+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Live now in utter delight, O Jerusalem, living in complete happiness and satisfaction; for God has removed all your lawless deeds and of necessity has rescued you from the power of the foe, to whom you were subjected in paying the penalty of punishment. The Lord will now be in your midst, showing his kingship by his care for you, so that trouble will no longer be able to approach you.
Thus wrote Theodore of Mopsuestia in his early fifth century commentary on the passage from Zephaniah we heard a few minutes ago. I’ve been interested in this early biblical scholar for many years, perhaps because we in seminary we habitually referred to him by a sobriquet which he certainly would have rejected–Teddy the Mop. In all seriousness, Theodore of Mopsuestia is one of those figures from the patristic era, like Origen of Alexandria, whom it is difficult to classify as either clearly Orthodox (like, say, Augustine or Gregory the Great) or clearly heretical (like Arius and Nestorius and the rest). So, relying on old Teddy the Mop for insight into our Old Testament lesson feels a bit transgressive.
That said, I couldn’t help myself, because of one word in that brief passage with which I began this sermon–necessity. Theodore writes that it was of necessity that God rescue his people from the power of their foe. The Greek word here is αναγκη, which implies what in philosophy we call logical entailment. Simply put, he is not writing here about God’s people (whether they be Jews or Christians) being in need, but rather that God’s very nature means that he needed to help them. This seems at first blush to imply something we may think is theologically out of bounds–namely, that God is subject to a power beyond himself (in this case, the very concept of logical consistency), that his hand is somehow forced. This brings up all sorts of concerns, from Plato’s famous “Euthyphro Dilemma”–is something good because the gods demand it or do the gods demand it because it’s good–to more popular paradoxes–could God create a rock so big that even he couldn’t lift it? We might be tempted to say that Theodore of Mopsuestia was a step away from heresy already, so just ignore it, but I think that would be too easy. We have here a potentially important insight into God’s saving activity, so let’s tarry just a moment, pondering the mystery.
What I think the Platonic view of divinity and even the pop-philosophy “God with a big rock” view miss is that they begin with an assumption that God is fundamentally a philosophical concept rather than a person. This is not to say that there is no place in Christian theology for understanding God in these terms. The classical “attributes of God” (omnipotence, immutability, simplicity, and so forth) can be helpful guard-rails, keeping us from creating a god in our own image, which would be precisely the sort of idolatry against which Zephaniah himself contended. Even so, if that’s all we have, then God is merely “the ground of being” or “the ultimate concern.” That is to say that God is essentially a metaphysical concept. Now, perhaps you are capable of having a relationship with a concept, but I’m not. I can only have relationships with people.
The view everywhere and at all times held by both Christians and Jews is that God is, indeed, a person. And what is a person if not a moral agent, one with a will more or less in congruence with “the Good”? What distinguishes the agency of God from that of mortals (from ours) is that it and “the Good” are coterminous. In other words, God cannot but act in perfect righteousness and justice and mercy and love.
But is this placing a limit on God? I would contend that it is not. Rather it is simply the recognition that we can know some things about God’s personality–his personhood–because he has told us about himself. Don’t let any of my college professors know I said this, but revelation is prior to philosophical commitments, and the latter must be held more loosely than the former. Put another way, and at the risk of being charged with anti-intellectualism, Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Gottfried Leibniz and all the rest are great as far as they go, but all their insights must be judged against a Sunday School song–“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
So, to return at last to the Prophet Zephaniah and to Teddy the Mop: what we know, what we can found our hope upon, is that salvation and eternal life, the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to be a light to the nations, the justification of God’s ancient, chosen people and all we who have been grafted on like a wild olive shoot is a certainty. It is God’s very nature both to keep his promises and to provide even more. He cannot do otherwise. He cannot, we might say, make a rock so big that he can’t lift it and this, it turns out, is a feature rather than a bug of the logic of his metaphysical subsistence. His property is always to have mercy.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.