Sunday, October 19, 2014 | 8:00 a.m.

The Humanity of God

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Exodus 33:12–23
Matthew 22:15–22

“But you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”
Exodus 33:20 (NRSV)

Our problem is this: to derive the knowledge of the humanity of God from the knowledge of his deity.

Karl Barth, The Humanity of God

When I was about eight or nine years old, I looked forward to the regular delivery of an Avon catalog to our home. Every so often, a woman from the neighborhood who sold Avon products would deliver the latest Avon cosmetics catalog to each home. I would peruse the pages, looking at all the shades of eye shadows and colors of nail polish. Then I would put my finger on the things that, if I could, I would select for myself. It was as though, even before anything like an iPad had been invented, I was shopping virtually.

It wasn’t, however, just shades of makeup that caught my eye. As I looked at all the faces of the models in that catalog, I put my finger on the color of someone’s hair and the color and even shape of eyes that, if I could, I would have selected for myself. Sometimes I dreamed of being a brunette with wavy hair, and sometimes I changed my mind and put my finger on shiny blond hair instead. Every time I selected eyes with a deep crease in the lid, because only then could you effectively layer on three different shades of eye shadow.

Once when I was going through the Avon catalog, mentally making myself over, my mom asked me what I was doing. Interrupted out of my reverie, I couldn’t quite find the words to tell her, because at that moment I realized that what I was doing might hurt her feelings; after all, even though most of my physical features resembled my dad’s, surely some of them took after my mom. Moreover, it was from them that I had inherited all my Korean features. I don’t remember exactly what I told my mom I was doing, but I do remember that, without making a big deal of things, she gently said to me, “You know, we are all created in God’s image.”

In hindsight I cannot imagine a response more appropriate than hers. That we are created in God’s image is likely what I needed to hear at that moment to assure me not only that in God’s eyes everyone, including myself, is beautifully made, but even more importantly that she, as my mother, wasn’t taking my mental makeover personally, because she knew and wanted me to know that everyone is ultimately a child of God.

From ancient times, an intimate connection has always been drawn between whom we resemble and whose we are. Surely this connection began with the recognition that children often look like their biological parents. But even in the ancient world, this connection was not limited to biological lineage. Already in Genesis, we see the recognition that though biologically we are born of parents and physically resemble them, we are existentially created in God’s image and are spiritually God’s children.

Through the ages, this intimate connection between whom we resemble and whose we are has gotten a lot of mileage, and unfortunately time and time again it has been powerfully abused. Its abuse is what we find to be the backdrop of the story we read today. As Matthew tells the story, opponents of Jesus try to entrap Jesus by asking him a question that will lead him into a lose-lose situation. “Teacher, we know that you . . . show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” Those who pose the question know that if Jesus answers that the Roman tax is not lawful, he will be convicted of being disloyal to the emperor, and if Jesus answers that people should pay the burdensome tax, he will be accused of being unfaithful to God, who is sovereign over all, including the emperor. Jesus responds with a demonstration. Asking them to show him a coin and asking them, “Whose image is this on the coin?” Jesus lets them demonstrate for themselves how the connection drawn between whom we resemble and whose we are can become perverted. On Roman currency emblazoned with the head of the reigning emperor and inscribed by a divine title they can see for themselves the way that an empire can powerfully abuse the intimate association between whom we resemble and whose we are.

And Jesus spells out the abuse. He says to them, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” By laying out side by side the two alternatives, he trusts those who are faithful to God to know the difference. He trusts them to remember the psalmist’s words that all things—“the earth and all that is in it, the world and all who live in it”—belong to God and that, therefore, there is no realm, political or otherwise, separate from God’s sovereignty. He trusts them to know that while Roman currency bears the face of the emperor, they themselves bear God’s image, as though they themselves are God’s coin.

So seductive are the intertwined questions of whose image we bear and to whom we belong that, when taken alone, it is easy for them to be abused or perverted. They seem always to need, as Jesus provided in the story from Matthew, a corrective. In the story we heard this morning from the book of Exodus, we find that even Moses needs correction. Knowing that God is fed up with Israel’s repeated worship of idols and that therefore God will not go up with Israel to the promised land but will send a divinely appointed delegate in his stead, Moses pleads with God to change his mind. He insists that God, and not anyone else, go with Israel.

