‘One day we shall see face to face.’ So says Paul (1 Corinthians 13.12). Our present puzzlement, we are told, will be replaced by something better. Paul goes so far as to say that we shall know in full, in the kind of way that God knows us. We may feel that that is even more puzzling than our present understanding, particularly if we remember that Moses’ face shone after he had been talking with God (Exodus 34.29). Unnerving, you might say. Unnerving perhaps but something worth thinking about when we attempt to understand God’s design for his creatures’ destiny.
In our more modest, everyday terms the pandemic has obliged us to consider this question in terms of being denied face to face contact in or around places of worship. We have joined in online worship and found that there is something missing. It is an experience of togetherness, of social interchange. It is part of being human that we commonly take for granted. We only give thought to it when it goes missing.
Having just been on the phone to one of our national institutions, I came away with a feeling of exhaustion. I had been going through the hoops, selecting one number after another, never finding quite the option that I needed, until at last I made contact with a human being. It was an exercise in abnegation. I was reduced to being not a person but a number.
Seeing face to face contributes to our humanity. We are less than human when have mechanical or electronic substitutes. If we extrapolate the other way and endeavour to imagine face to face contact of a more powerful kind altogether, we are on the way to enlarging our conception of our Maker and Redeemer. It is, I suppose, a question of scale. It happens when I turn to ‘Paradise Lost’ and its cosmic perspectives. We turn away in awe. Even Milton’s take on the Eden event cannot wholly engage our imagination.
Medieval man, who was much better at some things than we are, coined the phrase ‘beatific vision’, taking his cue from Matthew 5.8. We can give our ultimate destiny a name but with John Newton we hardly dare contemplate an experience that is ten thousand years in the making.
DIFFERENT NOW
Liz England, Team Rector of Buxton, has a telling meditation on the church website on the theme of ‘Different now’. The overwhelming changes in the church of recent years are taken account of and the poem ends on a note of confidence in an unchanging God.
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