God’s Language

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My little son is learning to talk. It’s a miraculous, exciting, frustrating, fascinating process. Some words he repeats over and over like mantras, perhaps to reassure himself – the names he uses for me and his father, and other especially beloved words too, ‘sheep’, ‘party’, ‘milk’. Others he uses like klaxons, to signal urgent needs: ‘down’, ‘cuddle’, ‘snack’. I empathise with his frustration when we can’t quite make out what he means, or when tiredness and hunger cause his words to fail him. I delight in watching him understand what we say to him, whether that’s following an instruction or just getting excited when I point out a dog. I love watching all this, and I love the feeling that he is revealing himself to us, little by little, in what he chooses to communicate.

Communication is such a basic part of what it means to be human beings. And yet when it comes to communication with God, we can often feel like frustrated toddlers, our vocabulary not far enough advanced to be understood, and our pleas unheard. For all that we know intellectually that God is always reaching towards us in love, wanting to be understood, it doesn’t always feel like that.

In our reading from Genesis, we see three very different forms of communication, God trying several different techniques for getting the message of his promise and faithfulness to Abram through. First, God uses plain words: ‘Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’ But Abram is weighed down with anxieties about the future of his family in an uncertain and hostile territory. He immediately responds to this reassurance with contradiction and doubt: ‘You have given me no offspring.’

So God tries a different technique: a visual demonstration of God’s power and mercy, opening Abram’s eyes to the beauty and abundance of creation in the myriad stars that cover Abram like a canopy – if God can create the infinite beauty of the cosmos, then a little matter like founding a lineage shouldn’t be beyond him. And this message gets through, at least for a while: ‘[Abram] believed the LORD, and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.’

But when another promise is made, a promise that Abram will possess the land, again that anxious questioning, ‘How am I to know that I shall possess it?’ And God responds in a strange and awesome way, by instructing Abram to bring him a number of animals to sacrifice. God’s reassurance to Abram in this third iteration goes beyond words and beyond visual imagery: it’s a reassurance of God’s very presence with Abram. The cutting of the animals in two representing the two parties to the covenant, and God’s assent to the covenant signalled in the smoking fire pot and the flaming torch. But God’s unmediated presence is only bearable to Abram if it comes to him in fierce darkness and through deep sleep. This promise, this reassurance, this covenant, is deeper and more terrifying than anything that God is protecting Abram from.

Throughout the Bible, when God seeks to communicate with God’s people, messengers are employed in the form of the prophets. In our gospel reading from Luke, Jesus seems to identify himself as one of the prophets, looking forward to his own death in Jerusalem as one of the prophets: ‘It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ The gift of prophecy is rarely associated with messages of gentleness and reassurance in our minds, and perhaps this is natural. After all, the books of the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah have plenty of instances of calls to repentance and lamenting the waywardness of the people of Israel. John the Baptist, that great New Testament prophet, addresses the Pharisees as ‘you brood of vipers’, not exactly a warm welcome.

And yet our view of prophecy in the Christian tradition is, I think, too much shaped by the legacy of Greek tragedy. The figure of Cassandra, always foretelling doom and never heeded, or the mystical oracles from the prophetess at Delphi, only ever understood when dramatic irony has run its course and it is too late – these are what we think of as prophecy. But the prophetic messages that come from our God are not tricks or puzzles, but simply and straightforwardly the proclamation of God’s love and desire for us. They are primarily a forthtelling, not a foretelling. Sometimes, because of our sinfulness, they are hard to hear. Sometimes, like Abram, we are in danger of being overwhelmed by them. Sometimes, they carry deep mysteries that we can only know in part. But they always point us towards God.

So when Jesus says ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,’ this points to God, to God’s nature. These words are a forthtelling, a prophetic communication. They show us that God is our mother as well as our father. As Julian of Norwich wrote in the Revelations of Divine Love, ‘It is a characteristic of God to overcome evil with good. Jesus Christ therefore, who himself overcame evil with good, is our true Mother. We received our ‘Being’ from Him ­ and this is where His Maternity starts ­ And with it comes the gentle Protection and Guard of Love which will never ceases to surround us.’ (Rev. LIX) God deeply desires us to come under this protection, to believe God’s promises as Abram did, to come as little clueless chicks into the fierce darkness of God’s enveloping love.

And when these words of Jesus’ failed, as he knew they would, he found another way to communicate with us. When we would not come under the protection of his wings by invitation, he stretched out his arms so wide that the whole world was perforce encompassed by that love. Under the shadow of his wings, in the shadow of the cross, we experience the motherhood of God, and know ourselves to be beloved children, just beginning to learn this language of love. Amen.