Was Jesus an "atheist" because he taught that God is within you?
Hespeler, 5 June,
2016 © Scott McAndless – Communion, New Members
Psalm 139:1-12, Matthew 6:5-15,
Romans 8:26-27
There
is one very big assumption that lies behind all of our religious and spiritual
practices. It is an assumption that is so taken for granted that I think we
almost forget that it’s there. The assumption is this: we assume that God
exists out there somewhere.
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It
is an assumption that goes with the very idea of existence. Existence, as an
idea, implies existence within a certain space. Now, of course, we may not know
where that “somewhere” is in the case of God. We would actually resist being
very specific about the place where God exists because we’re really not very
sure about that.
People
used to talk about God being “up there,” but I’m not so sure we’re as
comfortable with that phrase anymore. People used to mean it literally. They
actually imagined God as being right up there – just beyond the solid blue dome
of the sky looking down upon us – but we got a little bit too sophisticated (what
with things like space exploration and satellites and such) to think about it that
way anymore. So we tend to be careful not to be too specific about where God is out there, but everything
we do in our religion assumes that God is somewhere.
This
assumption has driven most religious activities for millennia. The things that
human beings do in our temples and our churches – rituals, sacrifices, hymns,
prayers – have all been carefully designed to attract the attention of whatever
deities people have worshipped and to persuade those gods to send their
blessing, salvation and healing our way.
In ancient times this might
have been something as simple as sending the smoke of your offering up into the
sky as this giant beacon to attract God’s attention with both sight and smell.
There are places in the Bible that talk about sacrifices in exactly those
terms. As ancient societies developed, worship practices became more
sophisticated. Some cultures developed musical and dance traditions. The Greeks
invented theater which was, in its origins, a sacred practice that was meant to
earn the favour of the gods with performances. In fact, most forms of art had
their origins in the attempts of humans to get their gods to pay attention. It
is one of the great contributions of religion to human culture. In fact, if
religion never gave us anything more than the music of Mozart and the paintings
of Da Vinci, that would be enough to say that the whole enterprise was
worthwhile.
And
then, of course, there are the prayers that are such an essential part of our
spiritual and religious practices. Prayer is, generally, seen as a way of
communicating with a God who exists somewhere out there. Somehow, it seems, God
is out there monitoring the things that we say – especially when we take on
certain religious postures or enter religious places. When you get on your
knees and clasp your hands and bow your head, it is like you are putting out an
antenna to better transmit your signal. When we enter together into a place
like this and enter into prayer with one another, it is like we are entering
into a broadcasting booth – into the heart of spiritual equipment that has been
designed to boost and amplify signals by joining them all together.
Of
course, one of the other things that we do to get God to notice us is the same
kind of thing that we do in most any social situation. When you want to be
noticed in your social group, what you usually try to do is make sure that you
stand out from the group in some meaningful way. We try to be better or
stronger or wittier or sometimes needier than everyone else and think that that
will get us more attention. Sometimes it even works. When we apply that logic
to our relations to a God who is somewhere else, people often try to get God’s
attention by being better or more righteous or more pious than other people.
This
is how it has always been – how religion has always worked. And it has always
been based on that one key assumption that God exists out there somewhere and
that we need to make contact with God. But what if that assumption – the one
that all religion is built on – is false?
I
know what you’re thinking: that’s blasphemy. That is a denial of God because if
God doesn’t exist somewhere then God
doesn’t exist at all and that is atheism.
Well,
if that is what atheism is, then it might just make Jesus an atheist. Now, of
course, Jesus believed in God – he talked about God and trusting in God all the
time. But Jesus certainly had some very interesting ideas about how we were
supposed to connect with that God. In particular he had some very strong ideas
about religious practices and especially about prayer.
Jesus
taught his disciples, “whenever
you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the
synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly
I tell you, they have received their reward.” Now, part of what Jesus is saying there is that he really has no
patience with people who use external displays of religiosity and piety as a
way to advance themselves and their standing within the community. This kind of
thing was very common in Jesus’ time and he absolutely found it annoying and
hypocritical.
But there is something more
in this teaching of Jesus than just a disdain of hypocrisy. I mean, yes, Jesus
dislikes how people are more interested in impressing other people than they
are in connecting with God, but he seems to be equally concerned that the God that
they are looking to connect with is not where they think God is. God is not out
there but rather in here. God is not in public but rather in secret. So Jesus
goes on to say, “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and
pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will
reward you.”
