Have you ever heard yourself say “I don’t like the God of the Old Testament”? This blog is for you.

I was leading a Day of Recollection over the weekend and I opened up some time for questions and answers.  One of these questions was something which isn’t really a new issue, but one that quite a few people seem to struggle with.  It usually goes like this - “the God of the Old Testament seems to be a different deity from the one that is portrayed or revealed by Jesus in the New Testament.  Why is this so?  Are there two different Gods portrayed?”    

Variations of this are statements like “I like the God of the New Testament, but I don’t like the God of the Old” or “God in the Old Testament is hard and demanding but Jesus shows God as merciful and loving”.  I’ve even heard one which says that “God in the Old Testament seems to have a need to smite people, but he seems to have stopped that in the New Testament.  He is a changed God”.  I often smile at statements like that last one, because saying that God has changed simply denies one of the most fundamental attributes of God that he is immutable. 

I have issues with these statements, even if one uses the phrase “appears to be” as a caveat for such statements made about God, largely because the questioner only takes selective verses from the Bible to support what they are saying, and often fail to do what is so important – read Scripture from a birds’ eye view and see Scripture as a collection of many books, written by particular individuals who were inspired by God.  Each had a particular encounter with God and each encounter needs to be seen as God revealing himself slowly and progressively. 

Just as there are statements or verses in the Old Testament that do show God’s wrath, anger, jealousy and predilection for a good smiting of his recalcitrant people, there are also numerous Old Testament references that show otherwise.  Nehemiah 9:17 reminds us that God is one who forgives, and who is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness.  Turning to Psalm 36, 69 and 17 will show that God’s people also saw him as God who compassionate, taking us in the shelter of his wings and Isaiah also highlighting God’s hesed, which is Hebrew for lovingkidness. 

Moreover, with tender images of God being the caring shepherd who tends to his sheep, a potter giving shape to and moulding clay, or that he is the rock of their salvation and a mother nursing a child at her breast, how can one say that the Old Testament images of God are only ones that show a wrathful and petty God?

So, it really isn’t true at all that the God portrayed in the Old Testament is so unlike and so different from the God who Jesus reveals in the New Testament.  What we must not forget is that from the time before the New Testament existed in its written form, the early Christians already believed that their faith in Jesus was rooted, based and steeped in the writings of the Old Testament.  So Jesus himself read and prayed the Hebrew Bible and he was certainly not oblivious to the God who is portrayed there.  This was the same God who he continued to worship and love as his beloved Father.   

The idea that Scripture is a meandering and slow revelation of God

Just as God writes straight with crooked lines in our lives, so too does he reveal himself to human beings in scripture.  Each of the prophets and writers of the Old Testament books had different facets and dimensions of God’s attributes and reality, like the way a diamond from different angles refracts different shades of brilliance, colour and light. 

Waywardness has consequences

It is undeniable that many of the prophets’ roles in the Old Testament were to be messengers of punishment.  But this conveyed a reality that all our actions, particularly those that were blatant flouting of God’s directions and instructions, had consequences, with some being more dire than others.  As much as God is a God who is full of mercy, God is also a God who is also the fullness of justice.  That Jesus only preaches and reveals a God of love who is going to permit anything and everything reveals not only a very shallow reading of Scripture, but a very selective one as well.  Parables like the rich man and Lazarus, the ungrateful steward, and Matthew 25 are rich portrayals of a truth that there are serious consequences that await those who are not willing to love their neighbor deeply.  I’m afraid that the God whom Jesus reveals isn’t the divine pushover that so many make him out to be.

God gives his people chance after chance to repent

The role of the prophets wasn’t only to be prophets of doom.  They were also called to show the merciful and tender side of God as well.  The call to repentance of his sinful people need to be seen as a revelation of his love as well.  In the Genesis story, the fact that the writer shows God making clothes to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness is his way of showing that God doesn’t just eject them from Eden with nary a care or concern.  The image of God as a Divine Couturier is a very tender one indeed.   As much as disobedience has consequences, it doesn’t in any way make God uncaring and in any form of a snit.

