Why is God so strange in the Sacred Scriptures? How does God reveal this strangeness to us and what can it show us about how we live out our faith today?
It was a strange God that encountered Moses from within the Burning Bush in the desert. This theophany, commonly believed to be on Mount Sinai (also known as Mount Horeb) is traditionally located on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. It was because of this strange God that Moses led 12 gangs of foreign migrant workers on a journey to a new land. Here they would build a new society where the alien and the powerless, the widow and the orphan, would be at the centre of the state’s organisation.
That vision, which is always easily lost, then and now, is renewed again, and again, by the prophets, and from Jesus down to Pope Leo XIV. Every year in every Passover and Easter we deliberately retell the story so as not to forget. We are called back to its core radical values in new and different times. At the heart of this retelling is the memory of God’s revelation to Moses that “I am who I am”, or “I will be who I will be”, or even “I will be where I will be.” In other words: “I will always be more than you can ever envisage, define or imagine.
The theme of strangeness continually appears in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. There the strange figure of Melchisedek who has “no beginning of days or end of life” and is a foreigner, of a strange religion, who offers bread and wine to the journeying Abram and Sarai in Genesis 14. Melchisedek probably represents an eternal priesthood that predates the model of Levitical priesthood. Then later, the seemingly impossible occurs to aged Abraham and barren Sarah – the birth of their son Isaac and the creation of a new people.
In the New Testament, the strange God comes closer still as a child from this same liberated people, who once again, are oppressed. But who is it that recognises the strange Divine presence? Three men from the East, men of colour, of strange languages and skills, and even stranger religions. So the revelation of the Divine presence within, can come at any time and often, with the help of the outsider. We see this with the prophet Jonah, ridiculed for his lack of belief and obedience who is saved by the repentance of the Ninevites from the heart of the enemy capital of Assyria. They have more faith in Jonah’s God than he does. We find that the stranger is able to open up God’s world if they are given the space to be themselves in our midst, and when we recognise their place in the Kingdom of God all around us.
In Mark’s Gospel (7:24-29) it is a stranger and Greek speaking Gentile, the Syro-Phoenician woman who provokes Jesus to open his message of the Kingdom beyond the borders of a possibly reformed Israel into an unsuspecting world. In John’s Gospel, chapter 4, it is a Samaritan woman, a stranger at a well and an enemy of God’s Chosen Ones, who shares the message of the waters of life with her whole town. The Samaritans then come to believe in a Gospel that is not limited by Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim where they currently worship or indeed any holy place, church and basilica. The good news of liberation, Jesus says, will eventually happen wherever men and women gather in spirit and truth. This is something Paul the Pharisee eventually understands as part of his own strange conversion and in the strangeness of the Cross. If God can be encountered in that darkest of places – then there is no place God cannot be. All special claims of holy shrines and spaces, holy times and holy festivals, holy people and priests are relativised, and now the ordinary becomes the place of encounter with the sacred – it is the place of the holy. “Heaven in ordinary” as the poet George Herbert wrote.
Yet the risen Jesus continues to be a stranger to his disciples and companions. They do not immediately recognise him despite their following him while alive. He comes among them opening a new perspective that was not anticipated. And which can only be encountered when Jesus, the stranger, has been accepted and welcomed. Since it is only when the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) invite the stranger – who they have been debating with – to share their meal that his real identity is revealed.
The Scriptures show us that the prophetic imagination calls us across the ages to remember. Throughout history and amid all peoples, the strange God continues to provoke us to see, think and worship.
The early Christians saw themselves as displaced persons and perpetual pilgrims. So much so that they called themselves parakoi or “strangers and exiles in this world”. This identification with the stranger and the migrant is at the heart of Judaism and Christianity, rooted in their very identities. The memory of this identity remains to be re-evoked, re-lived and re-discovered in every age. It is at the heart of our daily Eucharist – the communion feast of the pilgrim people of God.
God’s otherness – his transcendent nature and atypical methods challenge our conventional understanding of love, power and justice and in this way question the very social and religious order we have constructed. What we see throughout Scripture is that God regularly subverts our usual expectations. Instead of arriving in triumphant glory, God came to earth in the vulnerability of a manger and brought salvation through the senseless, violent suffering of the Cross.
Isaiah 55:8-9 explains God’s logic clearly –
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
The God that Christians worship is therefore, both the strange God of the desert that first called Abraham, and the God whose Spirit blows where and through whom she wills. If in our communities there is no stranger within, if the outsider and the powerless are not welcome or remembered in our prayer and active charity, then the God called on in such gatherings is not strange at all. It becomes an idol, a self-made image, of the old dispensation before Moses spoke the strange name of God. In all three Abrahamic faiths, God is the creator of all history rather than of our particular and national myths. It is the strangeness of this God which continues to offer us all the Way, the Truth and the Life.
Fleur Dorrell.
In this article, Fleur Dorrell explores some of the literary devices and biblical themes in the book of Tobit.
