God Does Not Want to be Everything (Pt. 3)
notes on an apophatic anthropology and the theology of ordination
God Abides in Himself as Nothing: Incarnation and the Divine Goodness of Being Human
Introduction
In the previous posts (pt 1, pt 2), I looked briefly at Numbers 11 and tried to show how it has been read along diverging lines. I argued that the best Christian readings, and the ones that matter most for how we think of ordained ministry, are the ones that recognize most clearly the transfiguring power of Moses’ Christ-like self-emptying humility. In this third post, I want to shift attention to the theological realities that underlie not only the church’s mission but also the whole of human existence, considering how Jesus both reveals meekness and lowliness of heart to be good for us and actually makes it so.
Purity of Heart is the Law of True Tenderness
Scripture says “the fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever” (Ps 19.9). Far from being a torment, this pure fear is, in St Maximus’ words, a “natural expression of the law of true tenderness.” Because of its purity, this fear keeps our love ever-new. And this is what makes the saints the saints—their tenderness toward God and neighbor, the ever-new-ness of their love.1 The saints, in other words, are tender, sensitive to the Spirit’s nudges—and just in that way not at all touchy or uptight.
As every line of the Gospels makes clear, Jesus of Nazareth was tender-hearted and wholly self-aware. Deeply moved by compassion, he was easily directed by the Spirit. Always emptying himself in imitation of the Father, he was continuously filled with the Spirit. He delighted in the fear of the Lord (Isa. 11.1-3). Just in these ways, he both fulfilled the Father’s intentions—and answered Moses’ prayer. The taking on of our nature did not change him; in and through that taking, he changed us and, with us, all things. Because of him, all God’s people are prophets, filled with God’s own Spirit, exactly as Moses desired.
But there is an even deeper wonder. Pseudo-Dionysius (The Divine Names 10) was certainly right: God’s fullness remained “unaffected by the inexpressible emptying of self.” But we can say more: God’s fulness became effective precisely in and through that inexpressible emptying. As God-in-the-flesh, eternal Son-of-the-Father, he not only delighted in the fear of the Lord, he created them by what Eriugena calls his “self-creation.” By being delightedly afraid, he invented what he knew we would need. Thus, the fear of the Lord is truly the fear of the Lord—the fear the Lord made in himself and shares with us. That goodness, along with all that is good, took shape in the womb of his experience, the womb in which everything came into being (Jn 1.3)—our lives, life itself, and all that makes life worth living.
Divine Annihilation
God, of course, is not self-centered, not self-seeking, not narcissistic or egotistical. But if a self is something that exists in distinction from all else, a what that makes something someone, then God is not a self at all. Or, better, God is infinitely above and beyond being a self altogether. As the Son he is, thanks to the Father and the Spirit, Jesus has no selfdom to protect, no ego.
Don’t get me wrong. God is personal. But God is so personal he is fully and entirely selfless. He makes himself of “no reputation” (Phil. 2.7) not as an act of disguise but as an act of disclosure. An even deeper wonder: assuming his mother’s lowliness, Jesus not only reveals God’s humility but establishes it as the essence of our being. His life, the one he lived between Nazareth and Jerusalem, constitutes ours. And because that is true, we find our flourishing, our purest happiness, in living with child-like abandon. Like Moses, like his Lord, we manifest ourselves most fully when we no longer have damns to give about our image. We begin to become like God when we are finally happy just to be ourselves.
To be human is to be small—but not nearly as small as God. Our insignificance is relative; God’s is absolute. This is why, as Robert Jenson points out, God is actually drawn to our insignificance:
If there is such a God as the gospel presents, he is invested in historical particularity. In the present tense, that is, in space, this means he will be invested in some speck or other in some cosmic eddy or other, as in the history of that speck he is identified with the Jews among the nations and with Mary among the Jews…2
But why should this be so? Because our smallness is not only a limited reflection of God’s but also the interval or breach through which the divine humility can reach and revive all things. Mary’s lowliness, in particular, makes it so that she can contain the uncontainable—and give birth to it. And what is true for her is true for us, as well.
God Abides in Himself as Nothing
Nothing—truly, nothing—could be more fitting than for God to take on flesh, to be a creature, a boy, a carpenter, a man of Galilee—because God is humble. Becoming human, he did not come down from a position of pride to a lowly, shameful state; instead, he came forth into the only form of creaturely life capable of embodying the full glory of God’s own meekness and lowliness of heart.
In spite of what we’ve sometimes imagined, Jesus lived as he did not because in becoming human he had become less than the Father, or because he needed to show us how to live submissively under the Spirit. No, he lived that life of self-emptying service because that simply is who he is in his oneness with the Father and the Spirit. It can be difficult for us to stomach such talk about God. Why? Is it because we’ve been conditioned to think that God’s superiority to us is what secures our superiority over others?
God, of course, needs nothing. But by needlessly needing for us, taking our neediness as his own, Jesus has altered absolutely how we live with our needs, and how those needs are met. So, to be entrusted by the church with the work of ministry is to be entrusted with the responsibility of living and helping others to live from and toward this neediness, this emptiness, this smallness that is in reality the giving and receiving of our fullest flourishing, our wholly delighted being.
That brings us back, yet again, to the truth burning at the heart of Numbers 11. We are called to be small as God is small. We have been made to partake in God’s self-emptying, self-denying nature so that others—especially “outsiders”—receive from us the overabundant flooding-forth of God’s life. We are called, in other words, to become like Moses, like Mary, and in that way to be conformed to the likeness of Jesus, their Lord and ours.
St Maximus the Confessor, “On the Lord’s Prayer,” Philokalia Vol. 2 (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 285-395 (285).
Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: The Works of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 117.
"Only the form of a slave, shaped by Jesus’ hallowed and hallowing spirit, could bear the weight of divine glory" The implication of this is staggering. Love it!
To have this meekness without self pity is very difficult. This can only be done by forcing myself to pray no matter what the circumstances or fear surrounds me trying to choke me out of my leaning on the Holy Spirit moment by moment. The picture of St. Anthony surrounded by demons to deny him the peace of Christ is so powerful. That painting has seared in my mind for the rest of my life.