The ‘problem’ could be more ours than it is God’s

There is a Latin phrase that goes ‘quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur’, and it translates into modern day parlance as “whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver”.  Could the problem of seeing God only as vengeful and wrathful be because we who read the scriptures have a predilection to be such ourselves, projecting onto God these negative traits and magnifying them, and in that way, justifying our own shortcomings? 

In truth, there are no two different Gods in both testaments.  They are one and the same, and overemphasis on either his mercy or his justice, with one at the expense of the other, will end with either a fickle God, a pushover God, or one who is simply a control freak. 

The place that motivation has in our spiritual lives.

There is a plethora of motivation videos and talks available on the internet these days.  It used to be that one had to pay quite a princely sum to attend motivation talks by experts in the field.  Nowadays, with the advent of media like YouTube, talks on motivation can be accessed gratis, and there are a wide range of such talks, from the very engaging ones to those who could do with the help of some motivational gurus themselves. 

When one deliberately searches for such material, one often has to sift through a sea of what is available, and could be akin to looking for a needle in a haystack.  Sometimes one stumbles on a gem without even trying, and when one is found, it makes the find all the more sublime and meaningful.  I had this happen to me this week when I was looking at some video interviews of chef David Chang, known in the foodie world as the owner of a noodle bar in New York called Momofuku, which has morphed into quite an empire with restaurants in other cities like Toronto, Washington DC, Las Vegas and Sydney.  My interest in him was piqued when I came across a series of food documentaries titled Ugly Delicious (the strange 'benefits' of post-operation convalescence time).  Apparently, he has two Michelin Stars to his name.  You may be asking what an American-born Asian chef have to do with a spiritual blog.  Well, in one of these interviews, a reporter asked him why he was on the search for chefs who feel the integrity of what they are doing.  His answer was so interesting because he shared that at some point in his life, he actually started caring, and wanted to do a good job at this (cooking), following this by saying “life is too short to be bad at something”.  If you watch the video, you can see David going deep into his inner self to put into words what he truly believed before giving that answer to the reporter.  It was something he truly believed in.

Seeing this was like seeing grace at work, and grace being responded to.  Even though what he was referring to can be considered banal, earthy and insignificant (cooking), we mustn’t limit grace to only things that are spiritual and eternal.  After all, we see in the person of Chef Chang someone who is not just a maker of a meal, but someone who is flourishing, someone at the top of his game, and someone extremely motivated, and someone certainly very engaged.  If he was lackadaisical, if he was just contented to passively place a cooked bowl of ramen haphazardly put together in front of a patron at his eatery, he wouldn’t be where he is now.  It was as if a light went on in his head/heart when he realized that life is too short to be bad at something.

More and more, as a carer of souls for the Church, I see the great urgency for my congregation to truly own their faith, to be invested and to be engaged.  However, the fruits at motivating them seem to be progressing at the speed of flowing molasses, but I have to respect the fact that conversion is primarily an act of grace, and not predicated on human action.  The conversion stories that I have come across are very often those where the life of the person became awakened, where there was a ground-shift, like as if a bulb suddenly lighted up, and they could, because of this ‘enlightenment’, see the folly of their former ways.  It’s as if scales suddenly fell from their eyes, not unlike Paul of Tarsus.  Addicts of various types began to see just how destructive their addictions made them to not only those who loved them, but to themselves.  Adulterers who had previously been unable to grasp how their affairs had broken their marriage vows could see they were somehow selfish in ways that they never did before.  Like David, grace allowed them to see that life is too short to be bad at something.

Perhaps part of the problem with many of us is that we take the reality that our lives have a ‘use-by’ date with a lot of levity.  After all, mortality rates are declining worldwide with the advance in medicine and science, giving many the mistaken notion that we can side-step and cheat death indefinitely.  But that is a lie we must never believe in, even as we do our best to live healthier lives.  Even if we live to be nonagenarians or centenarians, this would amount to just a flash compared to eternity that we have when we breathe our last.  Indeed, life is too short to be bad at anything, what more at life itself?  

