Absconditus

Propers: The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 13), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Whoever welcomes you welcomes Me, and whoever welcomes Me welcomes the One who sent Me.

There are certain stories, certain ideas, certain myths, that seem hardwired into our bones from the very moment of our birth; myths found across time, place, and culture; myths common to all of humanity. Maybe they’re programmed into our genes. Maybe they emerge from Jung’s collective unconscious. Or maybe we all just instinctively sense certain eternal, elemental, primordial truths, simply by dint of having a soul.

These are the stories so old that we have to wonder: Did humanity weave these myths, or did these myths weave humanity? And few such stories can claim an elder lineage than that of the Deus Absconditus—“the Hidden God”.

You can find “hidden god” stories all over the place. In the pagan myths of Germany and Scandinavia, for example, Odin, the one-eyed king of the gods, disguises himself as an old man in order to travel the world and keep secret tabs upon humanity. Those who show hospitality to a wizened old wanderer shall find themselves blessed; but those who present the stranger with mockery and cruelty shall discover that they have provoked the wrath of Odin himself—and suffer the consequences!

The moral of the story, of course, is to be kind to (or perhaps wary of) the guest in your midst. You never know when you’ll be hosting a god cloaked in vulnerability. To this day we often imagine wizards as old men concealing great power beneath the pointed hat, weathered robes, and cascading frosty beard of Odin.

It wasn’t just the pagans who recounted such myths, of course. In the Middle Ages, faeries were said to do much the same thing. Long before Disney, the story of Beauty and the Beast wove the cautionary tale of an arrogant, powerful, vain young prince who treated an ugly, elderly woman with scorn. Lo and behold, that hag revealed herself as an aethereal faerie in disguise. And she cursed the prince to have a countenance as beastly as his wicked, shriveled heart.

So remember, boys and girls: You’d best show respect for those vulnerable souls who cast themselves at your mercy. Judge not by appearances. The outer shell so often veils the true and mighty being within. The same theme crops up in the plays of Shakespeare and legends of the Crusades: kings and dukes in disguise, meandering amongst the common folk, meeting out an unexpected justice upon the unwary.

This tradition of the hidden divine being continues unabated in our own popular culture; because today, ladies and gentlemen, we have superheroes. And every good hero maintains a secret identity, does he not? Superman passes his civilian days as mild-mannered Midwesterner Clark Kent. My favorite has long been Dr Robert Bruce Banner, the skinny, quiet, bookish drifter who seems the perfect target for a mugging or back-alley beating. But don’t make him angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

Notice that in every one of these stories, from pagan gods to gamma-irradiated goliaths, the ancient, primal conviction remains: that gods walk among us unseen. It’s as if humanity has always suspected, and even feared, that behind everyday faces and the eyes of strangers lurks a harsh and hidden holiness: the power to bless and to curse; the power to reward the just and the loving, and to exact righteous indignation upon the wicked.

So what now must we do with this universal, gut-deep conviction? Is it for us a source of dread or of relief, of joy or of fear? Is it a comfort or a caution or both? I leave that for you to decide, my dear Christians, for those ancient pagan dreams have all come true—the archetype reaches its perfection—in Jesus Christ our Lord. The myth of the Hidden God is real.

Where is Christ for us today? We confess that He has conquered all, earth and heaven and hell, and sits now at the right hand of the Father, as our High Priest, Advocate, King, and Judge. Hallelujah! Christus Victor! Yet He is also present here, is He not? Christ is with us still, here in this community, this Church; this assemblage of sainted sinners made one as His Body, one by His Spirit. Christ is alive in His Christians.

We come here to receive Him, to lay before Him our sins, and ever to be reborn in His forgiveness. We encounter Him in Word and in Sacrament, in the Gospel rightly preached and the Eucharist rightly administered. Here He pours out into us all of His promises, all of His graces, all of His infinite life, so that we are made one with Him in Name, in Spirit, in Body and Blood, in His death and His Resurrection. It is mystical and visceral at once.

We are made one in Christ as Christ. And then we are sent out to be Christ for the world! That might be the most important part of all, the sending—literally the Mass—because the world needs Jesus, longs for Him, groans in agony for Christ. And He chooses to hide Himself in us, that He might then be revealed in us: in the love that we share, the promise we give, the grace that we live. All of that is His work manifested in our flesh. We poor sinners are His Incarnation now.

And it works the other way too, mind you. For just as He has chosen us to reveal Him to the world, so He meets us out in the world, at the edges of society, in our neighbor, even in our enemies. Christ is there in them; He waits for us in them. In the words of John the Golden-Mouthed: If we cannot find Christ in the beggar at the door, we shall not find Him in the chalice at the altar.

God is hidden in His Church, and hidden in His world. Conversely, He is revealed in His Church, and revealed in His world. All of us are Christ, and Christ is all of us. If you thought that a faerie, or a wizard, or a great green Hulk in disguise was a tall tale, then hold onto your hats. For here indeed is the Almighty God, the Creator of All, revealed and Incarnate in a scraggly desert-wandering Rabbi in from off the Galilee.

And even if we can accept that, even if we can take on faith that Christ is God and Man, we must then go farther and try to believe that Jesus lives in us, dwells in us, unworthy as we are, and beloved as we are. And as that love burns deep inside our bones, we have no choice but to live it out, to ladle it out, for a world in need of Him. We must decrease, and Christ in us must increase. For in so doing we become more ourselves than we have ever been.

This is the ultimate Deus Absconditus: the Most High God dwelling in pots of clay, promising us that we are now infinity in a nutshell. It’s hard to wrap your head around. We barely dare believe it. Yet once we do, once we begin to see Christ within our neighbor and even in ourselves, it changes everything, kills us and makes us alive again. Baptism is death and resurrection every day. And that’s what makes a Christian.

You see then, my brothers and sisters, that this whole “Hidden God” thing cuts both ways. It’s not that Jesus Christ is the façade, the mild alter ego of the true God within. It’s that, in many ways, the glorious God of our imagination is the façade. Jesus is the true face of the God whom we have worshipped since Adam in the Garden. And it is His very nature, His very Godhood, to work in quiet, subtle, hidden, humble, loving and merciful ways.

We do not always see Him. Sometimes we catch but a glimpse. Yet He is always here, always with us, always walking by our side and sharing in our lives. He weeps with us in all our pain, laughs with us in our joys, and is ever working deep within to bring us home in Him.

He is the One of whom we have dreamt since before we broke the womb. He is the Deus Absconditus, the Hidden God among us. And He is with us, right beside us, deep within us, even now. For some that is a fearful truth, but for us it is infinite joy. For the same God who is hidden in Christ is revealed in Him as well. Go therefore and do the same, giving as we have received, for together we are Christ for the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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