Savanarola, the great Florentine preacher of the fifteenth century, one day saw an elderly woman worshipping at the statue of the Virgin Mary which stood in his city's great cathedral. On the following day, he noticed the same woman again on her knees before the Blessed Mother. With great interest, Savanarola observed that day after day, she came and did homage before the statue.
"Look how she reverences the Virgin Mother," Savanarola whispered to one of his fellow priests.
"Don't be deceived by what you see," the priest responded. "Many years ago an artist was commissioned to create a statue for the cathedral. As he sought a young woman to pose as the model for his sculpture, he found one who seemed to be the perfect subject. She was young, serenely lovely, and had a mystical quality in her face. The image of that young woman inspired his statue of Mary. The woman who now worships the statue is the same one who served as its model years ago. Shortly after the statue was put in place, she began to visit it and has continued to worship there religiously ever since." (1) The point ought to be clear. What she came to worship was a statue created in her own image! People are continually doing that to God. As the cynic has said, "In the beginning God created man in His own image. Man has now returned the favor."
Who is the God whom you worship? What is He like? William Barclay, the Scottish New Testament scholar, sometimes took controversial positions on interpretations of the Scriptures. Once, when he was interviewed following a series of talks for the British Broadcasting Company, he related the experience of knowing God's sustaining strength during and after the time his twentyone-year-old daughter drowned in a yachting accident. A listener in Northern Ireland, angry over something Barclay had said in his radio Bible study, wrote an anonymous letter. The letter stated, "Dear Dr. Barclay, I know now why God killed your daughter; it was to save her from being corrupted by your heresies."
But Barclay knew that God did not go around drowning people's daughters in order to punish them. Had he known the writer's address, he said that he would have written back, in pity not in anger, in words which John Wesley said to someone: "Your God is my devil."(2)
Anyone who spends much time around religious people will encounter some whose god is a vengeful, spiteful, capricious being who is as far removed from the God of the New Testament as night is from day. C.S. Lewis said that he grew up believing that God was an "Old meany looking around to see if someone is having a good time, to put a stop to it." Where do we get such ideas? Such a view of God must come from sick minds and bitter hearts.
A man approached Horace Greeley one day to ask for a donation for foreign missions. Greeley turned him down but the man continued his plea and Greeley again said no. Finally the unfortunate one said: "Why, Mr. Greeley, wouldn't you give $10 to save an immortal soul from going to hell?"
"No," shouted Greeley, "not half enough people go to hell now!" I suspect that many people feel that way, and they worship a God who smacks his lips in gleeful anticipation of plunging sinners into a lake of fire.
Some people lean completely the other way. They create a God who is their "buddy buddy." He is the sweet grandfatherly figure who always is on our side and will always bend to our desires. The Christian Century recently printed an amusing account of a high school football team in the San Fernando Valley of California that is defying the ban on prayer in public schools. Bob Francola, coach of the Kennedy High School Cougars, said that his team has modified the practice to remove any religious references from its prayers. "I was still allowed to have a quiet moment with our team," he said, "so instead I just ask the Big Cougar in the sky to help us out." We are going to have to expand our theology to accommodate a quartet rather than a Trinity - Father, Son, Holy Spirit and the Big Cougar in the sky.
Where do we get such ideas about God? God is neither an angry, vengeful ogre eager to punish, nor a pliable, insecure smiley-faced waiter eager to please. God is God. But more than that God is the God revealed in Jesus Christ. And the overwhelming image that Jesus gives us of God is that of compassion. That is the word we encounter in the sixth chapter of Mark. Jesus has been teaching and healing and now he is tired. He suggests to the disciples that they come apart for some rest. Jesus knew that this is a need in everyone's life. Either we come apart from time to time or sooner or later we will come apart! They departed to a desert place. But the crowds found them. People came by the thousands to see and hear this man who had such an impact on their community. When Jesus saw them, the Scriptures say, "He was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd..."
I. That is God's view of Man - Sheep having no shepherd.
That is God's view of Man, we are sheep having no shepherd. Have you never been saddened by the human condition? This is a wonderful world and each of us is happy to be alive, but have you never been touched by what the writers call the "pathos" of humanity. There is something sad and almost pathetic about us. For all of our pride, all of our knowledge, all of our sophistication, there are areas of our life in which we are so vulnerable, so uncertain, so insecure. Middle-aged people, watching young people and remembering days gone by, say knowingly, "I wouldn't be 13 again for anything in the world." All of the struggles, all of the intense feelings. We envy their youth but not their situation. Probably we will sit around in heaven and say the same thing about our days on earth. "It was nice while it lasted, but I wouldn't want to go back..."
