Ezekiel is probably the most indigestible of the prophets. We can find his rich choice of imagery rather overwhelming – the flashing fires, the burnished bronze, the array of strange faces, the wings, the sapphires, the brilliant lights. This extraordinary picture of God’s chariot throne can with all its wealth of detail, blind us to the most important word in the text – a word that occurs five times – the word ‘semblance. ‘ In the same vein we hear the word ‘appearance;, just as we hear again and again that something is like something else – which all comes to a climax in the words, ‘This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.’
Behind all the richness of imagery Ezekiel is struggling to describe the indescribable. That may seem an odd thing to say about God in the Old Testament. We may have become used to feeling uncomfortable with the Old Testament image of God as all too literally human. Of course some texts do make it seem as though God has a human body – the old white haired and bearded man on his heavenly throne. Other texts, however, are more cautious as when Moses says to the people of Israel, ‘You saw no form of any kind the day the Lord spoke to you.’ (Deut. 4:15) Ezekiel is attempting to describe the divine presence very indirectly only as the limits of human understanding permit. God is like this or that, in the appearance or semblance of this or that. The four faces represent four divine qualities – the human face, his intelligence, the lion his royalty, the ox his strength, the eagle distance from the earth. Wind, cloud and fire represent the awesome, disruptive nature of the divine presence; the movement of the wheels represents the ubiquity of God and so on. And yet amidst all this wealth of imagery we have the sense that Ezekiel knows he is struggling to express the inexpressible.* Today is the Sunday on which Christians struggle with that most difficult description of God as three in one and one in three. It seems appropriate therefore to accept Ezekiel’s challenge to think about how we can talk about God at all, how we can express the inexpressible.
We might begin with the fact that all people of faith have a deep sense that what they believe in is beyond their grasp. So the prophet Isaiah imagines God saying to his people, ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ (Isaiah 55: 8-9) So how are we to speak about the God who by his nature is indescribable by us, what do the words we use about God actually tells us about God? We believe that God is beyond our grasp nevertheless we believe that all things are created by God and caused by God. So we conclude that though God is different from all he has created he is in some way connected to it. This leads to two ways of talking about God. The first is the negative way. We describe God by what he is not. We say he is invisible – he cannot be seen; we say he is infinite – he cannot be tied down by time or space. This negative way of speech serves to remove all limits from God, it reminds us not to assume that God is like us, it introduces humility and caution into our speech about God, it reduces us to the silence in which our minds are stretched out towards the inexpressible God.
We do, however, also speak about God positively. We say for example that he is just and wise, or that he is light, that he speaks with a still small voice, that underneath are the everlasting arms. Such descriptions of God we would claim to be true, but in what sense? How do we arrive at such descriptions? To answer that we have to remind ourselves that we are caused and created by God; therefore when we display justice or wisdom or loving kindness that must tell us something about the God who created us and caused these qualities in us. On this basis God can be named from his creatures; Solomon is the wise king created by a God who is wisdom. Our wisdom is the effect of God’s wisdom, though in a limited way. There is of course an immense difference between the way in which wisdom is exemplified in divine and human forms. Even so I can know what I am talking about when I say that God is wise. For example we may talk about someone being musical. We know what it means if I were to say that a member of the junior choir was very musical, and no doubt his parent would be very proud. But if I apply the word ‘musical’ to Beethoven then you will immediately realise that though the statement isn’t false it is totally inadequate. In a similar way then when I say God is wise you know what I mean but you also know that the statement while true is totally inadequate.
So to sum up so far, we can say quite simply that when we use the same word about God and about human beings the word is not being used in quite the same way, nevertheless, when I use that word about God I am saying something that is true. We ought perhaps to stop there because it all seems rather obvious and laboured. However, there is another important point to be made about language and God. It might seem from what I’ve said so far, that we are suffering from the ‘Lionel Espy syndrome’ Lionel is the parish priest in crisis, in David Hare’s play ‘Racing Demon’. He wanders round the parish with knitted brow wrestling with the complexity of faith. ‘Why do I always say, “God, as it were”?’ he asks himself. Does my understanding of how we use language in faith mean that we always have to say, ‘God is wise, as it were’? In fact it should probably be the other way round. If God is the source of all that we are, then in God is the source of real and perfect wisdom. We are only wise secondarily, derivatively and imperfectly. We are only wise, ‘as it were.’ And yet we have to use our imperfect understanding of wisdom if we want to talk about a wise God. It is perhaps a challenge to human being to become more wise. For the wiser we become the closer we shall come to the source of all wisdom in God. Just as the more loving we become the closer we get to the God of all love.
So far I have been talking about analogical language. Language about God used analogically with language about human being. We say that God is like human beings in some respect, using abstract words like wisdom or justice. But Ezekiel talks about God in very concrete ways – he talks metaphorically. And metaphor is one step further removed from analogy. Just now I said that the face of the lion on the chariot throne represent God’s royalty. To say God is royal is to speak analogically with royalty in human experience. To represent that royalty as a lion is a metaphor – a visual way of speaking that sets us off on an imaginative way of thinking that the more abstract analogy of royalty would not. There is an enormous amount of such rich visual imagery about God in the Old Testament including all the imagery of God behaving in very human ways. But we must always remember that to describe God as, for example, being angry is to speak analogically. There will be a huge difference between divine anger and our mostly sinful expressions of anger.
So finally what of the language of Trinity? For a proper understanding of that doctrine you would have to read Fr Jim’s sermon this morning which will soon appear on the parish website. But for now I will say just this. In the light of what I have said we might approach the Trinity through the analogy of relationship and human relatedness. This is something God creates in us. We cannot live without relationship, without love and community. And unlike other world faiths Christianity says that relations exist in God, between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To meditate on God as Trinity is therefore to meditate on the fullness of love. To meditate on God as Trinity is to raise up in us a desire for community, for perfect society. And in so meditating we can let go of words and offer ourselves up to the perfecting of love in us through the power of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen
* In fact all this vividly visual language became the basis for a famous tradition of Jewish mysticism which even St Paul may have practiced. When Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians speaks of being caught up to the third heaven to hear inexpressible things, he may have been meditating on Ezekiel’s vision of God’s chariot throne. What is said by the prophet is used as the vehicle in prayer for approaching the unsayable.