The theological tradition of most of my life is obsessed with the size of God. Often we were called to revere God for their sheer vastness; to recognize the presence of God in the grandest natural landscapes; and to find our love for God by virtue of their incredible creative power.
There's something to be said for recognizing the scope of God, for considering what it means that God is omnipresent. It's necessary to consider our concept of God as the power that compelled all things into existence. It's worthwhile to contemplate the significance of God's presence across the span of existence and outside of the constraints of our conception of time.
It may be useful to consider God on this scale, but it's extremely hard to find anything relatable about a god of this size, strength and power. The theological tradition of my life has too often attempted to compel me to feel personally connected to God by virtue of this vastness. The thinking has been that recognizing the unfathomable nature of God will somehow lead me to want to personally connect.
Which is ludicrous, of course. Imagine the awe you feel looking out from some great height at a vast landscape - a towering series of mountain peaks, an immeasurably wide valley, a deep circuitous canyon. You are in awe of the scale of it, of the landscapes grand presence. You look over and over it trying to fathom the vastness.
But it's not until you've drawn near to the landscape that you truly appreciate it's character. When you've climbed its mountains, wandering through shady copses and stepping over icy creeks, hiked under the imposing walls of its canyons, you're immersed in the beauty and diversity of it. You are in awe of its scale when you consider it wholly, but what you love about the landscape is what you can touch, feel, and discover.
God is like a landscape in this way, and it strikes me that the dominant theological traditions in America are terrible at remembering the importance of this truth. In Christian theology, Jesus is the manifestation of God on earth. He represents the character of God in ways that we can see and touch and hear; in ways we can directly relate. The stories of Jesus show us a man who is humble by nature; who resists powerful institutions and their dogmatism; who is attracted to (and attractive to) the marginalized members of society - the dirty ones, the forsaken ones, the shamed ones, the forgotten ones.
This man who is God's ambassador among us is ultimately destroyed by the institutions of power around him. The religious powers and the governmental authorities conspire to eliminate him. They bring their considerable power to bear to destroy a peaceful, humble preacher of love because his very gentleness and inclusiveness is a threat to their influence. Somehow the smallness of Jesus - his minor position as one man with no political power or wealth or influence - is such a threat the authorities of society that they feel the need to murder him.
Consider the truth that God's greatest interaction with humanity is through the small, short-lived, minor presence of the man called Jesus. Meaning that the thing that draws people to God is not God's grandiosity; not God's unfathomable scale and authority; not God's immeasurable breadth, depth and height; not God's presence as a being of uncertain substance that sits outside of human time and thought and rules by impenetrable and unimpeachable justice. We're not drawn to a God so unrelatable as all that. We're drawn to a common man who seeks justice by loving those who society has deemed unlovable. We're drawn to a person of such fervent love and mercy that his very presence among us is a threat to the powers that be.
