GOD’S POWER AND POWERLESSNESS

By Klaus-Peter Juerns

[This address at the 31st Evangelical Church Day in Koln on 6/9/2007 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.publik-forum.de/f4-cms/tpl/pufo/op/art/display.asp]

I begin with the Jesus story. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus’ way is the way to God (11.1). From chapter 1, he is God’s way to humanity. Following Jewish tradition, Jesus called God Father. In an impertinent freedom and clarity, he says, “he who has seen me has seen the Father” (14.9). Jesus did not only tell parables. He lived as God’s parable. Other religions see this differently. Whether what we believe is true is decided in whether it brings us near God.

I.

What is God’s nature from the Jesus story? Love. “God is love.” Love is the relational miracle or wonder. In the 1st Letter of John, we read: “He who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Joh 4,16). Love has a marvelous physical side. Thanks be to God. But its nature is spirit, an invisible power joining all living beings with each other. “Spirit and love hold the world together in the innermost” (Goethe). This is spiritual and physical. Faith does not involve a special world but the one world to which God and we belong. The world would fall apart without love, without God.

God is love and only powerful as love. Love is the foundation of the “dear God.” Wherever the church and other religions tried to strengthen God’s power through outward power and physical pressure, they perverted and hindered God’s true power.

This mighty love must be related in parables from life. Here is one of the best-known parables handed down from Jesus. First, the scene should be described: pious contemporaries insulted Jesus because he ate with swindlers and whores. They hoped he would be their chance for a new beginning. To explain this, he told a story to the complainants (Luke 15,11-32). It involved a younger son who wanted his inheritance from his father so he could live as he wanted. He went far away beyond the customary terrain, squandered his assets and bought what he wanted for life: property, party guests, friends, and a little renown as a very generous host, this and that. Then the word of life turned and struck him on the face. Inflation took away what he could not spend. The descent began and became a fall making him the rival of swine in the struggle for scraps of food. “But when he came to himself he said, how many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called y8our son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.” And he left.

He could not have dreamt what the father did on his arrival. To relate this, Jesus uses five verbs in one sentence: the father saw the son whom he never abandoned as lost, for whom he waited, rain to him from a distance – he was overcome by mercy – fell on his knees and kissed him. Then the son first came to his confession of guilt. He no longer asked for work since the father ordered celebrating a feast. He supported him as a son and shared his life with him. Joy over the homecoming is so great because it had no other ground than the love from which it originated. Happiness is central, not the law, the happiness of the son with the father and the father with the returning son. The parable even says God has happiness when people on the edge of life find their way back t6o his center.

That is the power of the dear God appearing with Jesus. God is mighty and a lover of life. Celebration is so powerful that the pain of the past can begin to be healed. God’s love for his creatures entangles him in their life. They become his life. God’s interest is that they remain alive. In the parable, the father says a sentence with which Jesus marvelously expressed the meaning of resurrection: “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” God is mighty. God has the power that nothing and no one will be lost. The judgment that someone is “lost” imposes social death. Only a love for life breaking the social bonds of death and waking up the lost can free from this. This power is more, greater and more beautiful than “omnipotence” and is different than emperors, generals and superpowers. This power is vitality because it includes forgiveness out of love.

II.

We must see this. This power is so great and boundless that it became dangerous for Jesus who told of this power and lived from this power. It cost him his life. The older brother who always lived in the law clearly points to this danger and in advance to Golgotha. He sets a condition for joining the feast of life. First, he wants to stand out as just, set apart from the failed one returning home – as we always stand out by calling the parable the “parable of the lost son” and not the “parable of the love of the father.” For him, a feast was never celebrated, the older one complained even though he always diligently served his father and followed all the rules of the game at home. He was right in that.

But he became angry with the father because he only judged from the law and contested his right to magnanimously celebrate the returning one. Still the father would not be dissuaded from the role of lover of life. He courts the angry one and tries to explain he only wanted to stay alive and thankfully enjoy the gifts of life. He could celebrate life on many occasions without moaning when others have undeserved happiness. Both should be important: being just and kind mercy with the failed and broken who are allowed to live and begin again. The love that wants justice and mercy has the strength to learn from bitter experience and respect the rules of the game useful for life. When the just rejoice over the happiness of the befriended, they can celebrate the feast of the new beginning and the happiness of being generous hosts and givers of life.

But the older brother cannot rejoice or be generous. Like those who put Jesus to death on account of his message, they did not want to believe God loves unconditionally. They had another picture of God, wanted to hold to a God who sets conditions to be fulfilled that could give them an advantage with God. For him, justice was bound with absolute obedience. Our mortality was understood as punishment for disobedience. There was no presented right to life for blatant sinners for him. A third one had to be sacrificed to vicariously fulfill the demanded absolute obedience. Since they had a decisive influence on early Christian theology, Jesus’ death was soon interpreted back in this old horizon as an expiating and atoning sacrifice. They could not believe God could love powerfully of himself without any return favor. We could learn anew from Jesus today.

Jesus lived God’s unconditional love. He also made those who believed him into parables of God’s love: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you” (Joh 20,21). God shows himself to be mighty in transforming the old privileges of the one Son of God to the many daughters and sons of God. Through Jesus, God empowered them to God’s work, forgiving sins.

