What did it cost God to be God?
Ordinary Sunday 29, 20 October, 2002
Fr Neville Connell
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
In February 1966, when 17 of us gathered for our pre-ordination retreat, at the opening address the priest-conductor informed us that the addresses would be what he described as "a bush-parson's theology". I would have to admit that we were a little patronising in our response, being young and knowing a great deal ... Then he went on to tell us that at the heart of the addresses would be the question, "How much did it cost God to be God?". We hadn't even thought about that!
The Scriptures and the Church speak of God in terms of being all-powerful, Almighty, everlasting, everliving, eternal; our formal prayers often begin with words like these. In effect, talking of a God who is self-sustaining. After all, that is what God is all about; he doesn't need anyone or anything.
Yet, the Scriptures also tell us that God was Creator of heaven and earth of all that is, seen and unseen, as we say in the Creed. These are certainly the acts of one who is all-powerful.
But why create? Just because one can create? Because God had the power to do so? And the time and the inclination? Perhaps in reflecting on this alone we are finding out more about God, about the character and nature of God, as well as his power.
God, so the Book of Genesis helps us to understand, created the Universe, and more particularly, this planet earth, and all that is in it, and in a logical, scientific order.
The climax of his creation is man and woman, created in his own image. What is this image? Are human beings almighty, everliving and so on? Genesis tells us that in a sense they thought they were. Adam and Eve wanted to be like God, and that was their downfall. They Fell. The story of Adam and Eve, their Fall, and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, illustrate for us the human condition in the face of God's creative power.
What did it cost God to be God? It cost him the fracturing of his image in man and woman. Rather than creating because he could do so, being all powerful, may it be that God created as an act of love? That God's power was expressed as love, rather than as any other kind of force; and that the image of God in which man and woman, we, were and are created, was and is the image of God's creative love.
And not just one act of creative love, but, as befits God, and act of never-ending love. God's power is expressed above all in his unending love for his creation; a love which encompasses all of creation, whether it responds, cooperates or not. A love which is able to work through, and in all sorts of situations.
Thus, in our First Reading for today, (Isaiah 45:1,4-6), God calls Cyrus, a pagan king, not of the chosen community of Israel, to be his instrument in the restoration of Israel–the country and the people, as his chosen. Jesus, the Son of God, gives due place to the pagan, earthly ruler Caesar in our Gospel Reading. (Matt. 22:15-21)
What did it cost God to be God? The cost of our free-will, freedom to be like Adam and Eve, who wanted to be like God, to play gods; and don't we want to do that today! The cost is summed up in one word–sin.
So the power of God which we know as love becomes perverted into hate, pride, lust, greed, envy, sloth, fanaticism and so on. We can indeed see how such sin manifested itself in Kuta on Bali last weekend. The power of creation used in that explosive to destroy, for perverted reasons. This is the cost to God.
Yet even in the national pain which we are feeling, focussed on Bali, let us see how sin is much more than one event, even while it is concentrated in such a bestial and monstrous way at Kuta.
The cost to God is his precious gift of freedom because the cause of division; just as those people in our Gospel Reading sought to use Jesus for their own divisive purposes, and so to destroy him. And so they did, as they thought, destroy him. They crucified the Son of God–what a huge, incomprehensible cost to the Father.
Yet God's power, his holiness, his love, was so great that he raised Jesus to New Life; and this is God's gift to all who struggle to live his way of love.
At Kuta we were brought face to face with evil, with the mystery of evil, because we do not know the people who perpetrated it, and why, even if we can hazard a guess.
But as on that hill of Calvary, when we see the mystery of evil in the crucifixion of Jesus, and yet know, as St John tells us in his Gospel, that that moment revealed to us the mystery of God's holiness and love, so at Kuta the mystery of love must be found there, if we are to redeem the horror.
Because God's love, his power, his holiness, symbolised by the cross at the Kuta memorial service, are instruments of reconciliation and healing in the face of the forces of destruction.
As we struggle to cope with Kuta, we enter more deeply into the cost to God, the cost of love.
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