jesus: John the Baptist informs those who question him that a person is coming who “is more powerful…he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matthew 3:11).

We expect our God to be great; we love God partially because, through the person of Jesus and the mystery of incarnation, the divine was able to prove that divinity IS great. We know this because of Jesus, who fulfilled all of the lofty goals of the prophets: who cleared a path for people to treat each other well, for justice to take root, for human good will to be the guiding principle of all behaviors.

God is not, in fact, unappealing because God is moral, or even moralizing; rather, the gods who did not last, the phantasms who lived in stories and passed away with the closing of ancient empires, are unappealing for worship because they didn’t bother to be moral, or to moralize, or to offer any sort of guiding rule to better our humble human lives. Perhaps we think of them now and again, when we need to tell a rich and engaging story; perhaps the line from Matthew which says that “every tree…that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” recalls them for us (Matthew 3:10). Those gods were interesting, but fruitless; so our God is humbling, and awesome, and we’re called to be the fruit which the divine bears.

Our advent readings are a reminder of God’s greatness, and of the wonder of the person of Jesus. They’re perhaps even “moralizing” words, as they encourage us to walk in ways which suggest godly ways. They speak of a perfected world in which God’s people play a significant part, and they know all of us to be those people, and demand of all of us those high deeds. They don’t expect us to do them out of deference, or obligation; rather, the terms in which the gospel and biblical morals are drawn make us, in their beauty, almost want to be more moral, more God-like. “God-like” stirs in us something primordial, something eternal and joyous; “gods-like” never could, and so the thought of it faded into myth.

We’ve entered a season of anticipation. Plenty around us will cynically claim that the holiday season no longer carries this, that “god is dead” within it; but as we encounter Advent passages, we know that this isn’t true. We look forward, with longing, to warm family gatherings; we include, in our shopping lists, strangers and families in need; we make peace with those we’ve maintained subtle feuds with; and all of this hints to the coming kingdom. God flourishes within our seasonal behavior. God becomes apparent in the places and spaces wherein we remember to look for what is fantastic about Heaven, and all its luminaries. God is; God remains; and the wonder of that doesn’t diminish, but only grows stronger as we await the rebirth of Jesus.

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As in Heaven

Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5;  Psalm 122;  Romans 13:11-14;  Matthew 24:36-44

It’s easy to get caught up in the rhetoric which surrounds us…easy to invest in social and political positions which don’t entirely mesh with our religious commitments. It’s easy, too, to place our daily needs above the needs of our spirits, to make concessions which we wouldn’t make standing before Christ, to choose a compromised position which makes all momentarily feel simpler.

The manifestations of choosing the easy way are many, and we’re certainly all guilty of it at points. Perhaps we sit on the sidelines of fights for social and economic justice, finding the actions which activists take too idealistic, too stringent to fold easily into our own lives. Perhaps we participate in political polemics which villainize some in ways which claim to protect the rights of others. Perhaps we stand silently by while others are hurt, or face derision, or tread through “dark nights of the soul.”

After all, what does it matter if some face temporary tribulations, or if systems are unfair, or if some are still marginalized, or if skirmishes occur in distant corners of the globe; what ultimate significance do such things carry if we’re all promised heaven in the end? What more can be asked of us than that we do our best to behave well in an imperfect world?

This week’s readings shun such middling positions. They all hold precious the notion of a coming, perfected kingdom of God, in which injustices will surely be done away with, in which people will live in peace and harmony, but they far from suggest that we should pencil that unknown date into our calendars as, simultaneously, the day on which we ought to begin behaving in a godly manner.

Heaven doesn’t abrogate now; it doesn’t render all of the ills of this age insignificant. And we’re assured that sitting back and waiting to be delivered, rather than doing the work of preparing God’s way now, would prove a mistake in the end: we leave our spiritual “homes” unlocked to moral intrusion if we opt to anticipate forever rather than involving ourselves with improving now. This is articulated best in Matthew’s famous verses, which inform us that “if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into; therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour” (Matthew 24:43-44).

