Vaster
Albert Einstein was one of the greatest minds in recent history. He thought and knew a lot about the universe in which we live. Yet he knew that his and all human knowledge is limited. “The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe,” Einstein said. “We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they were written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books—a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.” [quoted in Steven Kostoff, “Only Wonder Grasps Anything,” https://oca.org/reflections/fr.-steven-kostoff/only-wonder-grasps-anything; Oct. 13, 2015; original source unknown]
Einstein knew the universe is bigger than we can ever comprehend. Whatever his belief in God may or may not have been, he seemed to sense that behind the universe stood an equally incomprehensible intellect, an intellect too great, too vast to be “contained” by the human mind.
Solomon’s view of God is less intellectual and abstract than Einstein’s, but he too knows the surpassing greatness of God. The king has fulfilled his father David’s desire to build a house for the Lord. The Ark of the Covenant, containing the stone tablets God gave to Moses, has been brought into the Holy of Holies, the most sacred space in the new Temple. Now Solomon dedicates the magnificent structure with a prayer. But in the midst of the prayer, he wrestles with the very concept of a “house of the Lord.” He asks, “Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” Here, I think, is evidence of the vaunted wisdom of Solomon: he knows that he is dealing with something, someone far greater than he can imagine.
One of my favorite analogies for God’s incomprehensible vastness comes from a sermon by Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory was a bishop in Asia Minor, modern Turkey, in the fourth century. In his 11th sermon on the Song of Songs, Gregory compares God to the spring of water which, according to Genesis 2, bubbled up in Eden and sent its waters out in four great rivers to water the face of the earth (2.6, 10). As you came near the spring, he writes, you would marvel, seeing that the water was endless, as it constantly gushed up and poured forth. Yet you could never say that you had seen all the water. How could you see what was still hidden in the bosom of the earth? Hence no matter how long you might stay at the spring, you would always be beginning to see the water. For the water never stops flowing, and it is always beginning to bubble up again.
It is the same with one who fixes [her] gaze on the infinite beauty of God. It is constantly being discovered anew, and it is always seen as something new and strange in comparison with what the mind has already understood. And as God continues to reveal [God’s self], man continues to wonder; and he never exhausts his desire to see more, since what he is waiting for is always more magnificent, more divine, than all that he has already seen. [From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings, Selected and with an Introduction by Jean Daniélou, Translated and Edited by Herbert Musurillo, Scribners 1961, p. 246]
Just as, at every moment, the water one sees bubbling up and gushing forth is brand new and never seen before, so too is the beauty, the glory of God constantly new, inexhaustible—human perception is never able to take it all in. And what is true for the Divine beauty is also true of all of God’s attributes—love, goodness, creativity, justice, wisdom—and even more true of God’s being, God’s essence—the human mind cannot comprehend it all. We only grasp the hem of the Divine garment, so to speak. God is too vast for our understanding. Or as the African American Christian tradition puts it, God’s power and presence are “so high, we can’t get over it; so wide, we can’t go around it; so deep, we can’t go under it.” [Barbara Essex, “Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 3, Supplemental Essays [computer download], Proper 16: 1 Kings 2.10-12; 3.3-14, WJK, 2012, pp. 3, 5]
This truth of God’s vastness has important implications for our thought and practice.
Solomon points us to the limits of connecting God with particular buildings—or any other material object for that matter. He knows that no building, no thing made by humans can contain the Creator of All. He seems to suggest that taking “House of God” literally, as the place where God dwells, is absurd. God is too vast to be contained, too powerful to be controlled, too free to be constrained. The Temple, the building is only a symbol of God’s presence and a focal point for the people’s prayer and worship. UCC pastor Barbara Essex underlines this point: “Solomon’s act of prayer is a reminder to us that the church is not where God is confined, waiting for our orders for a rich, easy life. Rather, the church is where we gather to encounter the living God. It is the place where God meets us, where we can know and be known by God and each other. It is where we come into God’s presence as the gathered community to worship, pray, and offer thanksgiving.” [Ibid., 3] The church is an instrument focusing us on the God who is abroad and at work in our lives and in our whole world.
