Finding Jesus in the Storm by John Swinton

Author:John Swinton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

When God Goes Missing

Colwell’s assertion that the absence of God may be spiritually normative is evocative, provocative, and slightly disturbing. At points in the lament psalms, the psalmist seems to resign himself to living into the fact of God’s absence. So, when in Psalm 88 the psalmist says, “Darkness is my only companion,” he seems to be articulating a kind of holy resignation that God is not going to rescue him. The darkness that he feels at this moment is not going to be lifted. How he is now is just the way things are. There is no recognition in this psalm of God’s presence, and no recognition of the psalmist feeling God’s unending hesed. There is only darkness, only lostness, only hopelessness. However, we should not mistake the psalmist’s desolate cry for a cry of unbelief. Psalm 88 is a prayer to the living God, not a scream into the emptiness of the void. It is a prayer that bears witness to a God who is both very present and very absent. David knows exactly what that feels like: “There’s some comfort in reading the psalms, because the psalmist talks about that distance from God. He annoyingly talks about the presence of God, and I can’t really figure that out. But then again, in Scripture, the writers talk about being depressed, they talk about feeling completely alone and apart from God. I kind of go through a very prolonged version of that. I ask where God is, but he doesn’t seem to have much to say.” This is indeed an odd paradox. Like Jesus’s cry of desolation, even this profound statement proclaiming God’s absence is spoken with the assumption of God’s presence. If this were not the case, both the psalmist’s and Jesus’s words would be pointless. The resurrection helps us realize that Jesus’s words were neither meaningless nor pointless. Rather, and with a deep strangeness, his cry of desolation indicates that feelings of abandonment are not alien to being in the presence of God. God’s absence may well be a rather disturbing dimension of God’s presence.

Kathryn Greene-McCreight draws our attention to the words of Isaiah 45:15: “Truly you are a God who has been hiding himself, the God and Savior of Israel”: “Even here, Isaiah does not say, ‘Truly he is a God that hides himself.’ Isaiah addresses God directly, even in God’s apparent absence. He acknowledges that this absent God is still his own God and the God of his people. And Isaiah acknowledges that God is Savior, even in hiding. Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.”19 The theologian and preacher Fleming Rutledge notes that “the fact that God hides himself in the midst of revealing himself is paradoxically a testimony to his reality. Presence-in-absence is the theme of his self-disclosure. God isn’t hidden because we are too stupid to find him, or too lazy, or not ‘spiritual’ enough. He hides himself for his own reasons, and he reveals himself for his own reasons.

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