It’s Ascension Day! Here’s a new hymn that everyone should learn. I do love the Ascension, as every Christian should. It’s so astonishing that the Son would become incarnate in Jesus, joining humanity into the Godhead, suffer and die on our behalf, and then ascend bodily into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father, interceding for every single Christian who might be desperate enough to pray. I like to imagine him leaning forward in his chair, chin in hand, listening to each beleaguered believer pleading, grumbling, mumbling for help.
Unlike every other kind of human listener, he actually understands what you are trying to say. He understands both the words themselves, and their intent. Those two things, of course, should not be split apart from each other—the word spoken and the intention of the word spoken—just like the body and the soul shouldn’t be divided. Though so often they are. So often what you are saying or trying to say is not fully integrated, as it were, in the ear of the listener, or even in your own mind. Like, here I am trying to describe something with words, and I can’t quite capture it, and you might not understand.
If I could change one thing about Christians today, it would be the habit so many of us have of projecting our own feelings about the inadequacy of human speech into the heavens. We have a hard time with communication, but God does not have a hard time. We have a difficult time understanding each other, but God doesn’t. What we say is subject to futility and frustration, but God’s Word never returns to him empty. The person (I’m speaking from personal experience here) who really begins to believe that God is able to communicate clearly and perspicaciously will suffer a quiet transformation of the spirit that gradually spills out into all areas of life in an integrating and wholistic kind of way—just to employ the beloved jargon of the day. If you think that God has the ability to communicate through his Word and Holy Spirit, you’re going to read the Bible with a different kind of spiritual posture, and your subjective experience of the text is going to change, in a good way.
Likewise, if you think that God is just trying really hard but, like you, sometimes has a difficult time getting his point across, or really wants to do stuff but can’t unless you help him—in the When Bad Things Happen To Good People vein…what was that guy’s name?—you’re going to find more and more confusion and wroth work itself into your daily life. Anxiety and anger, in other words, arise from the belief that God isn’t strong enough or able enough to communicate or do anything.
But that anxiety masquerades as confidence in the “truth” of not knowing things. Don’t be so arrogant, this idea goes, as to “know” what God says about anything. If you’ve come up against this way of thinking, you’ll know that it has the appearance of kindness and even surety. Underneath, though, is real anger, because God needs help. And a god that needs help isn’t God, it’s a devouring idol. Deconstruction—taking things apart in the hopes that they can be fit together again in a subjectively preferable order—promises relief from existential anxiety, but it actually makes God small, malleable, and infuriating.
Whereas, Jesus is sitting at the right hand of the Father, listening to you this very moment. He knows you. He knows what you’re trying to say. He knows what you need. He knows how to take care of you. He knows what to give and what to take away. He has the power to help you make sense of your own life. What you have to do, as you pray, is crouch there, in the poverty of your spirit, and let him see it all (since he does anyway) and know it all (since he does already). You have to trust him to sort things out in his own way, to answer all your requests according to his own goodness. You can’t be in charge of any of it. You can’t control his speech, or control him. You can only ask.
But what an “only.” The God who spoke the heavens and the earth into existence, who knew you in the darkness of your mother’s womb, who came on purpose to rescue you from the power of sin and death, is sitting and listening to all of the things you have on your heart, and troubling your conscience, and hurting your body, and poisoning your mind. God—the Word made Flesh—has the inclination and the power to make sense of what you, in your broken poverty, might want to say.
So, seriously, why wouldn’t you pray? Especially today, why wouldn’t you?
Have a nice Ascension Day!
Wonderful, Anne. Encouraging, truthful. Really a wonder!
This attitude:
“Don’t be so arrogant, this idea goes, as to ‘know’ what God says about anything.”
is endlessly annoying to me, infuriating. Usually I encounter it in rebels whose lives run directly counter to God’s revealed will. And God’s supposed incapacity for communication has become a handy dodge for them.