The heartaches of loving and losing, the fears and insecurities about the future, aging and dying, the inability to get our act together, to do those things we know in our hearts we ought to do and to leave off those that are destructive to us the difficulty in connecting lives one to another.
The great philosopher Hegel on his deathbed complained, "Only one man ever understood me." He fell silent for a while and then added, "And he didn't understand me." We don't have to be a deep and learned philosopher to feel that way. There is that ultimate sense of aloneness that goes with being human.
Philip Yancey tells about a poll of senior citizens in London which asked, "What was the happiest time of your life?" Sixty per cent of them answered, "The Blitz." The Blitz was the terrible moment in World War II when German Luftwaffe planes dumped tons of explosives on the city of London, bombing the historic town into rubble mercilessly night after endless night. And yet even amidst all that terror, the survivors recall it with nostalgia, as a warm time of drawing together against a common enemy.
Dante opens his Divine Comedy with these words, "In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood." Such is the human condition. And God sees it all.
I like the story of a man who came home drunk after a night of carousing in a number of neighborhood bars. His wife helped him up to the bedroom, helped him to undress and tucked him into bed. Then she kneeled at his bedside and whispered, "John, do you want me to pray for you?" He nodded a yes and she began to pray, "Dear Lord, I pray for my husband who lies here before you drunk..." Before she could finish, he interrupts. "Don't tell him I'm drunk," he pleads, "Just tell Him I'm sick."
God sees our condition and He has compassion, for we remind Him so much of sheep without a shepherd.
II. We refuse to acknowledge our need for Him.
The saddest thing of all is how we refuse to acknowledge our need for Him. We are like three burglars I read about who reportedly tried to open a safe in a small factory in Vang, Norway. They attached an explosive device to the door and hid in the next room until it went off. Unfortunately, the explosion was so powerful it demolished the entire building and buried them under a pile of rubble. The safe contained no money; it contained explosives.
We think that our petty little sins don't amount to much. But God sees. He sees the broken families, the broken bodies, the unfulfilled potential of persons who thought they were simply blowing the door off of a safe containing jewels and discovered too late that it contained explosives. So God has compassion. God weeps. He has given us freedom. He cannot prevent our paying for our mistakes. As someone noted, "Many of us pray that somehow 2+2 won't make 4 this time." It does. But God longs to see us get our lives together.
Bishop Stephen Neill told once of hearing an Indian village evangelist telling the story of the prodigal son. The evangelist went beyond the text yet did not stray from the heart of the matter. He explained that the prodigal's real change of heart did not come about when he decided to return to his father. It did not come about when, to his astonishment, his father ran out to meet him to welcome him home with loving tears and a feast. The real change of heart did not come about until some days later when, in looking at his father, the prodigal realized in a flash that his father's hair had turned gray since he had gone away. (3)
III. God Sent Christ to be Our Shepherd.
God sees us as sheep without a shepherd. It saddens Him to see us flounder about with no sense of direction, no sense of purpose, no sense of hope. So God sent Christ to be our shepherd. "I am the good shepherd," Christ says in John 10:14. "I know my sheep and they know me." There is the Good News for the day. The Creator God not only looks upon His children with compassion but he has moved into the world to redeem His children to become the shepherd of the sheep. Even more. To become a lamb slain for the sins of the world.
G. Campbell Morgan was once approached by a soldier who said he would give anything to believe that God would forgive sins. However, he said he could not believe that sin could be forgiven just for the asking. It seemed too cheap. Dr. Morgan said to him, "You were working in the mine today. How did you get out of the pit?
The soldier answered, "The way I usually do. I got into the cage and was pulled to the top."
"How much did you pay to come out of the pit?" asked Dr. Morgan.
"I didn't pay anything," answered the soldier.
"Weren't you afraid to trust yourself to that cage?" Dr. Morgan asked. "Was it not too cheap?"
The man replied, ""Oh, no! It was cheap for me, but it cost the company a lot of money to sink that shaft."God's love for His lost sheep was expensive. For us, however, it is free.
Does that make God an ogre? Hardly. Does it make Him a pushover? Not at all. It does make Him a God of compassion who will not change His laws in order to protect us from the consequences of freedom abused, but who offers Himself to all who would seek to have a shepherd for their lives.
1. Anthony Campolo, SEVEN DEADLY SINS, (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1987).
2. William Barclay, A SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977)
3. Source Unknown