Scripture

Job 42:1-6. Job realises he has been presumptuous in the way he has argued with God over this problem of suffering – demanding, as he has, full and final explanation of it. He is rather penitent!

1 Corinthians 1:26-28. The apostle reminds his readers that in the mysterious ways of God, unlikely people can be used very significantly.

Luke 10:21. This verse gives us a hint that God could be said to play a spot of ‘hide-and-seek’!

I’ve a soft spot for the New England region of the U.S. – that part we associate with the Pilgrim Fathers, with turkey and Thanksgiving. When we lived there in the 1960s, we found Thanksgiving to be a bigger festival than Christmas. Last November we had Thanksgiving dinner with one of the families in my old parish. Thirty-one sat down, and there was so much food that twenty-odd came back next day for seconds!

A highlight after dinner was the game of 'hide-and-seek' for the children. In and around an 18th century farm house and adjoining buildings, the spots to conceal oneself were legion, especially when the house had secret rooms. These were often a feature of the older houses, especially those built around the time of the Revolution.

Sometimes I've wondered if God plays a game of 'hide-and-seek' with us. Two of the gospels record Jesus saying (in prayer) 'I thank you because you have shown to the unlearned what you have hidden from the wise and the learned'. I don't think it meant this when he said 'In my Father's house are many rooms', but I wonder. I wonder about a playful divinity who indulges in a little 'hide-and-seek' with the members of Mensa. Then, when they've given up, God sneaks out of that secret room and off to the children's playground - there to frolic with little kids on the swings an slides.

Something else happened that Thanksgiving weekend. Although it's twenty-two years since I was pastor there, talking about the things of the faith still seems to happen quite naturally, and that was the tenor of many conversations. A woman whose adult family has become involved with an evangelical community said to me, 'They speak of such blessing and bliss from their faith. I think I've read all the right books and gone to all the right conferences, but I've not found what they refer to'.

She was in her sixties, and I would have thought a godly and noble human being. She certainly exhibits fruit of the Spirit I find lacking in myself. And yet, she felt there was something missing; the way her family talks has increased her worry. She said 'Do you think God hides from some of us? It seems like that to me'.

Well, Jesus seems to be speaking here of a God who selectively conceals and reveals - eluding the wise and learned, and visiting the unlearned. I want to explore those separately.

1. God hides from the wise

First, the idea that God somehow 'hides' from the wise and learned. To be frank, I would find it impossible to think of Jesus as being 'anti-intellectual'. Like every good Israelite he believed the first and greatest commandment was to love God with heart, mind and soul and strength; that is, not with a part of oneself, but with all the faculties. In the only reference to his childhood we're told the young Jesus was inquisitive and precocious, dawdling in the place where the learned people met, to ply them with questions.

So, if he wasn't anti-intellectual, what was he saying in this word about God hiding from the wise and learned? In November I visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), principally to talk with the full-time chaplain, whose name is Scott Paradise. Scott has been an Anglican priest for thirty-eight years, and has spent all that time in chaplaincy of one kind or another: industrial, urban and campus. He is in his early sixties, and into his fourteenth year at M.I.T.

M.I.T. is arguably one of the biggest concentrations of 'brains' anywhere in the world. It has about ten thousand students, and a similar number of staff and faculty, many of whom are engaged in full-time research. Most of the students would have been in the top five percent at their secondary schools.

I asked Scott Paradise if he could say in a word or a phrase how he saw his role in the place. 'I am the priest of one religion', he said, 'in the temple of another'. That wasn't said with any malice, although he does talk a lot about the need for 'repentance'! He drew my attention to the chapel. M.I.T. has built this modest circular structure as a concession to religion, with no windows and surrounded by a moat! More than once the chaplain has been told by his friends that religion and its functionaries do not belong in such a place.

So what is the other 'religion'? He says it is 'scientism' - the belief that nothing has any validity if it can't be dissected by the rational, empirical methods of science, and that science itself is unambiguously beneficial to humanity.

On this note, there was a curious illustration in The Melbourne Times last month (26/2/92, p. 6). It was in the article about neurochemical research into schizophrenia, at the Royal Park psychiatric hospital. That was encouraging, but it contained some odd remarks attributed to the head of the neurochemistry unit.

He was reported to have said that schizophrenia was basically an inability to separate the real world from the fantasy world; also that it was a condition from which many people could suffer. So far, so good. He then proceeded to say, 'If you want to be extremely provocative about it, you could say that religion is a delusion. There's no factual proof for any of it; it's only real because so many people believe it. If only a few people believe in it, it becomes a cult, and if only one person believes in it, and no one else, they are deluded. You can argue that it's only a matter of degree'.

Neither, one might add, can one prove by the rational, empirical methods of science that anything is true or beautiful or good in the realms of aesthetics and morality. Perhaps God does hide from some of the wise and learned.