What does Matthew mean by the imagery of the thief in the night? The parallel to Jesus, coming as the Son of Man, seems to be that we can’t anticipate a “when” for his arrival, so safeguarding selectively doesn’t work. What’s required is moral diligence—not even anticipating Jesus’s return as imminent and therefore something we should bend our lives to, but anticipating it as a reality, as something that began to be realized at the moment of his assumption. The imperatives of the gospels aren’t distant imperatives; they’re required of us now. We already have to gird ourselves against invaders who would tell us that our immediate needs are more important. Our primary “immediate need” is to be Christ-like, to work toward realizing improved situations now.

We can derive suggestions from our readings for living in a way that mimics the heavenly realm. Isaiah tells us that when God’s house is built, all nations will stream towards it; that globally, all peoples will bend their ears toward God and let the divine dictates become their own, and that they’ll “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks,” so that all instruments which aided discord among them will become instruments of peace and mutual flourishing (Isaiah 2:4). If this is NOT simply an ideal to be waited for, we can assume the work of realizing it now. We can stop pretending nationality is a definitive human quality; we can treat people as people, and forego anger in favor of fidelity, mutual care and kindness, even intimacy. In the States, doing so would have immediate implications upon how we treat our immigrant communities; abroad, it would require of us greater vocality when people are oppressed by other people. Difficult work, certainly, but if we read the Bible as truth: godly work.

The 122nd Psalm speaks of the whole community—by which we can presume the psalmist means Israelites alone, or read Christianity into that grouping, or, more pertinently, read “our” as inclusive of all—standing at the city gates and doing good. This may be intentionally vague; good encompasses so much in God’s law. But what is certain is that all are involved, the work does not fall upon a select few, and the anticipated kingdom isn’t considered complete without the full participation of this enigmatic community. They should “give thanks to the name of God,” they should “pray for peace” and seek justice—and that ‘they’ is Jerusalem, and if we take ourselves to participate in Jerusalem, that ‘they’ becomes ‘us’ (Psalm 122:4, 6, 5). We are they who must “seek [God’s] good” (Psalm 122:9); by doing so, we begin to realize the eventual participation of all.

Romans speaks of coming into godly living in metaphors of arising from a deep sleep—as if we’re only fully conscious, only fully alive and active, when we do the work which God requires, love in the ways God asks us to love, work in the ways God asks us to work: “let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy” (Romans 13:13). Paul requires, in this letter, that we abandon fleshly notions. This would require shelving and forgetting all preoccupations which tell us that we don’t have to do what is right YET—that we don’t have to fight for the rights of others today, that working on behalf of peace and justice is not work we have to do right now. Romans assures us that “salvation is nearer to us” when we forget the things which we allow to become more important than God, and God’s word, and instead put God first (Romans 13:11).

We don’t want to risk sleeping through the realization of all of God’s dreams and anticipations for us; we don’t want to fail to become the people God formed us to be because we’re too busy doing our stuff, and are not quite ready, in the meantime, to do the hard work of being Christians, of being fully “Christ-like.” If we wait, we leave the door untended; we invite thievery into our hearts without, maybe, being conscious of the invitation. We risk losing access to, or perspective of, what is good by choosing to put off “good” until a later date.

The work we have to do, then, is that of diligently watching the “door”—of making sure that sin isn’t allowed to permeate the world we hope to make God’s home. Sin cannot enter in if we refuse to sit idly by while things are widely done which we know to defy God’s will. We’re to clothe and feed the needy—let’s begin by doing that now. We’re to welcome foreigners among us—let’s extend that invitation immediately. We’re to view “us” as a term which excludes none—let’s stop pretending that Christianity is exclusive, that it can be isolated either among pockets of people or in select activities (at designated times) in our lives. Being Christian means assuming tremendous responsibilities—let’s not wait to do that work.

We should be ready for heaven when it comes, and not because we’ve spent our lives dreaming of it. Rather, we should be ready for heaven when it comes because we’ve spent our whole lives making heaven real among us, bringing it to light by the deeds that we do and through the love that we offer to all. Heaven should feel like home because we’ve lived it.

