DO YOU BELIEVE IN ZEUS?

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This morning at vigils the reader stumbled over the word "propitiate." So the word caught my attention, and I asked myself "What is the word 'propitiate' doing in a text about our God?"

A dictionary definition of propitiate is "win or regain the favor (of a god, a spirit or a person) by doing something that pleases them."

This is what the Greeks did with "Father Zeus" and the other residents of Mount Olympus: one had to do all sorts of things to keep the gods happy and avoid their wrath -- one had to propitiate them.

Coincidentally, this past week I began reading Richard Rohr's book "Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality." As usual Fr. Rohr is challenging lots of things I thought I knew.  Just as with his book on the trinity, I'm being called to question lots of presuppositions about God.

Here are a few sentences that I highlighted so far:

"It takes all of the Bible to get beyond the punitiveness and pettiness that we project onto God."

"We must know that for most of human history God was not a likable, much less lovable character."

So what about those texts in scripture that portray God as vengeful and needing to be propitiated? Rohr has this image that scriptural revelation proceeds in a certain direction by taking three steps forward and two steps back. Some people mistakenly grab onto the "two steps back" passages and mistake them for the direction that scripture is heading. Rohr writes:

"Our job is to see where the three steps forward texts are heading (invariably toward mercy, forgiveness, inclusion, nonviolence and trust), which gives us the ability to clearly recognize and understand the two steps backward texts (which are usually about vengeance, divine pettiness, law over grace, form over substances and technique over relationship)."

This idea makes a lot of  sense, and certainly helps me to put into perspective the biblical passages that make our God look like Zeus. Still, there's something in us that welcomes the predictability of a God who plays by our rules of  power and punishment, revenge and retribution, and which makes it very hard to let go of the image of God as Zeus. We seem to prefer a God who makes us earn his love and who will stop loving us if we do too many bad things. Preachers of the Good News seldom tell people "God loves you exactly the way you are right now!"

What happens to morality if God loves you no matter what? I have two responses. First, the belief that God punishes evildoers does not seem to be having much of a deterrent effect on potential evildoers at the present moment. Second Fr. Rohr insists that we have things backwards: "It is not that if I am moral I will be loved by God, but rather I must first experience God's love and then I will -- almost naturally -- be moral." 

Lots of things to ponder here. Maybe I'll pursue some of these ideas next week.
Meanwhile, if you find it hard to let go of your "Zeus" picture of God, then just remember: you are made in God's image. So it's important to be sure you've got the right God!