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The Masks of God

11th Sunday, Year B : 17 June 2012 : Ezekiel 17: 22-24 , Mark 4: 26-34

An attractive churchyard of beautiful trees and shrubs surrounds the Church of St James Southbridge. It was one of the six churches in my care in my first incumbency as the Vicar of Ellesmere. During that time the local church committee decided that some reafforestation planting would be appropriate, and given a say in the process, I opted for a cedar of Lebanon as one of the choices. From time to time I visit the churchyard to check out how the tree is doing. It has become for me a kind of yardstick and measure of my years of adult living. After a hesitant and slow beginning it is now well underway, and in fact the high rainfall of New Zealand should cause it to grow faster and to die younger than it would of back in the Lebanon.

Although the Bible is full of arboreal and plant images, they are not always that accurate in terms of planting expertise and human husbandry. Today’s gospel passage could be called the parable of the lazy farmer, because having planted the crop he just slacks around until its amazing growth requires urgent harvesting action. Wouldn’t some ploughing, weeding, fertilising and irrigating have been a good idea, we are inclined to think? And even more striking is that image from the 17th chapter of the prophet Ezekiel of a shoot plucked from the top of a cedar of Lebanon, and planted on top of a high mountain to produce the cedar of all cedars. Tree people will want to break in at this point and say, that wont work to get a tree started - you need to give nature a bit more to work on.

But go back further into the 17th chapter, into the bit that we weren’t allowed to listen to, and the story becomes even more weirdly interesting as we find out that the one who is doing the plucking and the planting is a mighty eagle. And it turns out that the beautiful bird is God himself, appearing in our world under the appearance of this powerful avian animal. The business that the eagle is about is uprooting and establishing nations, causing the waxing and the waning of empires, and all because of his beloved Israel, who has broken his heart with her unfaithfulness.

God the mighty eagle is working though the warp and the woof of Middle Eastern power politics, and the Realpolitik calculations of sovereigns and rulers, to bring about the purifying and cleansing of a gone wrong people who are dear to his heart. And that means that God presents himself under another unusual appearance, that of Nebuchadnezzar Emperor of Babylon, and annihilator of small nations around him. He it is who draws the elite of Judah into exile in a 70 year period of getting their heads straight about their national life and their religious affairs.

What is it with all these bewildering changes of appearance, these different guises, with which God presents himself in the affairs of the world? Luther called them the masks of God, meaning I think that they both usefully present an aspect of his being that is needful at the time, while at the same time concealing his inner being. And the reason for that is that God simply cannot be in our world just as he is in himself. He is the Trinity, and his triune being cannot be visible to us in the beatific vision without the world ceasing to be the independent reality that he made it to be in freedom. And if he comes to be an object in the world that is visible, tangible and available for useful human manipulation, then he ceases to be God.

Of course the second person of the Trinity did present himself in the world in the most direct availability of God yet known, but even here he revealed himself in a different form of presentation as first of all the baby at Bethlehem, and then as the suffering servant predicted by the prophet Isaiah, and raised up in humiliation on the hill at Golgotha. If this was God made manifest in the world then it was in a way that no human being could have predicted, planned or come to a prior acceptance of. Always the element of surprise and human confounding surrounds even the incarnate arrival of God in the world.

But if God presents himself in the world in a concealed, discrete and humble way there are some agrencies he has introduced into human reality that are powerful and influential. The Kingdom of God, first proclaimed in Galilee, and then set free in human affairs, would be a case in point. Which is where the story of the mustard seed and the zesty cropping farm seeds is going. This isn’t the parable of the lazy farmer - it is more like a Jack and the beanstalk story, because these are seeds that produce an outcome more outstanding than any of our agricultural research stations would be capable of. The seeds of the Kingdom have an unstoppable power that as they work their way through the unfolding history of the human story, deliver an outstanding result, often without requiring human assistance and encouragement.

The Church of Mark’s day was small and insignificant in a world that did not wish it well. There would have been teething problems as its community life developed. Disappointments would have come its way with people who ignored the invitations to join the Jesus movement, or who fell away after promising beginnings. For that matter the exiles in Babylon of Ezekiel’s day must have felt that it was all over rover. But these parables of mighty cedars and gloriously big shrubs sprung from mustard seeds were telling them that the problems, the failures and the disappointments weren’t the end of the story. It wasn’t all up to them. God had the matter in hand by his mighty power and surprising methods.

This week the city of Dunedin received some bracing news, courtesy of the Otago Daily Times, about the likely future for the Diocese of Dunedin. For reasons that I have outlined in the Pebble the future prospects for this parish are far from bleak. But as we look at the bigger picture, and the likely unfolding pattern of events for the diocesan family south of the Waitaki, we can find much food for thought and encouragement in today’s parables of divine planting and growing.

We don’t live in a world in which things just happen. Often God is at work behind the scenes, operating in a subtle way in a world of apparent contingency and chance. Sometimes he confronts his people in judgement, letting them know that he is not happy with what they have been up to, but always intent on restoring them, and drawing them back to himself. Even when his community appears to fail, his mighty power is at work, as the seeds of the Kingdom grow in surprising and unstoppable ways, not dependant on human husbandry. He will not be frustrated in his long-term purposes. And we will not be thrown away as he brings the garden of his delights into full production.