A young Christian recently asked me for what I thought the non negotiable traits of God to be.
My response was that God is big and God is good.
This reminds me of a parable that comes from Hasidic Judaism. It is the parable of two angels.
Two traveling Angels stopped to spend the night in the home of a wealthy family. The family was rude and refused to let the angels stay in the mansion's guest room.
Instead the Angels were given a space in the cold basement. As they made their bed on the hard floor, the older Angel saw a hole in the wall and repaired it.
When the younger Angel asked why, the older Angel replied..."Things aren't always what they seem."
The next night the pair came to rest at the house of a very poor, but very hospitable farmer and his wife. After sharing what little food they had, the couple let the Angels sleep in their bed where they could have a good night's rest.
When the sun came up the next morning, the Angels found the farmer and his wife in tears. Their only cow, whose milk had been their sole income, lay dead in the field.
The younger Angel was infuriated and asked the older Angel, "How could you have let this happen? The first man had everything, yet you helped him" she accused. "The second family had little but was willing to share everything, and you let their cow die."
"Things aren't always what they seem," the older Angel replied. "When we stayed in the basement of the mansion, I noticed there was gold stored in that hole in the wall. Since the owner was so obsessed with greed and unwilling to share his good fortune, I sealed the wall so he wouldn't find it.
"Then last night, as we slept in the farmers bed, the Angel of Death came for his wife. I gave her the cow instead. Things aren't always what they seem."
Sometimes this is exactly what happens when things don't turn out the way they should. If you have faith, you just need to trust that every outcome is always to your advantage. You might not know it until some time later.
I think the parable is wrong in that it has too small a view of God’s activity. God does not merely limit evil but is active in providing life to the full for his people. Nonetheless, the point of the parable is clear: just watching events seldom gives the whole story.
Whether we are a congregational leader or church member a task we are all involved in is helping each other to view events ‘with the eyes of faith’.
Because we live in a world where it is so normal to draw conclusions from the mere involvement in and observation of events, we have to train ourselves and those around us to remember that we don’t have access to complete knowledge but we do know that God is always big and good, and so we must view events through that grid.
So here are some thoughts:
- with the benefit of hindsight look back on your own life and ask ‘what would I have misunderstood if I did not have ‘the eyes of faith’?
- share this with others and ask them to do the same thing
- remember that in times of grief the most important thing to do is grieve with those grieving and not to merely give theological answers. (The time for correcting thinking and vision is before and after the blackness of grief.)
