Out Of Sight...

How many of you have played peek-a-boo with a baby? Fun, isn’t it? But eventually they figure out that you can see them even when they can’t see you, and the thrill goes away. It’s a control thing, I think... they’re learning that what they do has an effect on their environment, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. So they move on to more sophisticated games, like hide-and-seek. By that time kids know they have to work at finding a good place to hide, that just squeezing their eyes shut doesn’t do it any more.

But it seems to take a whole lot longer for people to figure out that God can see us even when we can’t see him. For the Israelites in the wilderness, it’s out of sight, out of mind where God is concerned. By the time Moses came back down from Mt. Sinai with the tablets containing the law, they had capped their months of grumbling and whining and complaining that God was going to abandon them to die in the desert by making a golden calf. If they couldn’t see God, obviously God wasn’t there, and they could do what they liked.

But when Moses came back with the law, and they had an opportunity to actually hear God speak themselves, Scripture tells us that “they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance, and said to Moses, "You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die." [Ex 20:18-19] So you see they wanted to have their manna and eat it too, so to speak. They wanted God to be with them and take care of them, but they didn’t want him to get too close. An idol was much more to their liking, in fact; they had the control, then. They could get a religious thrill from the ceremonies while not actually being challenged to anything life-changing. YHWH God was just more than they wanted to deal with.

And that’s what most people are like, even today. Most of us want a domesticated God, one who forgives us and provides for us but doesn’t ask us to do anything difficult in return. We want a God whose priorities are the same as ours, one we have fashioned in our own image, in fact. The golden calf wasn’t exactly in the Israelites image, of course, but it was the sort of thing they imagined a God ought to be. And we do the same thing.

Some of you have probably heard of the “Search for the historical Jesus.” It started well over a hundred years ago, and to make a complicated theological issue as simple as I can, the claim was that the Gospels were full of all kinds of embroidery that the early church had added following the resurrection in order to make various theological points, and wasn’t necessarily an accurate portrayal of the Jesus who actually lived and walked in Palestine so long ago. The interesting thing was that each interpretation of the “historical Jesus” looked exactly like the scholar who had come up with it. There were “social activist” Jesuses and “fiery revolutionary” Jesuses and “mystic healer” Jesuses and so on. But each one affirmed the biases of his creator. Interesting, no?

We all are so much more comfortable with a God who will tell us we’re just fine exactly as we are and it’s all other people’s fault the world is in such a mess.

The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were like that, too. Since the Jews had returned from exile some 400 years before, they had had a great deal of trouble maintaining a strong national identity. They were always under the thumb of someone or another, the Persians or the Greeks or the Egyptians or the Romans. The hereditary priests were often corrupt, usually in the pockets of the political powers, and so a lay renewal movement got started. They insisted that knowing and obeying Scriptures were the essentials of being Jewish, rather than just showing up at the temple for the appointed feasts. It was, in fact, very much like our own 16th c. Reformation. And religious authority slowly began to move away from the priests and into the hands of these scholars, who were known as Pharisees. Their hearts were in the right place, but they wound up creating an idol. Their system was so focused on maintaining their own purity through strict adherence to the law that they forgot God’s larger purpose.

There had been a time when these devout and dedicated people remembered that they were supposed to be the means through which God would bless the world. The great Rabbi Hillel, one of the founders of the Pharisee movement, maintained that righteous Gentiles merit salvation just as Jews do, and in 20 B.C.E. a man named Menahem the Essene took 160 of his followers on a mission to the Gentiles.