Furthermore, Moses presses God to get out from behind the pillar of cloud and reveal Godself so that the Israelites and everyone they encounter will know that they belong to God. Moses thinks that a full-scale revelation of God will ensure their own sense of identity as God’s distinctive and favored people. “For how shall it be known that I and your people have found favor in your sight unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct . . . from every people on the face of the earth. Show me your glory, I pray.” Understanding the Israelites’ need for a personalized God to protect and distinguish Israel from all other peoples, Moses insists not only that God remain present with Israel, but also that God make his presence visible to them. God gives in to Moses’ plea to a certain extent, but not fully. God says to Moses, “I will do the very thing you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight. . . . But you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live. . . . You shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”

That God would not allow his face to be seen is here the corrective that Moses and Israel needed. Moses assumed that God would have to show his face, his distinctive face, in order to give the Israelites their sense of distinctive identity. By refusing to become visible to them, God would maintain his divine sovereignty and would avoid the Israelites’ tendency toward idolatry. The people of God would have to find another way to show to whom they belonged.

Every group of people, if it wants to stick together for one cause or another, has to figure out to whom they belong. This is because sticking together requires, first and foremost, trust in and loyalty to people. They are emotions that exist between people. Even faithfulness to causes like environmental stewardship or breast cancer prevention can be traced back to loyalties that we hold toward people, such as the next generation of children to whom we leave our earth or the wife or mother who died of breast cancer.

It’s not always easy, and sometimes it can be risky, to personalize our loyalties. As the biblical stories we heard today remind us, we run the risk of idolatry when we personalize our loyalties. And yet we know that if we do not personalize our loyalties, our commitments run the risk of becoming more ideological than faithful. Faces help to humanize the causes to which we are committed.

In his book Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King Jr., author David Chappell acknowledges that one of the greatest challenges that black leaders in the early 1970s had to address was how to keep people committed to the civil rights movement in the absence of their charismatic leader. Without the face of Martin Luther King Jr., without his heroic personality, what would the future of the movement be? It was a dilemma that arises whenever we focus on a person or a leader as the face of a cause, an organization, or a movement. According to the history that Mr. Chappell provides, those who were committed to the civil rights movement figured out that they needed to build black institutions rather than anoint black leaders. So when the Congressional Black Caucus was founded in 1971, its founder, Ossie Davis, famously said, “It’s not the rap, it’s the map; it’s not the man, it’s the plan” (Richard Lischer, “Following Martin,” Christian Century, 17 September 2014, p. 31). Institutions of people helped to carry on the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. so that around the world other peoples’ quests for freedom could borrow from the spirit of the civil rights movement.

In cities of Eastern Europe, Tiananmen Square, Soweto Township, and countless other places, new freedom fighters sang “We Shall Overcome” and made King’s dream their own (“Following Martin,” p. 33).

In the days after Jesus’ death, Jesus’ disciples had to figure out many things. In the absence of their leader, they had to figure out how they were going to stick together, to whom they now belonged, and how they were going to keep alive the movement that Jesus began. They faced the same dangers against which the people of God always struggle: on the one hand, the danger of becoming an idolatrous cult of personality and, on the other hand, the danger of losing the humanity of God, their personal relationship with God.

During his lifetime, Jesus had taught them how to avoid those pitfalls. So that they would not idolize him, he always pointed beyond himself to his Father in heaven, and so that they could relate personally to God, he taught them to relate to God as their Father in heaven.

Furthermore, he taught them that as children of God, they are family to one another and so, as brothers and sisters, they should resemble one another.

In debates that have ensued over the centuries, the church has questioned the intimate connection drawn between whom we resemble and to whom we belong. What does it mean to be made in the image of God, especially when God himself refuses to be seen? It is this question that I think Christ answered for us. Christ showed us what it looks like to be the Son of God and gave us a model to imitate. He showed us that, by imitating him, we can mature. With the help of the Spirit, our hearts can be shaped by love and grace and our bodies can take on the grooves of service until we come to resemble Christ, the Son of God, more completely.