No Nonsense about God 4: The Passion of God

Originally this final sermon of the series was going to be called “The pain of God”, but I have widened it out to “The Passion of God” instead. The word “passion” has a double meaning. Commonly it refers to any strong feeling, whether of love or desire, delight or enthusiasm; or more hostile passions like anger or indignation; and then there is its more technical sense, which we use in talking of Passiontide and the Passion of Christ – the sense of “suffering. Why change the title? First, because today is the beginning of Passiontide; and, secondly, because I want to affirm that God is in both these senses a passionate God. God shows strong feelings; and God suffers.

Yet, in the traditional teaching of the church, both these ideas have been firmly opposed. The church of the third century A.D. said it was a heresy (called “patripassianism”) to say that God the Father could suffer. And the very first of the Church of England’s 39 Articles of Religion says God is “without body, parts, or passions”. We can understand why they wanted to say God had no body or parts, whatever they are: but no passions? This idea came into Christianity from the philosophy of ancient Greece: of God as immutable, inscrutable, and fundamentally detached – as opposed to the Hebrew God, who was always highly passionate. But it was the dispassionate God who won the day, so we’re on shaky ground if we speak of a God who feels passion and pain. Yet how can this be denied?

Let’s begin by looking at ourselves, at human beings. We are passionate people: passion is, as they say, wired into our make-up. Of course these passions can be distorted, perverted, misdirected: love can be perverted into lust, enthusiasm into obsession, anger into hate. But the original passions are good and admirable, and indeed necessary. The human race needs to feel love and desire, longing and delight, anger and indignation, for how else could we create and procreate? how else could we bring the future to birth? how else could we strive for justice and oppose evil?
Now some religions, indeed some forms of Christianity, aim to achieve detachment from the world and its passions. But that has never been the hallmark of authentic Christianity: Christians have always been called to embrace passion, and, when necessary, suffering; which is why the church has always celebrated martyrdom as the highest form of Christian witness.
But if we are fundamentally passionate beings, how could God, in whose image we are created, not also be passionate? And if passion is a good thing, how can God be missing out on it? – for God is the source of all good. Is it not the Spirit of God who arouses passion in us, and drives us out into the wilderness of suffering? And again, as far as Christian ministry is concerned, how on earth could we show love without passion? That would be a poor, watery sort of ministry, and probably also feel very patronising. But doesn’t the same apply to God? Can his love possibly be watery and patronising?

Next let’s look beyond ourselves at those who have stood out as God’s witnesses down the ages: the prophets, the apostles, and all who have witnessed to Christ up to the present. All have been passionate people. Look at Moses, Elijah, Hosea – none of them exactly calm or detached in their preaching of God’s word. Above all look at Jeremiah, whose calling as a prophet causes him constant pain: he seems always to be crying out Why, why? why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable? and sometimes we lose track of whether the pain belongs to Jeremiah, or to the God on whose behalf he speaks.
Then consider the apostles: for Peter (or whoever wrote his first letter) glory and suffering are always intertwined, as indeed they were in Peter’s life; and as for Paul! again and again he depicts the apostolic life as a calling to passionate suffering, as in 2 Corinthians 4: “afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible”; or at the end of Galatians, where he says “I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body”.
And then there’s the array of other saints down the centuries until today. Look at St Francis – passionate about the poor, passionate about creation, passionate in his own poverty and suffering. Or St Teresa (either of them will do), in love with Christ to the point of agony. Or all those more recently who have been valiant for truth and suffered the consequences.
But if these are the saints, the people we describe as “godly”, mustn’t everything about them be a sign of what God is like – including their passion? How can we say that, yes, they show us God, but actually their strongest characteristic has nothing to do with God?

Finally, of course, there is Jesus himself. He is nothing if not passionate: in love with the world, in love with people; hotly indignant when people cannot be their true selves, either through illness or because of the way the world treats them; angry with those who are too self-righteous to allow others into God’s kingdom. All this leads to the “Passion” itself, when the vicarious pain he has always felt on behalf of the world is made explicit as he is lifted up on the cross. But what is happening here? Do we see a passionate Son being sacrificed to a dispassionate Father? If so, (a) we are splitting up the godhead in a quite improper way, because orthodox theology always insists, as in the fourth gospel, that Christ and the Father are one; and (b) we get something even worse than last week’s picture of an angry old uncle demanding blood – a serene, detached, unfeeling God calmly accepting the agonising but horrendous sacrifice.
None of this will do. The godhead cannot be divided like this: if the Son suffers, it is because the Father suffers. On the cross we see, not the Son being sacrificed to the Father, but the Father, at one with the Son, bearing the pain of the world: the Father and the Son going through the Passion together, experiencing together the sin, and the pain, of all humanity, of all creation.

Anyway, how could the Creator create without passion, without pain? All artists feel pain as they mould their materials together, as they hold irreconcilable things in tension, as they make something out of nothing, as they risk everything in order to create, and then as they have to let go of what they have created. In more than one passage of scripture God is likened to a mother, painfully bringing creation to birth: is it the whole creation, as Paul says in Romans 8, which “groans and travails” as it comes to birth: or is it actually God? I will finish by quoting again some verses of W.H. Vanstone’s hymn, which we have just sung:

Open are the gifts of God,
gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony,
love’s endeavour, love’s expense.
Drained is love in making full
bound in setting others free,
poor in making many rich,
weak in giving power to be.
Therefore he who shows us God
helpless hangs upon the tree;
and the nails and crown of thorns
tell of what God’s love must be.

Amen.