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| Painting from St. Mary's Chapel, Wautoma, Wisconsin |
To read the biblical narratives is to encounter a
God who is, first of all, love (1 John 4:8). Love involves a willingness to put
oneself at risk, and God is in fact vulnerable in love, vulnerable even to
great suffering. God’s self-revelation is Jesus Christ, and, as readers
encounter him in the biblical stories, he wanders with nowhere to place his
head, washes the feet of his disciples like a servant, and suffers and dies on
a cross–condemned by the authorities of his time, undergoing great pain,
“despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with
infirmity” (Isaiah 53:3). Just this Jesus is the human face of God, not merely
a messenger or a prophet but God’s own self come as self-revelation to
humankind. If God becomes human in just this way, moreover, then that tells us
something of how we might seek our own fullest humanity–not in quests of power
and wealth and fame but in service, solidarity with the despised and rejected,
and willingness to be vulnerable in love.
– ‘Narratives of a Vulnerable God’
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