Imagine God, the great God of the Universe, coming into the room where you are sitting. He bends down and starts taking off your shoes, then your socks, and he starts rubbing your feet. He takes a washrag and begins washing your feet, getting between the toes, cleaning out lint and dirt, caressing your feet and toes. In shock, you grab his hands and say, “Wait! You can’t do this. You created me, and how can I let you do this?” He gazes into your eyes and says, “If you don’t let me, you’ve missed the point of life.” And God continues to rub your feet and clean your toes.
Have you ever thought of God like that?
What is God like? Even more important than the question of whether there is a God is the question of “What is he like?” I have some astonishing news for you about what he is like, and I have it on good authority.
What is God like?
God is like a woman with a soup tin in her hand and a bloated child at her side. He is like a man serving a life prison term for a crime he did not commit. He is like a dear friend at the funeral of your son, the only one who knows how you feel because she lost her son, too. He is like the man on death row. He is like the child on the streets of Rio de Janeiro or Calcutta, orphaned and starving for love and food. God is the lady in a nursing home whose family never comes to visit her. God is the criminal who bears the shame of his crime. God is the prostitute who longs for love and runs so fast from her pain she is running too fast to find love. God is the despicable creature whom everyone looks at in disgust.
Can you imagine God like that? Do you think I am committing blasphemy and heresy? What authority am I using for these pictures of God?
My authority is the teacher who transformed the world. Although his message has been glossed over and dismissed, his piercing pictures and shocking stories are what our world so desperately needs. This teacher is Jesus of Nazareth, and according to him, these are the clearest pictures of what God is like. According to both Jesus’ words and actions, God is so aligned with the sick and suffering, the hungry and unloved, the grieving and troubled, and even the criminals and crooks, that God’s closest resemblance here on earth are these lonely, neglected, outcast people (see, e.g., Matthew 25:31-46).
God is the one who is continuously accused but accuses no one. God is the one who would rather suffer the pain of love than take away our freedom to choose his love. God is the one who prepares the food and cleans the dishes, changes the diapers, and takes out the trash. God is the one who serves a sentence for crimes he did not commit. God is the one who holds his children after they destroy themselves. God is the one who pronounces the judgment knowing all the time he will take the punishment for the crime. God is a Servant—that is his very nature (Philippians 2:5-11).
According to Jesus, if you don’t see God as this Servant, washing your feet, you have missed God and missed out on life. Jesus says that if you do not let the God of love come and serve you, you have misunderstood this life. Unless I realize I need God to wash my dirty feet and clean my dirty laundry, then I cannot move past my past nor do I have hope for the future. Everything depends on this type of God. If God is not like this, then we have no hope.
But the overwhelmingly good news is that is precisely the nature of the God revealed in Jesus, a God who has forever bound himself to us humans. As theologian Thomas Torrance wrote, “It is above all through the incarnation, the Word of God become flesh, that God reveals to us something of his own nature as the mighty living God who he eternally is and yet who will not be without us whom he has created for fellowship with himself and with whom he freely shares his own divine Life and Light and Love.”[1] Jesus of Nazareth transformed the world over the last 20 centuries, and his revelation of God is as relevant and critical today as at any time in history. This, at last, is the God who is forever aligned with us, who does not exercise power from above in an impersonal way, but whose power works “in an intensely personal patient way from below, by penetrating into the dark disordered depths of our alienated creaturely existence in order to work savingly, healingly and preservingly within it.”[2]
[1] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 238.
[2] Ibid, 222.