How Big? So Big!

Remember that little game you played with the little ones in your family: “How big is baby? So big!” The inflection of voice and the gestures with the arms can be so amusing and engaging for both involved. It is a sweet activity that shows new signs of interaction and development. It involves modeling and copying: a time of fun, together.

Two of the questions you can ask yourself as the days of Lent get underway are: “How big is your faith?” and “How big is your God? In a sense, they are the same question, because God is beyond measure, and is beyond the category of size. If our faith in God is developing and deepening we get that, and we know better than ever the Holy One is beyond any comprehension we employ to move further into a relationship with the Godhead. This is a season, really, for sharpening our practices to realize big faith. As the love of God expands, we come to realize, God is beyond description.

It was sixty-eight years ago the New Testament scholar, J. B. Phillips, wrote Your God is Too Small: A Guide for Believers and Skeptics Alike. In its time, and even now, it brings up in fresh terms the prospect of a relationship with the Holy: God is not what you think. God truly is not the images, analogies, titles, and understandings we bring to God. All of these applications do help us in our search for God. Honestly, however, it is the search itself, not apprehension, that is valuable to us, because the essence of the Divine, God in God’s–self, is ineffable and transcendent. From the early theologians, and the “desert abbas and ammas” of the first three centuries of the church, through the thread of Christian mysticism, and to the present, an awareness emerges: God cannot be contained or possessed. But certainly, God can be loved. The more you love, the bigger and more beyond yourself God “becomes” for you. We should all be saying what John the Baptist said of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (John 3:30), “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

There are two aspects of this Sunday’s scriptures that help us embrace the infinite grandeur of God in Christ, and move us to greater faith. The first is from the tradition of St. Peter. He seeks to help the Christians of the provinces of Asia Minor who are suffering great persecution. He encourages them to hold onto two things, one is the solidarity they have with Christ who suffered unspeakably for the sake of all humanity. Moreover, Peter is letting them know Christ is the cosmic power of God beyond all that we can fathom, having been raised from death as Savior both to those who are living and those who are asleep in death.

As long as we are speaking of it, did you grow up like I did, having been taught the Apostles’ Creed? You might have wondered, as a child reciting it, what it meant to say that Christ “…was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead.” In the traditional language it was even more bewildering: “…was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell.” By that the church meant Christ really died: he went not to the place of punishment, but the place of departed spirits, the place where all who have died go. This thought hinges prominently on the passage from 1 Peter:

He [Christ] was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. —1 Peter 3:18-20

This “prison” was what the Greeks called hades, not the punishment place but the realm of the departed. And Peter claims those spirits heard from Christ: they too heard the Good News of God.

What I want to learn here is Christ is bigger than we know. The saving influence of Christ knows no bounds. We may limit the capacity of Christ to save, but that does not actually bind God’s reach. On the very same point, look at the synopsis in Mark’s record of the temptation of Jesus. Right after the account of Jesus’s baptism, we read this:

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. —Mark 1:12-13

This is a marvelous picture of Jesus, who is fully human, and yet more than we can fathom. He chooses rightly in the face of the powerful adversary, Satan, and then wild beasts and angels minister him. It is an image that Jesus is Lord of all. It is sometimes said the earliest Creed for Christians is a very short one indeed: Jesus is Lord. And so we sing hymns declaring this belief as in the case of “Crown him with many crowns,” in which we cry, “crown him ye kings with many crowns, for he is King of all.”  We look at this picture from Mark and we conclude, he is Lord of nature, of angels, and of all that has existence.

We will certainly be able to expand our faith during this holy season. From the first Sunday in Lent through Holy Week, our notion of God will increase to realize any conception at all is a small sliver of the Infinite. In so doing, we will find ourselves being stretched. How big is your faith...so big and growing? How big is God? O, my heavens!

Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you-- not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him. —1 Peter 3:18-22