Delaying our response to true conversion further and further away from us may be seen to be a good thing, especially if we have a strong belief that a converted and authentic, engaged and personally invested life is one that will see us not being happy and missing out on parties and fun, when in fact the opposite is true – that when the blinkers are lifted and we are responding to grace, our happiness becomes much more genuine and our love becomes purified, and we are able to see the folly and shallowness of the delights which the temporal world promises.  It’s not that parties are no longer fun, but we will see that our locus isn’t only fixed on our pleasure-centres.  The truly integrated person is able to discern the different levels of pleasure and delight, and can differentiate between shallow pleasure and deep and lasting joys.

Our prayer should always include the desire to be responsive to the grace of God that constantly invites us to cooperate with Him, to be motivated by Him, resulting in our entire lives not just existing passively, but truly engaged, giving us the ability to flourish and like Chef David, be at the top of our game.  Only difference being that it is not our game, but God’s.

It makes all the difference when we pray with love, out of love and because of love.

There is a pervading sense in many minds that just because one has said prayers, it means that one has prayed.  However, these two actions can in reality be very different and one can really end up having said prayers without praying, in the same way that a spouse can say the words “I love you” without really loving.

In my experiences of either counselling directees or hearing confessions, I sometimes ask the question “do you pray?” to which the response very often is “I say my prayers daily”.  When I say in return that this is not what I asked, I am in no way dismissing their sincerity.  I am merely bringing to their attention that there is an intrinsic difference or distinction between the two, and that it is more than just a semantic one.

Perhaps more so in the long-standing tradition of the Catholic faith, we have been steeped in the formula of crafted and worded prayer.  There is indeed goodness in this.  From a very young age, we are taught how to say our prayers, and this has been highly effective in providing us with a framework of how we can approach God and the mystical in a formulated way.  Particularly pertinent to a developing mind and psyche of a child who is in the process of growing from a toddler to a young adult many years down the road, being schooled in prayer that has a framework that is specifically formulaic and worded has its merit.

But together with, and ingredient to learning prayer in this formulaic way, needs to also be a keen intention in developing a heart that has a love for God.  What I have come to notice in my years of ministry is that it is this particular aspect of prayer that is highly underdeveloped and insufficiently imparted either by parents or catechists.  It often results in a disconnect later on in life, and there is a price that one pays heavily, often without even knowing it.

That we are loved by God is something that we don’t give enough attention to.  But I have come to see over and over again in my priesthood that this is the lynchpin that is missing in so many lives that are either becoming slowly shattered or already in smithereens.  Our rigorous prayer life that is depicted largely only by saying prayers, whilst good, can only do so much.  Because we are often rattling off words learnt by heart, we do not easily give ourselves over to emoting the same words from the heart. 

We must never underestimate the great power that we are given when we appreciate anew that we are loved by God.  Just on the human level, aren’t so much of our lives so positively affected when another human being tells us that in his or her eyes, we are loved?  What more the creator of the universe who has ultimate power over everything and everyone? 

I chanced upon a short dramatized biography of the famed fashion designer and doyen Coco Chanel recently in my convalescence.  This fashion doyenne from Paris who was born in the late 1800s had a very deprived childhood and was abandoned at an orphanage by her father whom she always hoped would come back for her one day.  He never did. 

All her life, Coco, whose real name was Gabrielle Bonhuer Chanel, looked for love and approval in her myriad affairs but she never did.  There is one poignant scene in a final part of that particular film which saw her speaking to one of her models whom she chose to wear her creations on the catwalk at a fashion show, and she said to her in words to the effect of “remember – the most important thing in the world is to be loved by another.  It is not a big deal when we love others.  We do that all the time – we love others, and we love things.  But when someone loves us, our world changes and becomes beautiful”.

There is much truth in this, but as a priest, I would apply this truth ultimately to God, and this takes the truth to the nth degree.  What Coco said mirrors what is found in 1 John 4 which tells us "In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us and sent us his Son as expiation for our sins".  

When we become aware and truly convinced that not only we are loved, but that we are loved by God who is the master of the universe who has loved us into being, our world not only becomes beautiful.  Our world becomes infinitely brighter and safer because this assurance of divine love gives us the ability to take all the life throws at us.  We will be chasing much less the things and relationships and delights that are only good for the moment and whose satisfactions fade almost immediately thereafter, like the way fireworks are breathtaking and disappear seconds after having lit up the night sky.

Jesus came to impart this to us, and used his entire life through Calvary to tell us that in him, God was promising us he loved us.  Indeed, in Jesus, God gave us his Word. 

