God comes in the wrong disguise
Tuesday, December 25, 2012 at 6:47AM There's a story about a high-ranking barrister in the UK, who was unavoidably delayed on his way to court one morning, and arrived in the courtroom in plain business attire, having had no time to robe up. The elderly and rather pompous judge scanned him over the rims of his glasses, squinted, then frowned and declared, "Mr Johnson-Smith, I'm afraid I can't see you!"
There is a great parallel in the way we recognise the God of our own religion, and certainly the same amount of pomposity and disapproval. In the old film, The Invisible Man, and in the more recent remakes, you cannot pyhsically see the character unless he is wearing clothes. Occasionally you see a hat floating around, or a vase or book apparently making its own way across a library, but you don't see the hand that moves them unless the superhero chooses to wear a glove at that moment.
And in the narrow tracks of much of our religious thinking, the only costume that the invisible God can possibly wear is the one that we recognise. So if God chooses to turn up dressed as an Imam, we in the West don't recognise him (or her). In fact, we can be extremely narrow in our interpretations of what is a valid costume for God to recognise, or wear. Take a look at the fabulously elaborate requirement for priestly garments described in Exodus in the Old Testament. Each element had a special meaning, as part of the priest's and the people's devotional lives, and to enter the temple incorrectly clad might mean not only that God couldn't "see" you, but he might be angry enough to punish you.
So a certain type of fundamentalist takes this primitive view of God's anger at breaches of protocol, and imagines he or she is doing his will when they reflect that attitude to others who have dressed from the wrong wardrobe. And the beautiful priestly cosume, a creative expression of a soul's and a people's longing for and devotion to God, turns in an instant into the wronging of all others; left and right; sheep and goats; saved and damned.
What disguise must God turn up in for you to recognise him, or her? The general view of God in the Old Testament, at least, is that he has no form, no physical shape. So we're more likely to recognise him if he wears what we're expecting. But he may, of course, choose to look like a pope or a woman or an enemy or a down-and-out to reveal himself to individuals. So we probably all need to get out a little more, and start to take some pleasure in spotting more of his multiplicity of disguises, one of which is as a baby at Christmas.