If God cannot be contained in a building, neither can God be contained in a doctrine or a set of ideas. In my very first theology class, one of the first things I recall my theology professor, David Gouwens, saying was, “All God talk is metaphor.” All our words, even the most eloquent and the most well thought out, are imperfect attempts to describe what cannot by fully grasped by the human mind or fully expressed in words. That is why this chapter speaks of a cloud and glory and, in verse 12, thick, impenetrable darkness. Like the temple and the ark themselves, these words are attempts to express the presence of God. “Faith,” says C.L. Seow, “speaks with a limited vocabulary. It paints impressionistic pictures.” [“1 Kings,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. III, p. 78] Faith, theology, doctrine, even Scripture, does not present us with the crisp realism of a high-definition video, but instead with the fuzzy images of a painting by Monet. This is not to say they are not true, only to say that God transcends our words and ideas. As St. Anselm of Canterbury observed, “God is the than which no greater can be conceived.” [Anselm, Proslogion, c. 1078] In other words, God begins roughly where our human capacities to understand and imagine end.
The Victorian poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, makes this point eloquently in the Prolouge to his great series of verses, “In Memoriam.” His words, addressed to Jesus, the “Strong Son of God, Immortal Love,” seem to me a call to humility not only in regard to our ideas about God, but also to those other finite and fallible systems of thought which we oft imbue with certainty—the philosophical, political, economic, and social ways of perceiving and ordering the world which we tend to treat as if they are sanctioned by God when, in fact, they are human creations. [Robert H. Ross, editor: Tennyson, In Memoriam, A Norton Critical Edition, p. 3, footnote 3] Tennyson observes:
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
God is indeed vaster than all our human systems of thought and we will need God’s grace and wisdom so that our minds and souls may perceive vaster realities and conceive of vaster possibilities for ordering life according to God’s Immortal Love.
Which leads us to one final implication of God’s vastness found in our reading. In the most surprising part of the prayer, Solomon asks God to hear and respond to the prayers of foreigners who come to the Temple. Much of the Old Testament seems to be wary of strangers and downright opposed to foreigners—they are often seen as a threat to Israel’s unique identity and faith. But this passage is part of the minority report. Indeed, it sets the stage for the stories of two foreigners who come to Israel later in First and Second Kings: the Queen of Sheba who visits Solomon and Naaman the foreign general who seeks out Elisha for healing. Both of these foreigners confess the power and goodness of God (1 Kings 10.9 and 2 Kings 5.15). Elsewhere, Isaiah declares that the Temple is to “be a house of prayer for all people” (56.7) and Malachi boldly declares that incense is offered to God’s name in every place among the nations (1.11), perhaps in response to the Jewish encounter with Zoroastrian monotheists during the Babylonian Captivity.
There is a clear move in the Hebrew Scriptures away from the conception of God as a tribal deity, to God as the universal Lord of all whose activity is not constrained to one land or one people, but encompasses every tongue and tribe and nation. The scope of God’s mercy and concern seems to increase as we move from the oldest to the more recent Hebrew scriptures. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that over many centuries the authors of the scriptures come to the increasing realization that God’s mercy and concern are far vaster than they had previously suspected.
God hears the prayers of foreigners like the Queen of Sheba and Naaman, because all people are made in God’s image and are loved by God. God’s love and care are far vaster than our linguistic, cultural, ethnic and national differences. This is why, as Jonathan Sacks, formerly the chief rabbi of Great Britain, has observed, "The Hebrew Bible [the Old Testament] in one verse commands, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to 'love the stranger.'" [quoted by Tony Robinson, UCC Still Speaking Daily Devotional, February 5, 2017] I can’t help but wonder what might be the effect on our political and social systems if we took this vastness of God’s love and welcome more seriously and tried to live in a harmony that “accords well” with that expansive Divine reality.
So let us heed the wisdom of Solomon. Let us remember that God is vaster than our understanding or imagination. God’s love and beauty are beyond description. God’s goodness and creativity are inexhaustible. God’s wisdom and power are incomprehensible. God cannot be confined in the walls of any building, nor can God be contained in even the vastness of the human mind. Let us be shaped, as individuals and a people, by the vision of God as an inexhaustible spring of beauty, love, goodness and justice. In wonder and gratitude, let us give thanks and praise God who transcends even the highest heavens and yet looks upon us with care and hears our prayers. Amen.