2. God comes to the ‘unlearned’

The other side of the picture is this idea that God comes to the ‘unlearned’. The Greek word here is nepios, the primary meaning of which is 'child' or 'baby'. But with, I think, one exception it's always used in the Christian scriptures in a metaphorical sense - of adults who are uninformed or 'unlearned', as we have here. It's also used in a somewhat negative way, though, as we say of someone 'He's dreadfully immature for his age' or 'She always seems to behave so childishly'.

So, its meaning is a bit different from those other words translated 'child' or 'little child', such as when Jesus says 'Except you become as a little child'. In fact, the way it is used, nepios almost conveys a meaning like that wonderful Yiddish word shlemiel. So, what's a 'shlemiel'? A 'shlemiel' is someone who is regarded as a bit of an oddity: a clumsy, naive person.

Assuming those gospel writers, who wrote in Greek, got Jesus' meaning more or less correctly, do you see what this may be suggesting? It seems to be saying that the Eternal may sneak 'incognito and covert' into the lives of those who don't too much mind being considered shlemiels.

The question, of course, is what this might mean for people like us. If we were to try to put it in some positive form of words, maybe it would run along these lines: that when you and I are not too fussed about how we look to others, perhaps even being thought a little 'naive', then the one who hides from the wise and the learned has a way of entering in.

Remember the woman who asked, 'Do you think God hides from some of us?' I said, 'Perhaps. Perhaps also we look in the wrong places and in the wrong ways. There's another possibility: that when God sneaks up on us, we just don't recognise that it is God.' I went on to suggest that what we may need is a kind of 'holy naivete'.

'What do you mean?' she said. 'Isn't naivete something we try to outgrow?' I pointed out that the French 'naïve' comes from Latin 'nativum', meaning 'native' or 'natural'. In its basic sense, to be naive means to retain (or to recover, it we've mislaid it) something which is at the core of our nature - like a baby knowing where its mother's breast is, and knowing how to suck.

I want to conclude, but certainly not to close the matter, with three little vignettes, each of which seems to throw a spot of light - from Peter Ustinov, Chet Raymo and Jean Catford. So, who are these people?

Peter Ustinov needs no introduction. He has written a novel in which one of the speaking characters is God. He has God saying things like, 'Of course, I am everywhere and in everything'. Ustinov admits though that, 'Part of the fun and mystery of life is that you don't know, but that there are hints all over the place. We have instinct. I once wrote that a twinge of conscience [my emphasis] is a glimpse of God'. A twinge of conscience ...

Chet Raymo does need a little introduction. He is a physics professor in Boston, and science writer with the Boston Globe. I met him at a faith and science forum in Boston. He told us how he had been inducted into a form of Catholicism that was burdensome and guild-ridden. At Notre Dame, where he did his undergraduate work, this was reinforced. Then he went to the University of California, where a Panamanian atheist Jew(!) liberated him from all this. Strangely, I suspect he was liberated to become truly religious. He says he does not believe all the stuff about God any more. And yet, he says the overwhelming spirit of science is not scepticism, but wonder. I asked if he thought that which elicited wonder in him could indeed be the God he claims no longer to know. The eliciting of wonder ...

Jean Catford also needs a little introduction. She is an elderly member of a congregation where I was guest preacher. Something I said prompted a conversation after the service, when she told me about a childhood moment of 'transportation, which left an indelible effect. In fact, thinking back over the experience prompted her to write a piece of poetry. I realised this was something very special in her pilgrimage, but asked if she was prepared to let me see what she had written. Recently I received it, and also her permission to share it. This is the reflection of an elderly lady on a moment of 'holy naivete'. She calls it 'Early Intimations of Immortality (with apologies to William Wordsworth). I invite you to get inside the soul of a little girl for a moment.

Early Intimations of Immortality

Creeping quietly from the sleeping house,

We children, hand-in-hand,

Ran tiptoe through the shining grass,

To pick the summer flowers.

Translucent shone the morning air,

While the ardent sun on high

Sent warm beams to pulsating earth,

And myriad voices shrilled reply.

Laughing, we ran from flower to flower,

Our fragile harvest culled –

When all at once, the air was stilled;

The insect voices lulled.

Spellbound, I stood in the glowing morn,

Earth transfixed beneath my feet.

For that moment out of time, it seemed

My heart had ceased to beat.

Entranced, in a golden ambience,

From earth’s ‘prision house’ set free.

Was I, a child, in that halcyon moment given

A brief glimpse of eternity?

Perhaps the incognito and covert one will come sneaking quietly into your being this Lenten season – and surprise you with grace and peace and healing!

Reproduced here on the Warragul Uniting Church web site with the permission of the author,
Rev Dr John Bodycomb -2004.