Like in Romans 8:38, which I wrote about in "God-parent?". In (extensively) listing the things that can't come between us and the love of God, the writer includes the present and the future, but makes no mention of the past. So is it entirely intentional that we then come to wonder about how the past might well come between us and the love of God? I know that when I'm waxing lyrical myself, I might leave out all sorts of things, with no intention that any list I share is meant to be inclusive. But is the Holy S similarly sloppy when it comes to the Living Word?
Now, ostensibly what is being written about here, as far as I understand 'common' teaching, is the Divinely mysterious and eternal intention of God to take fully human form as Jesus; an intention formed before any exiles or commandments, or prophets, or floods, or serpents, or banishments.
But the moment I personally found this piece of Scripture, I happened to be tenderly recouping my energy after a really grief-stricken hour in my personal therapy, experiencing waves of emotional and physical memories of being left too alone as a tiny baby.
And the first thing that struck me, when I read about His love reaching from the distant past into the future, was that that's what He had just done in me in the therapy room (and which is what I'm sure I've also been told by my teachers that He does). Namely, that He doesn't just "patch us up" here and now as adults. He doesn't just give us an emotional prosthetic to help us walk straighter whilst remaining fundamentally still crippled. His power is so awesome that sometimes He actually moves right into our past, as we're feeling the effect of it here in the present, and He works His magic. And, back here in the future, we're - I'm - feeling the peace of His eternal love; and the damage done to that little baby, which was still creating suffering in the here and now, has been wiped clean away, or at least is now in the process of being healed with no scar.
Now, I really don't like the idea, which I think falls into one of the negative readings of the word 'gnostic', that God has hidden magical and mysterious formulae in His Word which only a certain circle of initiates can understand. That's not the God I feel myself loved by. He doesn't want to hide or trick - He wants to find.
But at the same time, Jesus regularly said things along the lines of "All who have ears to hear, let them listen", and frankly even 'clever old me with my fancy degree and big brain' finds a lot of Scripture far from straightforward or plainly and literally communicated.
I wonder if that's how He's created the Living Word - the words have been written to do the mystical equivalent of rearranging themselves on the page in a way that supports not just layers but whole separate universes of meaning when the reader enters into a deeper contemplative relationship with them by the power of the Holy Spirit.
It feels like this meandering is all leading me to the conclusion that there are as many understandings as there are readers of the Living Word. But if it is, I'm not arguing that it's because His Word is so vague that it's like a horoscope that seems to ring true for everyone reading it. Or that any subtle interpretations are unintended personal psychological constructs or projections.
I mean that that's how outrageous His power and mercy is.
Not only does He bend time and space to heal our past as it was happening, but He wrote words, and gave us His Spirit for reading them, such that each one of us might understand them in a very particular way for us, whilst they still remain the same physical words for the person sitting reading them on the next seat, and for whom their meaning may be absolutely and intentionally different.
Now that is awesome!
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