The Mediation of Our Senses – Br. Keith Nelson
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Br. Keith Nelson
When your mind’s eye creates a picture of God, how does God appear to you? As a kind-faced Galilean rabbi; or a stern European monarch; as brilliant as the sun; or like the dark shimmer of the ocean under moonlight?
When your mind’s ear hears the voice of God, how does that voice sound? Is it a rich, resonant bass, or a liquid, silvery soprano?
When your mind’s flesh knows the touch of God, how does it feel? Is it soft and warm as a knowing hand’s caress? Or have you perhaps felt, like the prophet Jeremiah, something like “a fire shut up inside your bones”? (Jeremiah 20:9).
Maybe God smells like fresh coffee or frankincense or the dirt in your garden. Maybe God tastes like the wine of Holy Communion or … a Werther’s Original stashed away in your grandmother’s purse?
Suffice it to say that without these and a kaleidoscope of other sense impressions, God would be much less real to us. The Sacred must meet us in and through some mediating experience, some access point for our human faculties. Even if we meet the sacred in the gentle laying aside of words and images, that persistent return to a glance, a breath, a posture keeps the compass needle of the soul aligned with its true north.
In the fourth century, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria wrote about Jesus: “He came to center our senses in himself.”
In today’s passage from John, we encounter a circle of Judean authorities with stones in their hands, pushed to the limit of their patience and their understanding. There are time-honored rules governing how God makes Godself known, in the world and to God’s covenant people, Israel. In this world, God may well look, sound, and feel like a human being – but these comparisons are limited to the realm of metaphor. A human being cannot “make themselves” God, however many good works follow them.
It is important to remember that this is an intra-Jewish conversation. Jesus, a faithful Jew, frames his counterargument by quoting Psalm 82: “I say, ‘You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High’” (Psalm 82:6). How can they object when Jesus uses the more modest phrase “Son of God”?
What is Jesus getting at?
Ancient rabbis debated the identity of these “gods” (elohim). Their interpretations, or midrash, were concerned with naming the ways God’s presence was mediated to the faithful. To stand before a judge of Israel was, by extension, to stand before God the divine Judge – and obey the verdict. To receive the Law revealed to Moses on Sinai and to gaze upon his shining face was, by extension, to gaze upon God’s face – so they put a veil on Moses. God invests these mediators with some measure of God’s authority: “I say, ‘You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High’” (Psalm 82:6).
But the psalm continues: “Nevertheless you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince” (Psalm 82:7). Although Jesus doesn’t quote the next verse of the psalm, the context it provides is implicit: these “gods” (lowercase g) are not the one God, the one source of Life.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus “has life in himself.” The Gospel’s author and the Johannine community found in Jesus a categorically new mediator of God’s presence in the world. In John 6, Jesus says: “Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, and they died; this is the bread that has come down from heaven, which someone might eat of and not die” (John 6:49-50).
We are blessed to live in a world where many good things mediate God’s holiness to us. We are also prone to turn those blessings into distractions, and all of them will one day fade, fall, or fail. Jesus came to “center our senses in himself.” In him, we find access to God now and always.