How We Envision God

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 The Catholic Church, to which I belong, is observing a Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016.

Because “mercy” is one of those religious words that is otherwise seldom used in modern life, this may sound like a pious exercise that only the clergy or the devout should care about. But it goes to the heart of the question of who God is and who we are, questions which are essential for skeptics seeking God.

Most of us form an idea of God from our parents, grandparents and family members; our church, if we’ve been associated with one; and the traditions and beliefs represented by those people and institutions. Sometime during our lives, those ideas are tested against what we learn from science, art, literature and the maturing process.

Either we’re able to reconcile and harmonize what we learn from those sources or we’re not. But there’s an outlier in all this – a difficult-to-define-and-understand element we call faith, and in some form or another, it’s the game changer. It’s said to be a gift from God and it can come to people who have reconciled and harmonized, and to people who haven’t.

A Mystery?

So who gets this gift of faith? All we can say is that, like with so many other such questions, we don't know. I maintain, however, that – believer or not – it requires openness, patience, persistence, and a willingness to accept uncertainty.

But faith in whom or what? That brings us back to the Jubilee Year of Mercy. A little background.

The idea of a Jubilee year is a Hebrew thing, found in the Book of Leviticus. It occurred every 25th year when slaves and prisoners were freed, debts forgiven and God’s mercy particularly made manifest.

“In Christianity,” according to Wikipedia, “the tradition dates to 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII convoked a holy year, following which ordinary jubilees have generally been celebrated every 25 or 50 years.” Extraordinary jubilees have been held depending on need, and that’s what Pope Francis has declared for 2016.

I believe the pope accurately perceived the need in our time when so many people, including “believers,” want to strike out against others, ignore major problems such as care for creation and poverty and seek vengeance for real or imagined wrongs. 



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The idea of God held by most Christians and Jews dates to at least 1,000 years before Christ, and the Book of Leviticus, in which the Jubilee Year is mentioned, dates from 500 to 700 years before Jesus.  The God of the Hebrew Bible could be capricious, and even cruel – reflecting the projections of the ancient Hebrews and their neighbors – but the overwhelming image is one of mercy.

A few weeks ago I mentioned Psalm 135 (136 in non-Catholic Bibles) in which the author is giddy in his praise of God in a litany that repeated over and over “for his mercy endures forever.” Despite a feeling by many that God is uncaring and absent, for most people the overwhelming image is a God of love and mercy.

Just why he/she loves us has been the stuff of theology and poetry for ages, and would be the subject of another blog if I had any useful insights in the matter.

The Christian Bible, however, is no less insistent than the Hebrew Bible about God’s mercy and love. “This is how much God loved the world,” says The Message translation of John’s gospel: “He gave his Son, his one and only son.”

A Liar?
The letter of John makes the commandment to love God clearer. “If anyone boasts, ‘I love God,’ and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see?”

Mercy – another way of saying “love of God and neighbor” – is “the beating heart of the Gospel,” says Pope Francis.

“How much I desire that the year to come will be steeped in mercy,” he writes, “so that we can go out to every man and woman, bringing the goodness and tenderness of God. May the balm of mercy reach everyone, both believers and those far away, as a sign that the kingdom of God is already present in our midst.”