Is there one thing that you could say is more precious to you than anything else? Something that should you lose it, you would be devastated. Something that is life to you, or even something that is more than life to you, something you would give your life for. Perhaps it’s a relationship. Maybe it’s a belief. Whatever it is, it is something without which you would feel completely lost and forsaken.
To what extent would you go to protect this precious thing? What measures would you be willing to take to ensure that nothing ill happens to it? What if you cannot protect it? What would it mean if you did lose it? What control do you really have over that at all? What is the real meaning of this preciousness in your life? Would you be willing to share it?
Many of us have faced some if not all of these questions? Some of the answers that we may have come up with were probably startling at times and even humiliating. Preciousness sometimes can be closely aligned with promise; the promise that you will never be without that which you deem precious can be deeply implicit. In the extreme, this can turn into possession. Loss within the context of possession can be a terribly destructive event. Anger and resentment can escalate immediately and result in reactions that lash out with blame and fury at everyone and everything. For those of you familiar with J. R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, this is the character of Gollum, the creature whose life is totally taken over by the precious ring of power such that it has literally driven him mad.
There are also themes of this in today’s scriptures (Ex 32:7-14):.
The LORD said to Moses,
“Go down at once to your people
whom you brought out of the land of Egypt,
for they have become depraved.
They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them,
making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it,
sacrificing to it and crying out,
‘This is your God, O Israel,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’
Interestingly, one could look at the situation from both the Hebrew people and the God of Israel. Feeling abandoned by their God in the wilderness, the people have created an idol to worship as God. They feel that the precious relationship and its promises have been taken from them. And God is also described as feeling the loss of preciousness. We hear God’s intended wrath, even amidst Moses’ pleas for mercy:
The LORD said to Moses,
“I see how stiff-necked this people is.
Let me alone, then,
that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them….
But Moses implored the LORD…
Let your blazing wrath die down;
relent in punishing your people.
This is a REAL relationship! Without entering a discussion on the anthropomorphism in this scriptural text, it’s important to point out that the power of the passage is within the passion that this jealous dialogue is taking place. The Preciousness has been violated. Yet still the preciousness remains. There is a loss, but the relationship remains. Moses ends up talking God out of his wrathful intentions.
There is a similar violation going on in John’s Gospel (Jn 5:31-47), where Jesus is confronting the Jewish leaders who are up in arms and plotting to kill Jesus because not only has he cured on the Sabbath, but claimed to be doing his Father’s work. The golden calf of the Jewish leaders here is their strict adherence to scriptural, religious and cultural norms and Jesus has violated the preciousness of that cultic possession by… of all things…healing someone on the Sabbath. Yet the effrontery goes much deeper in that Jesus is claiming to be doing God’s work Who, by the way, he is calling “Father.” Insult upon injury!
,…the Father who sent me has testified on my behalf.
But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form,
and you do not have his word remaining in you,
because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent.
You search the Scriptures,
because you think you have eternal life through them;
even they testify on my behalf.
you do not want to come to me to have life.
Jesus also is also feeling violated, albeit perhaps at another level. Being attacked for being sent to testify on behalf of God the Father, and then the denial that he is the Sent One wounds the very preciousness of not just his relationship with God, but even more so the people’s precious relationship with God. It is excruciating for Jesus to see that they cannot recognize Him primarily because it indicates that they have cast their relationship with God in a rigid mold bolstered by stale scriptural interpretations, cultural stringencies, and religious authoritarianism that won’t allow the deeper preciousness to emerge. He painfully realizes that they don’t recognize him because they don’t recognize what their relationship with God means.
One line captures the devastating effect of this loss of preciousness:
you do not want to come to me to have life.
Ultimately, they don’t even realize much less want the LIFE offered!
This story repeats itself in our world this very day. How often do we fail to realize how precious we are to God and how this preciousness must be maintained in an ongoing relationship? This is LIFE – real Life. Life is not life without relatedness – without sharing. All attempts to live without solidarity and relatedness are lives without ground, sustenance and vigor. We may try, and we do, to make these ‘lives’ look nice and vital, but they always end up in fatigue, exhaustion, competition, exclusion, depression, isolation, violence, and death.
Indeed, the lives that we seek to control or manufacture are the result of feeling that we have lost the preciousness of the Divine relationship – our deepest source. A.H. Almaas describes it as an attempt to control one’s experience so as to avoid the pervasive feeling of disconnection.[i] The fact is that we have not lost it, but turned away from and shunned it. Either consciously or unconsciously we have created an idol life for a precious life. We don’t’ see that Life is only Life in the sharing. We fail to see the Sent one on a daily basis. Mainly because we fail to see that the Sent one is right next to us – you – me!
you do not want to come to me to have life
* * *
Yet we are on the journey. The preciousness remains. It cannot go away. It can be healed. In fact it’s very work is healing – Precious healing.
What are the ways that we can come to Christ to have Life? What are the ways we can work with each other to create Life? What are some ways that we can live the Precious Life always within us?
[i] A. H. Almaas, FACETS OF UNITY: The Enneagram of the Holy Ideas (Shambhala: 2002), p. 200