Some things are easy to take or to think about in the abstract, but much harder to face when they are a part of your actual everyday life. Like babies. Or taxes. Or death. Or God.
This week's OT lesson has David's armies engaging the armies of his son, Absalom, in the Battle of Ephraim, where 20,000 lose their lives. Stop & consider that. Twenty-thousand! A slaughter! An atrocity! But the text skips right over that number to relate the very real and very poignant reaction David has when his own son is killed that day. "The king was deeply moved [when he heard of the boy's death] and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, he said, "O my son Absalom, my own, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son." We often read about death on unimaginable scales, but it is a single death of one we love that drives us to our knees. It is normal and it is healthy and it is human.
So also is it human to find the idea of God quite acceptable in the abstract, but much more difficult in the sense of a present reality. We argue for hours over whether or not God exists and who God loves or hates, and just what it is that God requires of us. But what if we were face-to-face with the living God? This is the reality of our Gospel for this week. Some, upon facing a man claiming to have come from heaven to earth (abstract to reality) are understandably skeptical. "We know God," they say, "and you are not God." But denying reality doesn't change it.
I pray to a God I don't see and wonder if I am heard, or if this, too, is an abstraction.
But then I encounter Christ with my senses and I find myself in the presence of something very real.
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