2. Omnipotence and limits.

Similarities and limits.

I remember one day, while getting some children to mime EXODUS, one of them climbed up on the table saying "I'll be God!" The God of the heights, of the divinised chiefs, of the Caesars, Incas and other emperors in Peru, Rome or Japan. God the dictator, 'But the Christian's God is different. He is not above but below. He is on the ground, washing our feet. The Revelation of Jesus Christ turns everything upside down. The identification of God in Jesus Christ, obliges us to rid ourselves of every representation we had of God prior to this Revelation.

The myth of Adam and Eve is a good example. It brings a perpetual experience back to its origins. The worm is in the fruit, as the saying goes; the serpent is in the tree, proclaims the Bible. From the beginning, that is to say, at the origin of all his actions, man is assailed by a fatal doubt: is God after all holding on jealously to His privileges? He imagines a God at the centre of everything, a tyrant, one of those childish representations so criticised by Freud: all powerful, insensitive and self sufficient, a bugbear God, a rival and castrator.

You will be as gods". The first idol is the "ego" which divinises itself by transgressing the symbolic limits where the space of the "other" begins. On one side we find respect and confidence, beyond the limit, conflict and the death of one or the other.

The serpent's treachery stems from the doubt which he instils. "God knows what will happen if you eat the forbidden fruit, if you exceed the limits of the taboo. You will become like him. Then you will be God and He will be nothing. That is why he forbids it."

The taboo limits my desire to be all powerful. It can be an irritant, as it is the line of demarcation beyond which the other's space begins. If I go beyond this line, I deny the other who is symbolically killed. The majority of violent acts have their origin in this transgression: the invasion of one nation by another, a shooting to kill, rape, the abusive authority of some parents, the want of respect for nature, leading to ruin and degradation.

"You will be as gods". This promise by the serpent means that man desires to rule without limit. But by so doing, he enters into a kind of madness which can only lead to disillusionment. A return to reality, and in particular to the status of the human condition is a painful process.

As the Bible indicates, relationship with the other is lived out in the wake of the Fall: conflict between man and woman; painful childbirth, work on the land by the sweat of one's brow.

The perverse thing, and the essence of the serpent's deceit is that he proposes to become God. He uses the same word, but is not speaking about the same God. "You will be as gods" but what gods? He is talking about a phantom god, not about the living God, for in Jesus Christ, the living God reveals Himself as servant and not as a domineering lord; at the feet of his followers and not lording it over them; vulnerable and at their mercy; in no way insensitive nor inaccessible.

The God we imagine and whose place we dream of occupying, the God we can never aspire to be, has become our idol! The Greeks gave us the myth of Prometheus who was placed in chains by the gods for stealing the fire to give to men. The Greek gods were jealous. The God of the Bible is said to be jealous, but He is not. He is sad at the ravages brought about by error or Original Sin. There is nothing wrong with humanity's desire to stretch scientifically or technologically the limits of its knowledge or of its power. On the other hand, the desire to escape from its creature status is the cause of its self destruction, of its mortal ruin, of its more or less collective suicide. It bumps its head against the walls, and dispairing of an exit, creates its own hell.

In Christ's perspective, would it be inconceivable to aim at being "God"? On the contrary! The Bible is constantly referring to this. For example, Psalm 94 mentions the repose of God into which we are invited. Jesus Christ expressly wishes that we should share His life: "That they may be one in us". Jesus invites us to share in the divine condition. When he is reproached "for making himself God", He cites the Scripture and shows that those who listen to the Word, are children of God. On these lines, all orthodox theology expresses itself in terms of the creature's divinisation, both by prayer and by the sacraments. "God became Man so that man might become God" wrote St. Ireneus, adding, "The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is to see God"

But let's get back to the sense of the myth. When I place myself in a central and superior position, in the position of God so to speak, l am straightway into a conflict situation. It begins with the man woman conflict. A single centre presupposes that one of the two, either the man or the woman, must serve the other. Theology has repercussions straightway in the social, political and even in the ecological order. If there is only one absolute person, we are in opposition to a Triune God, to community. We are tyrants, not communion people.

