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Does God Change?

22nd Sunday : 2 September 2012  : James 1: 17-18, 21-22, 27

You may have noticed in the Sunday Scripture readings listed in the Pebble that some of the readings are sliced and diced so as to reduce them in size to one convenient gobbet that emphasises often a particular theme. While that makes for compact readings that are easily within people’s concentration span, it sometimes means that important bits get missed out that indicate what the author is driving at in the overall framework of the reading.

So it is that today’s epistle from the letter of James has started out, in the verses we didn’t hear from, on the subject of temptation, and how character building it is to resist it. In this silent front end of the reading the author is keen to get across the message that God doesn’t tempt people - the source of that corrupting inclination to our own downfall comes from our desires, that interesting stew of fatal attractions that originate from what the poet Yeats called, "the rag and bone shop of the heart."

And that leads James to make it clear that there is no double-dealing in God, no hidden agendas, he is utterly reliable and consistent because he doesn’t change. In his words, "Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights."

If that message comes through clearly right from the beginning in the New Testament, it got reinforced in spades when the good news made its way into the Greco-Roman world, and became translated into the language of Greek philosophy. If God was pure being then he surely didn’t change, because change and decay is what happens in the world of human affairs as it sweeps us all away, and people in those times wanted God to be about halting the relentless attrition of time that took away everything they loved. God stands outside the world of time, and the continuing life of the universe, while at the same time being active within it through his right and left hands, Jesus the Word of God, and the Holy Spirit. This is an issue that really matters because it is about the kind of God that we are dealing with, and are forming a relationship with.

In my growing up years my mother had a saying designed to stop our hot reactions to intra family provocations - "don’t descend to their level dear." That is what the Patristic Fathers of the early Church were getting at when they described God as being immutable and impassable. God won’t allow himself to become a prisoner of human agendas and complicated relationship tangles. In order to help the human race he has to avoid getting wound up by the messes it gets itself into. He is a God who doesn’t change - his intentions towards us are constant and consistent, with our best interests at heart. So he is clear, calm, and reliable in his dealings with us. In this way he is useful to us.

What is more a God who became passionately over identified with our situation would cease to be God. The more he emoted and became mired in the human situation, the more limited and needy he would become. It would be like the scriptwriter in Coronation Street becoming a character in the soap, and thereby losing the objectivity to write the story. The God who rules the universe, and who has a rich inner life in himself, doesn’t need us to be himself, or to be happy.

In our time this view of God has come under sharp attack. Some of the great horrors of the 20th century have led to theologians trying to get God off the hook of having apparently done nothing to stop them by arguing that he was completely identified with the victims of these atrocities. So God apparently was gassed in Auschwitz in solidarity with millions of Jews. God suffers with the victims of history. In a variation of this he is described as developing in his being in tandem with human history, so that he suffers setbacks from human rejections and atrocities, but his innocent suffering love will prevail in the end. In this way he can’t be blamed for human suffering because he is limited - he is not responsible for everything that goes on in the universe. But this just won’t do, because as I said before, this is talking about some other kind of God than the God of Christian theism.

But those who have got it in for the immutable and impassable God are on more solid ground when they turn to the pages of Scripture that describe a God who responds passionately to developments in salvation history, particularly when God’s people lose the plot and turn away from their Covenant responsibilities. Grief and anger and jealous love are the emotions the prophets report about the God who is beside himself over the apostasies of his chosen people. He doesn’t seem to take it calmly when Divine love is rejected.

The particular neuralgia point for God seems to be when the people he was counting on let him down. More particularly it is when people who ought to know a thing or two about God respond to his invitations to a deeper union with him with a calculating self-interest and insulation strategy that seeks to keep him at arms length, while taking full advantage of the privileges that are associated with being his friends. He gives himself utterly, without reserve, in a self-emptying generous love, and he is staggered when those who have been schooled in the ways of Divine love react in a blasé or dismissive manner.

So does what we do to affect God, sway him, have an emotional impact on him? Our adoration and devotion and heartfelt requests can - that is what intercessory prayer is all about. To some extent we are allowed to tug on his heartstrings in this way. And when Jesus came among us his identification with us was complete enough to open up God to the nastier aspects of human existence. As Balthasar put it, "Sin killed him so that he could kill sin." To some extent sin, death and suffering was allowed in to God’s being so that he could neutralise it. That side of God that is turned to the human race with saving intent took the brunt of all that in order to deal with it, while the inner life of God continued on in tranquillity.

For there is what has been called a "super impassibility" about God - He could allow sin and death to touch his Divine being without being dominated or coerced by it. He can be angry at the rejection of his love without allowing it to cloud his judgement or to behave unfairly. He can allow us to influence his actions in the world, without relinquishing the Divine prerogative to have the last word in human affairs. He can pray through us when we turn to him in prayer, without cancelling out human freedom.

Nor is he passive and at our mercy in the way the story of salvation plays out. One of the deepest messages in Scripture is a reassurance to us that his sure touch will not allow human rejection to overturn his saving intentions. His ability to outflank, outwit and outthink human short sightedness, sloth and stupidity means that all will be well in the end.

"Be angry but sin not," it says in the Scriptures. That is the way God is. His wrath is in fact his purifying love that will not let us go on in our folly, but confronts us to save us. He is magisterial in his overseeing of the human story. And he is warm hearted in a way that redefines what closeness and compassion really means.