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Light of our Lives

Readings: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Luke 1:68-79; Psalm 46; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

Our readings this week act as a meditation on the radical availability of God, first made visible by the relationship of the divine to the people of Israel, then evinced by God’s incarnation in the person of Jesus. Let these chapters serve as a counter to anyone who wants to argue that God is a distant, uninterested figure. To the contrary: the suggestion is that God is not only interested in, but is deeply engrossed in our lives, and that history winds toward a moment in which we’ll all be drawn back into divinity. The preparations for this reunion, we’re told, began even before we did.


In the Jeremiah reading, the metaphor of God’s people as sheep, with God as the shepherd, is used. There is divine assurance that any person who wrongs God’s people does so in a necessarily limited sense. All ills inflicted upon them are ultimately thwarted; God’s people, no matter how tried, no matter how tormented, will ultimately find their salve in being drawn back into God’s company. Via Jeremiah, God says, “I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply” (Jeremiah 23:3).



Following is the anticipation of the return of a Davidic king, a messiah who will seek justice for all God loves. These promises, in consideration of what the nation was facing, can leave one breathless at their breadth, at the seeming audacity of what they propose: it would be no small feat to collect, from all ends of the Earth, the Israelites of the Diaspora. Some sheep, some of the people, we might otherwise think, seem certain to be lost—the thought of so many, across such an expanse, and with individual wills, seems to work against the idea of total return. And yet Jeremiah assures us: each and every soul will return. All will fold back into the community which they inherently belong to—God’s community, Israel.

Colossians arises in a different historical situation, but faces, similarly, the threat of fracture: the burgeoning Christian communities are saddled with the difficult task of defining their “borders,” of determining what Christian means, who it includes and who, ultimately, it excludes. Are they a continuation of the people of Israel, a branch of that family, or something radically different, promised decidedly different relationships to God? And, a more pressing question: what happens to this delicate, still ill-defined community when it faces, wholesale, persecution from nations which won’t wait for it to define and secure itself before undermining it?

Paul is addressing communities which anticipate very real, and very potentially divisive, circumstances. And yet he assures us, as did the author of Jeremiah, that whatever happens to God’s people in the short term, in the long term they’ll all be gathered to God. Through the person of Jesus, in whom all are justified, Paul says that “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace” (Colossians 1:20).

So both books, from both testaments, assure communities which feel themselves to be God’s communities, even perhaps in an exclusive way, of their eventual total assumption into God. Yet we can’t help notice, from a critical distance, that the two communities are, in actuality, at least a little different. Does this call into question the exclusivity of either?

This perhaps leads us to an interesting realization: God undertook specific and particular relationships with these particular communities, imbued with intimacy and familial love; but the particularity of those relationships does not amount to exclusivity. Rather, that both communities are engaged, and that both engagements are real and assured, indicates that God’s particular love for us extends beyond subtle definitions: it is available to all, who can call themselves almost anything without compromising that love.

Luke finds that the relationship of Christians to God is a continuation of the covenantal relationship of God to Abraham, saying that the promises made to him were, in fact, made to us as well, and that “us” is inclusive. “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,” the Gospel says; all who are God’s, all who face the pains of humanity—in the end, a radical all (Luke 1:78). It’s therefore understandable that God is celebrated everywhere, and is manifested everywhere: “Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth” (Psalm 46:10).

Both Jeremiah and Colossians give us a correct picture of who will be gathered back to God; both could be misread as envisioning a somewhat exclusive eternity; but both actually anticipate a wider salvation, one which is available to all mankind. God’s love, manifested in special ways in the Israelite and Christian communities, isn’t given to them alone; it’s an effusive love, a ubiquitous love, one which seeks and finds all.

God’s love is radically available, and radically assured. We can note in Jeremiah that the sheep whom God shepherds don’t collect themselves back to him, necessarily; even if they stray, God collects them back, taking the care and time to seek, and find, each one. How does God know which belong to the divine, we might wonder, if we don’t yet understand that all are God’s.

But we can intuit, and assume: just as we take pride in the beautiful and unique things we do, just as we thrill in or maker’s marks upon our own works (in the corner of our paintings, in our fingerprints upon the meals we make for families and loved ones, in our names scrawled across the back of hard-earned checks), God must delight in seeing the divine light given into each and every being made by Heaven’s hand. God knows us because we are God’s; and all are God’s, regardless of individual self-identifications.