If in opposition to a Trinity living the one love, unity in diversity, where the relationship calls for and constitutes the person, if I represent God as an old man seated on his throne, lording it over all, exacting obedience and punishing accordingly, I am allying myself with masochistic brute violence.

As long as this perverse representation is maintained, there is no solution to the conflict that opposes man to woman, parents to children, man to his work. If "I" am alone at the centre, my wife is obliged to serve me, my children must be like me and conform to my desires in their regard. They must not escape me by introducing difference or otherness which could wound my narcissism. It is understandable that childbirth in the literal, but also in the figurative sense is a painful experience. Thus, just as man affirms himself by setting himself by force in the place of this imagined Deity, and by transgressing the symbolical taboo, likewise the children generate themselves by the various transgressions they allow themselves, following the example of the "paterfamilias"

Subsequently, brothers pursue this conflict for, in order that there be one centre only, one absolute, the other must give in. Cain killed Abel through jealousy, because he was not like him. Eventually, nature itself becomes a limit to the desire for self domination. It resists in face to face confrontation, imposing constraints. It is met with stubborn resistance and matters become difficult. Adam earns his bread by the sweat of his brow.

Thus the problem is not so much one of words, but of the meaning behind the words. What kind of beer is underneath the froth? When I say "God", when the serpent says "God", when Caesar calls himself "God", when Christ says "God", what God are we talking about? The word "God" then, encompasses all kinds of different realities! Would excluding the word "God" from our dictionaries eliminate the ambiguities? Our present civilisation banishes questions of its cultural references, but will the question of God automatically go away? Can we really pose the question of God's existence without pronouncing the word God? The "drama of atheistic humanism" proves convincingly that we cannot. By risking to use the word "God", we risk also using its opposite, its caricature, namely "idol" another word to which it might be useful to accord its rightful meaning.

The word is hardly ever used now, but that does not mean that modem idols do not exist. In the thick jungle of modem representations of God; in the New Age cacophony, the sects, the gnosis, in the confrontation of different religions, small or great, secular or not... who is "my" God? "In whom have I put my faith"? "How can I render an account of the hope that is in me"? "Who is the One whom my heart loves"? He for whom I am ready to lay down my life? He whom I adore, He whom I serve, He on whom I count fundamentally, He who I know will never let me down, at least never definitively, who I know will raise me up...? Who is he, "my" God, "your" God?

My God... I may as well state it right away... my God is above all else relation. He is relational, He is the relation: "a" relation in the sense that I can say of a friend that he is someone to whom I am related, but more fundamentally still, God is "The" relation. And we are invited to enter into that relationship which God is.

How can the odd creature that I am, find his truth, his image and resemblance to God, without a restoration of the fundamental relationship with the One who is at once his first beginning and his last end? What road brings him there if not the narrow road of suffering the road of vulnerability? The way of the Cross alone leads to true exchange, in a reciprocal relationship.

Whose vulnerability? Certainly not man's: losing the battle, he would only wallow still further in resentment. In the spiritual battle, it is God who emerges as Victor. We see this in the case of Jacob at the ford of Yabbok. "You will be called Israel because you fought against God". It is God's vulnerability, truly an intellectual and existential scandal, which explodes the alienating idea of a false divinity, at the same time freeing the person from a perverse and deadly theology. For according to the admirable saying of Saint Maxime the Confessor: "Man will only submit under the weight of God's extreme humiliation." Submerged in God's vulnerability, that of man ceases to be a fault. In the measure in which God assumes the human condition, man comes to term with his limitations and enters into relationship, a relationship which is the very life of God. God is not a proud and distrustful solitary. He is not hemmed in to a violent madness. He is community. God has refused to be the idol. Jesus, the true image of the Father, manifests this in his very person: he does not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, an inalienable right!

For having put himself in the place of God, man becomes inhuman. And in order that this failed superman might discover the true God, God had to show him what a man really is. God had to become man and assume the human condition with all its limitations - even the most difficult - that of suffering and death. In order that man might recover his humanity, someone had to show him what a man really is and how man can become authentically divine. Not only become "as" God, but radically become God!