God’s Mattering for Us, Our Mattering for God
Saturday, 21 December 2024
| Matthew Tan
In this time of waiting till the great feast of Christmas, it’s tempting to be drawn in by the barrage of advertisements luring us into a shopping frenzy. But as God’s people we are reminded of that most basic Scriptural narrative: God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son (John 3:16), and in his Son the whole universe obtains salvation.
For many, however, this basic biblical truth might ring hollow.
‘Maybe God so loved the world’, they might quietly protest. ‘But what about me? Where is the evidence of this cosmic transformation in the grains of my own experience? Or is this concern for salvation in the particularities of my own life a narcissistic concern for things that don’t really matter in the greater scheme of things?’
In the face of this ruminating, some Christians might even ask, ‘Do I only matter to God when I am dead? Will I only begin to be of significance when my earthly existence ends?’
I know because I was one of those Christians.
It’s easy to think of ourselves as the recipient of God’s transformative power when times are good or when this power is demonstrated in extraordinary circumstances. Such times, however, are rare; in contrast, the experience of disappointment or even trauma can feel like more of a common, and thus more ironclad, experience of life. And so we might wonder if we can ever be the specific recipient of anything except the Cross, and whether any specific consolation is the reserve for anyone in particular. The author and podcaster Hope Johnson frames this sense in a more biblical mode: invoking Malachi 1:2, she suggests we can find ourselves in the position of those who hear God saying, ‘I have loved you’, with the accusatory question, ‘but how have you loved us’?
We can be tempted to think that God’s salvation and mercy are the special reserve of more ‘universal’, and thus more important, things like ‘creation’ or ‘humankind’, and not of any human in particular (let alone me). After all, Isaiah did write that ‘all mankind is grass … the grass withers and the flower wilts’ (Isa 40:8). Therefore, when it comes to God’s work in the world, it almost seems that one’s own life is secondary to the seemingly greater good of all creation, as if the particularities of one’s own existence stand in the way of the universal impact of God’s grace.
What we sense is a deep metaphysical question: does there necessarily have to be a dichotomy between one’s particular circumstances and the transformation of creation in its entirety? To put it in more metaphysical terms: is the particular necessarily separate from and subordinate to the universal?
The political theorist Adrian Pabst suggests that this supposed dichotomy between the universal and the particular is more the result of caricature than actual analysis. Pabst argues that an analysis of Plato’s metaphysics should reveal a deep and complex connection between universals and particulars.
On the one hand, the universals are hierarchically superior to particulars. However, for Plato, these universals are so fertile and rich that they spill over ecstatically into the particular, so that the particular becomes a real manifestation of the universal.
The earliest expressions of the Christian faith grow out of this Platonic foundation. It is what underpins the Christian view of the world and God’s relationship to it. The economy of divine love is not confined to some abstract universal, but will spill over and seep into every fibre of the particular. The key difference between the Christian and the Platonic is that, while the latter says that the universal must spill over into the particular, the former says that God is perfectly free and so does not have to express his love in the particular. However, from the Church Fathers onwards, it has always been the Christian claim that God wants to manifest the divine economy in particular things.
The first creation account in the book of Genesis was meant to show that the God of the Hebrews transcended the particular. And yet, the second creation account that follows shows God’s deep involvement in particulars. Even as he commands from on high the light, the earth and the seas into being (as is the case in the first account), he also bends down to breathe into dust, so that this lowliest of substances might be raised to become the loftiest – a human person. Furthermore, the patriarchs, the prophets and the psalms show time and time again that it was through one particular life that the universality of God’s operations unfold (God lifted up Abraham out of obscurity, a nation out of slavery, a poor man from the dung heap).
A similar dynamic of the universal working in the particular appears in the Gospels. Jesus is the universal sovereign, announcing a Heavenly Kingdom to all, and proposing a path of discipleship for all. But the universal sovereign’s version of salvation also involved stooping down to pick up mud to smear on the eyes of a blind man, lifting a girl out of death, healing a haemorrhage through the hem of his cloak. Even in the passion, one must not forget that it is through the particularity of a wooden cross and the body of a 33-year-old Hebrew that salvation of the whole cosmos came about. Moreover, in each of these savings, we are not only delivered from something, but we also gain something, our status as a child of God. Every particular saving act of God’s also bestows an identity. This logic continues in our sacramental life, especially in the Eucharist, when the universal Lord is fully manifest in a particular piece of bread that is then consumed by a particular body, entering through the gates of an individual’s mouth. In so entering, in the words of one of Augustine’s homilies, we receive who we are.
In the salvific, particulars do matter, and as such, we matter in particular. A God who has an account for ‘every hair on your head’ will not leave the beneficiaries of his grace to something as abstract as a universal, since the universal unfolds itself in the particulars of our existence. Thus, while creation ‘groans in waiting for manifestations of the Son of God’ (Rom 8:19), while we rightfully wait for the salvation of the world, each one also rightfully makes this expectant claim ‘restore me again to health and give me life’ (Isaiah 38:16).
Matthew Tan is the Dean of Studies at Vianney College Seminary, the Wagga Wagga campus of the Catholic Institute of Sydney. He blogs at Awkward Asian Theologian.
Image credit: Man, Light, Night Image by Stewardesign on Pixabay.