Our Gospel reading puts us at the foot of the cross. Jesus is surrounded by persecutors who revile him, and who, by his death, appear to have won. But Jesus takes pity: “forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he prays (Luke 23:24). He’s mocked, he’s cast in with criminals; he’s taunted with demands that he save even those who persecute them, if he’s so able. Jesus both answers these derisions and doesn’t.

He doesn’t address the rabid crowd directly; he prays on their behalf, though, and he anticipates their return, which is alluded to when the criminal beside him comes to the realization that Jesus is divine. To him, Jesus promises “today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). And we know, in view of all of our readings, that that “today” is as every day, just as the criminal is like every individual who has faltered and fallen down; we’re all people who haven’t exactly earned God’s love. We’re sinners, we’re fallible and imperfect; but even in our imperfections, we’re beloved, and given to anticipate paradise.

God loves radically. God invests his love in particular places; God’s love is simultaneously invested everywhere. God forges complex relationships with individuals; God seeks complex relationships with all. And when we begin to realize this, we come to understand that, if we’re ourselves like the sheep waiting to be brought back into the fold, so are the people next to us—they, too, are justified by God’s love. The light of God is in us as we love; the potential for it rests in our neighbors, too, and in their neighbors. And when God eventually calls—when the work of shepherding us back begins—the divine mark in all will come to light, and we’ll all shine in synchronicity.

God’s radical love, if it’s radically and everywhere accepted, will lead to a beauty and a harmony in creation that we can hardly anticipate.


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A New Heaven, a New Earth

Isaiah 65:17-25; Isaiah 12;  Malachi 4:1-2a;  Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

Faith, the inner inclination toward God, the choice to believe, may happen in a flash or develop over time. It’s a feeling, a tendency, an inner movement. But we frequently find that, after the initial moment of epiphany or the first measured decision to believe, faith is something which must be cultivated by continual, conscious action. That action is the basis of our religion, of the moral and ethical organization in our lives which ties us to the holy: to God, His son, and to the Holy Spirit.


Religion is revolutionary. Entering into it is transformative. Our readings for the week certainly exemplify this. They speak of the ruptures and renewals which characterize religious life. The effects of entering into religious traditions, which within Judaic and Christian circles are built upon a notion of communion and relationship with God, are nearly always extreme. Thus Isaiah is able to speak of an eschatological future which is simultaneously a metaphor for entrance into religious tradition: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind,” God says through the prophet (Isaiah 65:17). Living in faith means entering into just such a new world, wherein all is considered possible, all possibilities are imbued with purest hope, and hope is sustained by faith.

The biblical promises and potentialities given through God can initiate a kind of euphoria, can lead us to delight in the possibilities of the kingdom of God. God speaks of that kingdom in the highest, most idealized terms: it’s a place without distress, a place of perpetual youth, and a place wherein death has been conquered by life. People who enter into the kingdom live long, are continually sated, and are able to enjoy innate intimacy with God: “before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear,” God says (Isaiah 65:27).

It’s probable that Isaiah didn’t have only a distant future in mind. The relationship between God and Israel was predicated upon a number of covenantal “conditions,” which existed almost as a map to living wholly in relationship to the divine. If those in the earthly kingdom were able to direct their lives with covenantal and Torah prescriptions in mind, the heavenly kingdom would be, to a degree, actualized, or at the very least mimicked, on earth. In this new kingdom, in the new and perfected Jerusalem, God will rejoice “and delight in [his] people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress” (Isaiah 65:19). Such predictions are common throughout scripture, and yet continually enticing: a world so free of distress and so bursting with joy would, indeed, strike us as a “new” world.

The scriptures do not, and could not, suggest that religious transformation is solely characterized by the new ease of living with God and in God’s image. There’s certainly delight to be found there. But the journey from living without God to living in him is hardly a brief one, and it’s certainly not one we make simple. Even as we hunger for the fulfillment of prophetic promises, we sometimes resist the work required to move toward them. Faith, and religious life, is disruptive; it requires rejecting the empty promises of secular circles, of the world which doesn’t feel inclined toward God. It does not aspire to ultimacy, neither does it exhaust much time imagining ultimacy at all. But because all promises have their glitter, rejections of worldly visions don’t always naturally take root, or appeal to us easily.

