15 June – god on not quite being there
Trinity Sunday
15/6/2025
Romans 5:1-5
Psalm 8
John 1:1-13
I remarked last week that “spirit” is the second most useless word we have in Christian-speak, and also that “religion” is our third most useless word. To complete the set, I remind you of what I’ve also previously said: that the most useless word we have is “god”, to which we’ll return a little later.
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Our psalmist this morning marvels that the human being seems to feature so centrally in the divine ordering of the world: “What are humans that you are mindful of them?”
But we might ourselves wonder, What indeed, is the human? To be sure, as the psalmist sings, we apparently “have dominion” over the world. But what kind of dominion? What are we with our politics and economics, our passions and desires, our loves and our prejudices, our vigour and our mortality, our potentials, our failures, our innocence and our culpability? What holds all this together? What the human is and what it feels like to be human can change with the hours. If we were to “think” the human, what image comes to mind?
What is the human, when we care to be mindful of it? This is less clear than it might first seem, so that perhaps “human” is our fourth most useless faith-word.
Let’s hold that thought for a moment as we turn to the first verses of John’s Gospel, which I’ve set next to our psalmist’s wonder. In fact, it’s only the first few words of John we’ll consider closely: “In the beginning was the Word”.
This sounds like a rather straightforward declaration, something like “the first thing was the Word”. But taking the text as it presents itself, while we don’t know what “the Word” is yet, we must see that whatever it is, this Word is not the first thing. The Word is that through which all things come into being, but it is not itself a thing. Or, if we insist that the Word must be “something”, it is not the same kind of thing as every other thing. Or, to put it differently again, if created things are “there”, we might say that the Word is not quite there.
The Word with which John begins is a not-quite-there not-thing. This makes it quite difficult to think the Word, for we must think something which is not a thing – we must think a no-thing (…“nothing”…).
And it gets worse (but only so that it might get better, so bear with me!).
This first not-thing is evocatively named “the Word”. But the thing about words is that there are no single, unique, isolated words. Every word floats on a sea of other words. Any word that does not have a dictionary-load of other words that give it contextual sense is not a word at all; it’s just a noise. And John does not say, as the physicist might, In the beginning was static.
So, while he seems to declare that the Word is the no-thing before all things, if it is a word – a thing spoken, a thing sensible – then there must be other words as well. Or, we might say, the Word suggests not a thing spoken, but a conversation. Necessarily, this conversation itself is also not a thing, because there aren’t any things “yet”. But if John’s before-all-things no-thing is “the Word”, this Word must have had something even before it, a different no-thing which is not the Word and without which the Word could not be itself (as Word). This no-thing before the Word speaks the one Word in such a way that the Word has sense – in such a way that the Word is not the first no-thing – but can be the no-thing by which all things come into being.
Now, I’m going to stop there not, because it’s not fun to say such circularly silly things but to draw attention precisely to the silliness, because it touches upon a kind of divine nonsense at the heart of Christian confession of God. This is a meaninglessness like the meaninglessness we’ve touched upon a few times lately – the meaninglessness of not having a location. The Word, and the one who speaks the Word, don’t have a location in the usual sense. There is nothing – no-thing within which they fit. God has no “in”. The God of Christian faith is not-quite-there because this God is a “thing” like no other thing we know. This is a God who is before all things, and after them, and perhaps even between them, but is not one of those things.
This is where the word “God’ begins to manifest its deep uselessness to Christian faith-talk: we tend to assume that God is a thing like every other thing and then struggle over where – or whether – the God-thing can be found among all the other things. But this is not to look for God at all, but for an idol – a thing in the world which could not have been before it and could not be after it.
If we wanted to, we could press all this into a fuller exposition of the kind of no-thing which God is, and see roughly how this accords with the trinitarian confession, in deference to this particular day in the church’s calendar.
But let it be enough to hear that we tend to mistake the kind of thing the word “God” points to. And, with that in mind, let’s get go back to our poet’s, “What are humans that you are mindful of them?”
How silly, he proclaims: how marvellous; what a wonder!
But this is not only wonder at the place of the human in God’s eyes. It is the conviction and wonder that it is indeed God’s eyes that see us in this way. Not us but God is the miracle here: God sees us like this, and so this is what we are.
Why does this matter? Because when God looks at us, what God sees is an “image” of God’s own self, of God’s own being (Genesis 1.27f). How does a thing image a no-thing? We image God in the mode of not quite being “there”, of no longer quite being “things”.
As God is not quite there, so also are we not quite there. There is a no-thingliness about us, as there is about God. We are properly more (or, we could just as well say, less) than all the things we touch and use and love and fear. We are not merely our chemistry or biology, our impulses or our effects, our loves or our loathings. These things are part of us, but there is a crucial no-thingness about us – a “dimension” which doesn’t match the mere thingliness of the rest of the world.
This means that, properly, we can’t say what we are in worldly terms, in the same way that God cannot be said in worldly terms.
This is a bit different from where we started, when I suggested that we struggle to sort the many things we are into an order, to say finally what we are. We struggle in this because we tend to think only in terms of the confusing array of things we do and are done to us, and then try to make sense of them.
But the mistake here – the sin, even – is to imagine that we can calculate ourselves, that we can reduce ourselves here to mere cogs operating according to complex laws and that there is somewhere a hidden solution to all we feel is unresolved about ourselves.
Everything we do and everything which is done to us is, indeed, part of us. And matters.
But we are more than this. There is a proper “not yet” about us, an appropriate “not quite there-ness”, an unthinkable-ness, a built-in incompleteness which is our being in but also somehow “above” everything else. This above-ness originates in God’s distinction from all things but being for all things. And it has its worldly reality in our distinction from each other, while also being given to be there for each other. We cannot say what we are, we are not-quite-there yet, because there is another not-quite-there sitting next to us who needs us or can give us what we need. And this is our incomplete completeness.
The word “God” is the most useless of all our religious – and non-religious – words unless, when we say it, it sets us free from ourselves – from our fears and anxieties, our calculations and controls – and, in all this, overcomes our distance from the God who is not quite there and opens us up to the not-yet-there other who shares this world with us.
It all sounds pretty complicated, I suppose, but this is not because God is complicated but rather because we have made ourselves so, imagining God wrongly and so getting ourselves wrong.
To put it all more simply, as John the Evangelist does: Love. Love one another, and everything else will fall into place, and you will be complete.
This is the God in and by which we live and move and have our being.