PART 2 | WHAT IS GOD LIKE? AND WHO AM I?
As we wrestle with the question, who is God? another question emerges, where does Jesus come in and what do we do with Him?
WHERE DOES JESUS COME IN?
I’ve come to believe that while everything in Scripture is inspired, not everything carries equal weight. To me, Jesus trumps everything. Not even the modern mind’s favorite, Paul, come close (I now read Paul’s writings through the lens of Jesus, not the other way around).
Jesus deconstructed the prevailing concept of God so thoroughly in His time on earth that religious leaders did not know what to do with Him. And because of that, they eventually crucified Him.
Jesus challenged and reinterpreted the dominating paradigm that humanity at that time had of God. Jesus, once and for all, presented the perfect picture of who God was (and still is). In the upside-down radical “Sermon on the Mount”, Jesus emphasized He did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it and proceeded to reinterpret the law. He gave wise instructions and warnings as to how to live. The Beatitudes would have been enough to rock the boat of His listeners and would have provided an unforeseen sense of hope that…the Kingdom was available to them.
Fast forward to Jesus’ last week before the crucifixion, which started out with the Last Supper (John 13).
Jesus, as their rabbi, rocked the boat again by washing the disciples’ feet and commanded them to love one another. To Jesus, that was the true mark of discipleship and how all people would know they are His disciples. The most brilliant and coolest teaching of Jesus took place when he summarized the entire 613 laws in the Old Testament (no, I did not actually count them) down to 2 (which were embedded in 613, but with one minor change):
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.”
By following Jesus, we experience Jesus’ God and Jesus’ God becomes our God. To me, this is why I follow Jesus—moving from my woefully inadequate concept of God to the perfect and ultimate presence of God.
WHO AM I?
Right off the bat, I would like to consider who we are not. We are not what we do. We are not what we have. We are not what others think of us. And then there is the biggest impostor of them all— we are not what we make or project ourselves out to be. We are not what we construct ourselves to be.
This idea of construction is all about ego-making. Early in life, the ego is a necessary life coping mechanism. Without it, we would not know how to survive. It is our learned way of preserving and defending ourselves from hurts, wounds, and perceived danger from the world. The problem is that over time, it disguises itself as the “real us.” It drowns out and overshadowed the true self that is in all of us. . . until our ego’s survival tactics don’t work anymore in life. This is what many refer to as a “mid-life crisis.” I think the label mid-life crisis is a bit of a misnomer, mainly because it doesn’t always happen in “mid-life”. It seems to me that it is hitting people sooner, and people are becoming more honest about “hitting the wall,” “hitting rock bottom,” or some sort of a meltdown.
The question, Who am I? is really a question of what is my true self? Our true self is what God originally created us to be and thus who God really intended us to be. Because of ego’s activism, disguise, and dominance, our true self is often buried deep. However, from time to time, we catch glimpses of it, and we can’t help but be completely enraptured by the original beauty, which is a mere and true reflection of God’s creative beauty. The true self can only be discerned and discovered over time in safe space from ego’s allure and cannot be manufactured by will even if they are out of good will. Who we are is given to us from the beginning. The true self will invariably showcase its being into doing: doing what we love and loving what we do. This discovery (some people call this “personal vocation”) process “is written into one’s concrete history and into the inner dynamism (that is, the movement of the inner forces) of one’s life,” according to the late Father Herbert Alphonso. His concise book, Discovering Your Personal Vocation, is a gem of a book on this topic. Alphonso continues, “I am convinced that the personal vocation, once discerned, becomes the criterion of discernment for every decision in life, even for the daily details of decision making.”
A cautionary tale here… The question, Who am I? is not a narcissistic pursuit of modern and post-modern obsession with individualism. The Genesis account (Gen 1:26) makes it clear that we are created in the very image of the Triune God. In other words, from the very beginning, we are created as relational beings, first with the Triune God and also with others. We are never meant to be isolated. God does not and will not leave us alone. Our creation DNA will not leave us alone. Each of us is created for relationships. This is where the supreme paradox of individuality and community co-exist, never short-changing one or the other. Thus, the question of who am I? is not an isolated journey of individual discovery but a communal one!
In 2001, I first came across the dictum by Saint Irenaeus, “The glory of God is man fully alive,” in John Eldredge’s book, Wild at Heart. I remember exactly where I read this—at Starbucks on the corner of Washington and Allen, close to my home. It was that shocking! I dropped the book and was dazed for a good several minutes. I didn’t know what to make of it at first. Confusion and shock hit me simultaneously. My then theological frame could not handle such “man(kind) centered” theology! Moreover, I was blown over by the thought that my aliveness is directly related to God’s glory! I was operating out of John Piper’s famous phrase, “Missions exists because worship doesn’t.” My way of bringing glory to God was to engage in missions with all my heart and life, which I had done since 1988. The Irenaeus dictum disturbed my modus operandi!
Looking back, I would say that the following years resulted in a perpetually slow simmering confusion. Often times I found myself juggling between seemingly contradicting paradigms and trying to make connections and synthesize. All in all, I was not satisfied with where I was.
(To be continued next week. . . )