Our readings from the gospel and Paul remind us that choosing to live in God is not always a choice the world understands. Jesus does not promise a graceful or pain-free transition from worldly living to Christian living. To the contrary: he assures his followers that “[non-believers] will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name” (Luke 21:12). Societies, he warns, tend to rally against religious living; they tend to want to dismiss and repress it. And he warns that it’s not a condition limited to particular times. To be faithful is to set oneself up as different, to proclaim aspirations beyond the world’s immediate inclinations.

Jesus assures his listeners that even families are not safe from the disruption which moving into faith initiates. Rather, believers will find themselves “betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and…some [will be put] to death” (Luke 21:16). They’ll be hated and despised; all daily pleasantries previously taken for granted will no longer be available.

Our readings vacillate between these two poles, both assuring us that believers will enjoy unimaginable delights, and that the radical decision to believe will lead to strife, grief and innumerable disruptions. And yet they both articulate the same truth. When we decide to believe, and when we elect to form our lives around that belief, our former lives do, indeed, pass away; they dissipate into a now unavailable space. And that can be difficult; it can mean losing familiar access to the people who don’t accompany us. But what awaits us on the other side—the delight of living in radical communion with God, in intimate relationship to heaven and ultimate truth—is itself a new world, and can mend whatever pains are initiated by the disruptive decision to believe. God both requires us to break our hearts a bit, allowing the old to pass away, and promises to fill them with the light of total truth which comes in knowing him. He requires us to leave behind that which is not of him; he also promises us new and limitless homes.

Religious life is a choice. It’s a movement from the comfortable uncertain to radical, unfamiliar spaces of divine truth. Tears may fall along the way; change is never easy. But the space beyond them, the infinite vistas of eternity, are promised as a space wherein tears have no place, wherein life is spent as it was meant to be: in loving God, and in the gift of being perfectly loved by him in return.

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Here and There

Readings: Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Psalm 145:1-5, 17-21; Psalm 98; Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9;  2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

There exists a reality beyond what’s immediate and most apparent. The scriptures speak of it repeatedly, from apocalyptic writings of the prophets to Jesus’s own discourses in the gospels; as time beyond this time, as the truth beyond current events. Frequently this is how the biblical authors confronted situations which might otherwise lead to despair: they sought reason to rejoice and take comfort, even when circumstances didn’t make it easy.


I know plenty of people who have faced difficulties in their own lives, or who have witnessed tribulations in the lives of those around them. The burdens we bear don’t always undergird the idea of a loving God. When all is going well, it’s easy to invest in concepts of benevolence: the sun shines on us, and it’s easy to feel blessed. But what about dark days? As someone I know articulated it recently, “how can I believe in God when…?” We can fill that “when” in as we choose. When wars follow one another in endless succession. When natural disasters claim the lives of innocents. When bad things do, indeed, happen to good people, and with alarming frequency. If there’s a God and that God loves us, why doesn’t He stop it all? Where is our peace?

Responses which guarantee that God does love, and is invested, probably don’t always strike us as sufficient. We want something more immediate, something more obvious, than the assurance that God is with us in our pain. We want concrete solutions. Yet the scriptures don’t conflate God’s love with the granting of all our wishes. They promise an eventuality wherein pain no longer exists, wherein petty unpleasantries cease to rule us; but that eventuality is always either in a future spot, or is to be found in inner sanctuaries, in a spiritual peace and confidence which must be cultivated.

In Haggai, the prophet is positioned in a historical place wherein waiting ruled. The exiled Judeans had been permitted to return to the land following the fall of the first Temple, and had been granted a mandate to rebuild. During the time of the prophet, that rebuilding had yet to be completed. Yet the prophet knew the time approached: “greater will be the future glory of this house than the former”, the people are assured, and in the meantime, “‘I am with you,’ sa[id] the Lord of hosts…’my spirit continues in your midst’” (Haggai 2:9, 4, 5). Even when the land is stark and the promises of the past seem to have been broken, God persists. What is immediate is symbolic; the grandeur of God’s love defies circumstances.

