Psalm 27
7 “Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud;
be gracious to me and answer me!
8 “Come,” my heart says, “seek his face!”
Your face, LORD, do I seek.
9 Do not hide your face from me.
Last week I was listening to an interview with theologian Geoff Holsclaw who works in the intersection of theology and neuro-science—specifically with attachment theory. In the interview he discussed how children become attached in healthy and unhealthy ways to their parents and what this might suggest about our relationship with God.
He made a few interesting comments about children and their parents’ faces and how that might relate to our relationship with God:
* Typically from birth to around nine months, the eyesight of children is scanning to find faces, especially eyes.
* Humans are one of the few species that have white in their eyes. This allows us to lock eyes with another person and it allows us to have joint attention to other things while we are making eye contact. (If you are talking with someone and they suddenly look over your shoulder, it’s virtually impossible for you to keep from turning around to take a peak at what they are looking at.)
* Locking eyes and seeing faces is key to infant development.
* Holsclaw gave this example: Say you are at a friend’s house for the first time with your 8 month old. Your friend has a cat and your child has never seen a cat before. The cat makes a sudden movement and your child is scared. What does the child inevitably do? It looks to you to know how to feel and react in the situation. If you are not scared, their panic will decrease. But if you are scared, the child’s fear will increase. In other words, the parent is the person the child looks at to understand their environment and how to respond to it.
* Holsclaw then makes the point that the Scriptures are keyed into this when it comes to our relationship with God our Father. The psalms reference the face of God repeatedly. “I lift my eyes to the hills, where my help comes from.” Or most famously the Aaronic blessing in Numbers 6:24-26, “The Lord bless you
and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”
* Holsclaw concludes that it is God’s face that we are to look to in order to know the condition of our situation, just as a child looks to the faces of its mother and father.
I really love this. It’s beautiful and true. But something hit me as I was listening to the interview. What does it mean to “seek God’s face”? What do we mean when we tell people to “seek the face of God”? It is pretty abstract and vague. It can mean almost anything and so is in danger of meaning nothing.
As a cradle Pentecostal I grew up thinking it meant something like locking myself in a room, putting worship music on and reading the Bible, hoping tears come. To seek God’s face was about cultivating feelings of love and devotion in your heart.
I think this gets right to the heart of one of our issues today: we have so interiorized our relationship with God and made it primarily about our hearts.
To bring it back to the example of a child finding the face of their parent—I can’t help but notice these are two different movements. The child is panicked and so it looks outside of itself to the face of the parent. But when we think of seeking God’s face we think of a movement into ourselves. The child is looking at something concrete. They have a place to look. But with God do we have any place to look? Or does it remain an abstraction?
And this question occurred to me as I was listening to that interview: Do we really think God has a face that we can see or not? Is this language of seeking God’s face a mere metaphor or is it really true in some sense (even if it is mysterious)?
The psalms seem to suggest that he does have a face we can see. Other places in scripture talk about the “eyes of God” or the “hands of God” or, famously, Moses could only see the “back of God.”
I learned this first from Robert Jenson. He makes the point using Ezekiel’s vision. In his vision Ezekiel sees one “like a son of man” sitting on God’s throne. In other words, he sees someone who looks like a human.
So, Jenson asks: If the man on the throne in Ezekiel is not an actual man but merely a symbol or picture or something of the sort, then it is anthropomorphic language—presenting God as if he were a man although he isn’t. In that case, this language of God’s “face/hands/back” would be nothing more than a relic of ancient paganism and needs to be explained away. And that’s what most modern theology and biblical scholarship has tried to do.
God doesn’t really have a back, or hands and feet, or eyes to see, or a face that can be seen. This is all just metaphorical language for something else.
I asked Chris Green (one of Jenson’s students) about what Jenson meant in all this. This was his response:
There’s a difference between reading it figuratively (as merely a metaphor for something else) and reading it mysteriously, spiritually. When we talk about God’s back, for example, we can say (and [Jenson] himself does say) that there are “sides” to our knowledge of God. But we don’t know which God we’re talking about unless we have first said that God actually has a back—and it was whipped.
So, if I say, “Now, God doesn’t really have a back; this is just a figure of speech to refer to the limits of human knowledge,” then I am dealing not with the God of Jesus but a god I’ve dreamed up.
Let’s put this back into the question of the psalms and “seeking God’s face.” If we take the language of “seeking God’s face” as a mere metaphor for trying hard to be genuine in our devotion to God, then we aren’t talking about the God of Jesus yet.
In fact, we are forgetting the central confession of our faith: that the second person of the trinity, the eternal Son of God, is a man who does have a back that was whipped and a face that can be seen.
The account of the transfiguration makes the point. Peter, James, and John see Jesus transfigured, he is shining with God’s own light—because he is God’s own light. Now, did Peter, James, and John really see the face of God or was this a mere metaphor for something else? This makes the point sharper.
God has a face and as Paul says clearly in 2 Corinthians 4:6 “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”
But this is mysterious. God has a face because God is incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. But where do we see Jesus’ face?
Again, we have been conditioned to think that our relationship with God is purely a private, interior reality that is never mediated to us. But that’s just not how this God works. God mediates his face through his creation—through us.
The New Testament makes this point over and over again (see 2 Cor. 1:19 or 1 Thess. 2:13). Listen to the way Peter speaks to his congregations about seeing God:
Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
(1 Peter 1:8–9)
Peter does say that they have not seen him, and yet they love him. Of course they haven’t seen him like Peter did. But they have seen him. How? Through the witness of Peter. How did these people who had never seen Jesus fall in love with Jesus? They know Peter. They’ve seen Peter. They’ve seen Jesus in Peter. After all, Peter is a member of Jesus’ body!
Jesus is filling up the whole world with himself, beginning with his body, the church. If you want to see Jesus you have to find his body. You have to put your body in the right place to see him. Or as Jenson says,
In Paul’s general conceptual discourse, a person’s body is that person’s own self as he is available to others: it is his visibility and audibility and tangibility...In Paul’s language, to say that the church is the body of the risen Christ is straightforwardly to affirm that the church is his availability in and for the world. Would you now see Christ? View this gathering called the church—and blessed is he who is not offended by what he sees. Would you now come to him? Join them.
To see Jesus you find his body. And there you will find the preaching of the word (you will hear him). You will find the bread and wine on the communion table (you will see him, touch him, and taste him). And you will find a little group of people gathered around these things, and these people Jesus calls his body.
God does have a face. It is the face of Jesus. But Jesus’s face is not a million miles away in heaven. It is right here with us. We have to be trained to see it. It isn’t straightforward, but it is true.
How do you seek the face of God? You seek the face of Jesus. How do you seek the face of Jesus? You come near to the people who know him.
As Paul says to the Corinthians:
16 But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, who with unveiled faces reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
(2 Cor. 3:16–18)
Jesus is the face of God and you and I are made to become the face of Jesus. If my vision is trained correctly, I can see the Lord Jesus in you because you are reflecting his face to me.
We are called to seek the face of the Lord. But we can only do that because God first turned his face toward us in the face of his Son, Jesus Christ. This means he is a strange God, indeed. He is a God who actually has a face.
Our God can be seen, touched, heard, smelled, and tasted. Because our God is Jesus. As Chris Green says, “He’s somebody. He has a body!” And you have been included into it.
Gerard Manley Hopkins “As kingfishers catch fire”
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves--goes its self; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