The right spirit of Lent and its challenges.

This year, the start of the season of Lent coincided in a very interesting and paradoxical way with Valentine’s Day.  While the former was observed largely by the Catholic community, the latter has become a worldwide event, and has been seen as a day to show with various degrees of overture, one’s appreciation of another with demonstrations of love, often having romantic undertones.  The liturgical season of Lent is often seen as a time of self-renunciation shown and demonstrated by taking on forms of mortification and discipline, so on the surface of things, many may think that nothing could be more contrasting than observing Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s day simultaneously.

But in essence and in truth, it was actually quite provident that these two occasions met on the same day.  There is something that the two have in common in a rather hidden way, but on different levels – and it is love.

What many may find it difficult to perceive or appreciate is that underneath and undergirding the recommended observances of the traditional practices of Lent of fasting, almsgiving and prayer, is the purifying of our love – love for God and love for neighbour.  A prolonged season of doing this with some level of assiduousness (40 days) is asked of all of us principally because at the core of our human and sin-prone nature, we don’t do the two very well.  We often don’t love God as wholeheartedly and authentically as he ought to be loved, and neither are we as proficient in loving our neighbour as we should.  So Mother Church gathers us in and helps us through a 40-day guidance of a shared experience as a community – an experience of purified love.

“How does fasting purify love?” one may ask.  At the heart of the issue of not loving God and insufficiently loving neighbour is an issue of self-indulgence and an inordinate emphasis on the love of self.  This love of self takes on many forms, but they chiefly find their root in the sin of pride.  One way of overcoming or being aware of this is to resist how we often give in very easily to our comfort needs through our unwillingness to experience being hungry. 

A friend once shared with me that the one thing that tells him that he is no longer poor and is comfortable in life, is when he goes to a grocery store and he has the confidence that he can buy whatever he sees, without worrying about the cost.  There could be a host of factors that contributed his having this ‘marker’ in life, like perhaps having come from a materially challenged youth.  I think that not only this friend of mine, but all of us too, have an inner desire to never feel a lack or a discomfort.  We all like to keep hunger pangs at bay, and herein lays the rationale of fasting that a large majority of us miss.

When we willingly put ourselves in a state of fasting, we are reminding ourselves that we are not ruled or controlled by our physicality.  Our drives in life must not be purely instinctive and our bodies do not control us.  We are taking back full control of our natures, unlike animals without consciences.  Eating mindlessly all the time can make us a bit like the animals that constantly graze in fields.  We do this so that we don’t feel discomfort and hungry.   This has its parallels in the way we can often mindlessly take in other things in life as well – gossipy stories of others, biased opinions, trending newsfeeds and lifestyles, so much so that we end up loving ourselves and feeding ourselves in ways that leave us bloated and exhausted.  If periodic physical detoxing does our bodies good, what more spiritual detoxing?

Almsgiving does the same thing but on the level of money and how much it controls our lives.  Always a touchy issue, we know that we cannot live without it, but that it is also something that can easily master our lives if we allow it to.  Jesus himself warns us about this saying that where your treasure is, there is your heart also.  Ever since money was invented, there has been a prevalence of a fear of not having enough.  It has easily become a god unto its own, with a legion of worshippers at its feet.  Almsgiving helps us to counter its insidious allure and power over us when we willingly give this away, controlling it rather than letting it control us.  It also reminds us that our blessings are meant to be a blessing to others.

Prayer is the third area of life that Mother Church wants to give us special guidance at this time of grace.  She wants to remind us not only about prayer’s importance, but to draw us to the heart of prayer, which is ultimately love.  If our prayer is primarily that of asking God to listen to us, our prayer becomes an extended act of loving ourselves.  But if we move our motivations for prayer away from ourselves, wanting rather to love God more and purify our love for him, so too will our love for neighbour undergo purification as well.

Love then is truly at the heart of all our Lenten practices.  As a community, when we love God with a heart that slowly becomes more purified through mindfulness, the body of Christ takes on a form that becomes more visible and tangible in the world. 

Was there a clash of ideas and purposes when Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday met this year on February 14?  I guess the answer is yes only if we have been living distorted loves in our lives.