Job, too, anticipates a future season, enigmatically speaking of a time wherein “after my skin has been… destroyed, …in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:26). This seems contradictory—how can Job see God in the flesh if his earthly body has been destroyed? But the joy Job anticipates, the moment of revelation, has nothing to do with earthly bodily existence; no matter what Job endures on Earth, he can look forward to a heavenly existence which makes earthbound concerns seem miniscule, even like conceit.

Again and again, we hear echoes of these promises for the future. The seventeenth psalm is given in a period of persecution, yet through despair, the psalmist asks that God “keep me as the apple of [his] eye, hide me in the shadow of your wings,” and has confidence that God will show his “wonderful love” (Psalm 14:8, 7). Paul, in 2 Thessalonians, assures his church that persecutions are endurable precisely because they initiate the apocalypse, the revelation of the one true God who brings peace: “the day of the Lord is already here,” he asserts, and the churches can know this because “the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction” (2 Thessalonians 2:2,3). Rome persecutes; but Rome is, ultimately, ephemeral, and the persecuted will be vindicated.

The gospel passage, too, waxes on this peculiar theme, as Jesus uses the example of marriage and remarriage to display how what we consume ourselves with here is insignificant in consideration of heaven: “the children of this age marry and remarry,” he says, “but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels…” (Luke, 20:34-36). We are both of this world, and more than it; we both persist within it and await assumption into God’s love in a mysterious beyond.

Jesus isn’t encouraging people not to invest in now. There is no assumption in the verse that people will stop marrying, or remarrying, or otherwise engaging in the world, simply because they’ll someday be ‘like angels’. On the contrary, most of his imperatives are concerned with now. He consistently enjoins people to make the world better, taking special care to elevate the despairing and disadvantaged among them. Engagement is a given.

But so is a God above it all, who watches with interest and love as we navigate this confusing world. Who is pained when we are pained, but who doesn’t stop pain. At least not as it immediately occurs. At least not when it is transitory. And perhaps this is because He’s a God who lovingly anticipates the moment when we become like angels, who knows that we’re more than our individual situations..that this reality is not the only reality.

It’s easy to see how this “answer” may be received as a non-answer. Traditionally, telling someone who is experiencing pain, or who is facing injustice, that ultimately their pain is dwarfed by God’s love isn’t terribly helpful. Understandably. Such news comes across less like a warm embrace than a frigid wall, even a slap in the face. But then, it’s not our job to deliver such news. It’s our job to comfort, as Christ comforted. And we’re even entitled to our own pain, as it comes.

What we feel here is real. Injustice is a reality. Joy is as well, and so is God’s love. All that we experience might not seem like proof that God exists, and cares; but it’s not our responsibility to formulate proofs. Our job is to remain steadfast in faith, to maintain a glimmer of it even when what we’re faced with doesn’t seem to cohere with our belief.

Most often, attempting to answer the question for others is a mistake…at least, in words. There’s no great response to “how can I believe in God, when…?” Our responsibility, rather, is to be the living witnesses of a loving and higher power; to respond to the precepts He gave us and treat others with the utmost respect and consideration. We can’t prove that God exists; but we can be a comfort to those who are burdened with real fears that He does not, or does not care. Not answering the question overtly, but simply being there for people with a Christ-like love, gives people the space to rediscover the reality of God’s love for themselves. And, hopefully, others who believe will be able to do the same for us when we’re in our own moments of pain, or despair, or doubt.

For every instance of “how can I believe in God when…?”, there’s someone doing the work of “mak[ing] a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth; break[ing] forth into joyous song and sing praises” (Psalm 98:4). There are those who evince that there’s a reality beyond transitory pains, and that love permeates, and that God is always.

That life fluctuates between emotional and experiential poles doesn’t make things easy. It would be most convenient to exist always in the glow of love, and to not have to worry about moments that lead us to question. Convenient, but not characteristic of here.

God is beyond, as much as He is here. His will isn’t always easy to discern. It’s not always necessary to discern it. We have to rest in the knowledge that it’s waiting; that all which seems to obscure it is finite; and that nothing lasts as long as it does.

Beyond this reality stretches a brighter one, unscathed by tempestuous earthly occurrences. We must strain our hearts toward its light, even when reasons seem hard to come by; peace awaits us there.


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