This empowerment also includes God’s self-dethronement or loss of power. By enabling people to be children of God and to forgive sins without any ritual consecration, God makes experience of his love in everyday life dependent on the serving love of his children. In other words, God includes his creatures in his divine being because God is anxious for the life of his creatures. God is so mighty he can thwart human fantasies of omnipotence and acting like a god. This is hard for us to believe because an all-powerful God can be made responsible for everything in the world, even for what we must accept responsibility and should accomplish for the sake of our divinely ordained freedom. An omnipotent God is sometimes annoying and inscrutable but ultimately is very convenient. One who relies on the omnipotence fiction can blame God for the most outrageous atrocities like genocide and the Shoah committed by humans. A God empowering to freedom and forgiveness raises the question about the powerfulness of divine love. “God makes his sun rise on the good and the evil” (Matthew 5,45) not to justify “evil-doers” but only out of love for life so the earth does not become a hell and those entering in life experience something of this love.

God’s love is powerful but neither beautifully romantic nor idealistic. God’s powerfulness is attested in the diverse forms of private and institutional caritas and diakonia, of medical arts of healing and care, salvation and healing. Salvation and solicitude belong together. Powerful serving love points the way to the future through commands and education. Being a lover of life includes being a realist and reaching the many individuals who together are humanity.

This is hard because people live in different cultural, social and biographical constellations. Still today the foreign and other is stylized as threatening and “us” and “others” are distinguished as between friend and enemy. God then naturally belongs to our side. “The dear God is the God who treats us kindly. Truth is with our religion and us although we were born accidentally in this world and the place of our birth cannot be the criterion for truth. The learned ethnocentrism that we call holy tradition constantly seduces us to regard our own as the right and true. This is childish thinking, not adult thinking.

How hard it is for humanity to bid farewell to ethnocentrism and see the whole of life appears at every G8 summit and at every new conference or meeting of religious representatives like the recent meeting of the EKD (Evangelical Church in Germany) and the coordinating council of Muslims in Germany. Each side imagines it possesses the all-decisive revelation. The humbleness of religions to distinguish between God’s own truth and their own perspectivist perceptions of God is lacking.

The history of war is evidence that a God divided in himself is not the true God but the product of conflicting human cultures and interests. In it, gods and goddesses had to march off to war against each other when countries waged war. The Christian God was also dressed in national uniforms by the churches in the world wars of the last century and set out against the prayers of enemies and their hope in God. For people suffering under the wars, the question hat makes the dear God mighty becomes the question whether our dear God is really strong enough to act in our favor against our enemies.

The Jesus narrative including his execution as a parabolic story answers “No” to this question. God does not prevent evil and outrageous injustice or the suffering of creatures generally, even when we implore him. “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me!,” Jesus cried on the cross. Others who suffered injustice like him acted similarly or decried God’s powerlessness, bitterly accusing him starting from his omnipotence: How could God allow that?!

God does not change the world because and when the world makes us suffer, even when we ask him. That is the answer to our question about God’s power. God does not discharge us from responsibility. God changes nothing; God created the whole cosmos mortal. The earth and all other planets and galaxies are mortal, not only humans and the other creatures. The last great tsunami rudely reminded us of this. All life that takes form in the universe will lose this form some time or other. All life shares in a great transformation. Whether it begins with being born or dying is irrelevant. Both belong to life. Religion and resurrection faith are not the only sources of comfort. The discovery that new stars are born on the backside of the “black hole” where matter dies in the universe is also comforting. It is time to join our faith with what we know through life and modern physics of the world – created by God. Then we will be able to say what resurrection means without having to reproduce antique worldviews. Life is a great becoming, passing away and new becoming, includes being born and dying of whatever forms of life. Life does not end when it dies but changes through dying. Life’s course is open. As a whole, the creation to which we belong is an open event in becoming.

Suffering belongs to mortal existence. Mortal beings love, see themselves suffering and some time or other must be freed. Pains and sorrows are unavoidable because we need others as counterparts to find ourselves and meaning in life. This love becomes a problem when we make it and the beloved absolute and when God should guarantee their survival. When this happens, we set God against life as he created it. God would have to abolish mortality and bring creation to a halt. Life would turn senile and end. Speaking of resurrection would make as little sense as speaking of God. God’s power of life includes allowing life to be mortal. From that point of view, God is also the power of death encountering us. This has nothing to do with punishment. Death is a side of life created by God and is neither “the wages of sin” (Romans 6,23) nor the enemy of life.

II.

What does being pious mean if God is powerful as love? It means God’s powerful loving interest becomes more and more our own interest. We become living, powerful, loving and sharper in the life lived by Jesus. Only through love and the passion of the spirit that sees connections can we stop dividing God and wanting to have the “dear God” for ourselves. Only love that grants the same right to life to all things will no longer be instrumentalized against God. Love in politics is concerned for education and labor so people can survive and support their lives. Neither human dignity nor democracy function without labor. Peace among us is in danger as long as the social and economic structures are not just. The stock market conditioned destruction of jobs widens into the new atom bomb of our days through which the social and cultural peace in the one world is destroyed and urgently necessary assistance to countries long exploited by us is hindered – with terrible deformations of souls of individuals and cooperative human life as consequences.

It is not enough to say: “May the mighty God preserve us!” Whoever pleads this way must use his or her love and spirit where he or she lives more vitally, powerfully and contagiously than in the past so “reverence for life” (A. Schweitzer) grows. This active reverence is the powerful answer to God’s mighty love for life (Galatians 5,5). We must sue for this reverence from politics and the economy. But this only happens credibly when we live respectfully or reverentially.