The God that Jesus is talking about here is
completely different from the general concept of God that is and has been
common throughout most of human history. Now, that is not to say that Jesus is
the first or indeed the only one to conceive of God this way. The God that
Jesus is talking about is the same God who is described in the Psalm that we
read this morning. In it the Psalmist fantasizes about going somewhere to
escape the presence of God and discovers, somewhat to his surprise, that there
isn’t any such place: “If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my
bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at
the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your
right hand shall hold me fast.”
What he is describing here
are the limits of the entire universe as they were understood at that time.
They saw everything that existed as a three-tiered universe – like a three
layer cake with heaven on top, the earth in the middle and Sheol or the place
of the dead underneath. They thought that the universe began in the place where
the sun rose in the morning in the east and ended where it went down in the sea
to the west. So the author is imagining an impossible journey to the extreme
limits of the universe as he sees it.
If we were to map what this
Psalm is saying onto our modern understanding of the limits of the universe we
would have to say something like, “If I
descend into the black hole that is at the centre of the Milky Way you are
there; if I travel to the edge of the galaxy at the farthest end of the
universe, you are there. If I travel back in time to the moment of the Big Bang
or move ahead to watch the last light in the universe go out, even there your
hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” The picture is
very clearly of a God who is present in every conceivable corner, and a number
of inconceivable corners, of the known and unknown universe.
Think of it this way: God
is not merely a being who exists somewhere. God is being itself. Even better,
God is the source of all being – the very foundation of all existence.
So the notion that God, rather than merely
being someplace, is actually everyplace is certainly older than the time of
Jesus. But it seems to me that Jesus, displaying a unique understanding of the
true nature of God, finally explained to us the true implications of such a
concept of God.
Jesus is explaining
in this passage that communication with the divine is simply not what we have
always assumed. Most especially, it is not communication with some external
being who communicates with us from a distance. The God we worship doesn’t need
our religious practices and prayers in the traditional way that we have thought
of them because God is not at a distance from us.
So
Jesus rightly says that when you have a need or a request or a concern, you don’t
need to tell God about it because God isn’t someplace else looking on while you
try and explain to him what you need. If God is to be found everywhere, then
God is to be found within you. In fact, Jesus is saying, God already knows what
you need and what is really bothering you far better than you do.
Of
course, you may ask, if God is really that present within you, then why pray at
all? That is a very good question. The fact of the matter is that God doesn’t
need our prayers. For that matter, God doesn’t need any of our religion. Does
God need our praise? Does God need us to say, “How great thou art?” Of course
not, God already knows how great God art. God doesn’t need any of it. So why do
we do it? We do it because we need it – in fact, we need it desperately.
We
need to pray, not to fill God in on what is going on, but because we need to
verbalize the things that we struggle with. We need to come to terms with them
so that healing can begin. And sometimes, when we don’t have the words for what
we need and all we can do is groan in our pain or grief, we need to do that.
But God is not some distant and detached observer as we do that. When we are in
that prayer, God enters into the words or the griefs or the feelings with us.
That’s what Paul means when he writes, “we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
So
more than anything, prayer, like many of the spiritual or religious practices
that we engage in, is about opening ourselves up to the God who is already
present with us in our longings, fears and woundedness. It is about making
ourselves aware that we are not alone in what we face.
I
do believe that God hears and answers our prayers. I do believe that God does
heal us when healing is what we need (though, of course, healing can take many
forms and we may not always get the kind of healing that we think that we
need). But what I don’t believe is that God does any of this as some external
being who is separated from us by time and space. God is not some being hanging
around on some cloud somewhere who occasionally tunes into our prayers and,
when he feels like it, decides to send some miracle in our direction. That is
not the God that Jesus believed in. That is not the God that Paul worshipped.
Nor is it the God that the writer of Psalm 139 discovered to his amazement.
But
it is the God that most human beings throughout most of human history have
imagined themselves dealing with. I think that we are increasingly finding
ourselves in an age, however, where such a concept of God will no longer work
for many people.
But
that is okay, because we can see God in a radically different way – the way
that Jesus actually spoke of his father in heaven. We have a God who doesn’t
need to exist in any particular place – a God who we can just know is with us.
That was all that ever really mattered.
Let this concept of God challenge
the way that you pray and transform the ways that you practice your
spirituality. Let it set you free. I know many people who tell me that they are
afraid to pray or to try out other spiritual practices such as meditation or
contemplation because they are worried that they will not do it right. Be
reassured that there is no right way of doing such things because God is not
watching you from some distance judging the quality of your prayers. God is
within you participating in your prayers and that is what makes them worthy.
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