Facing God

AM Psalm 30, 32 • PM Psalm 42, 43
Ezek. 39:21-29 • Phil. 4:10-20 • John 17:20-26

Your face is amazing. So of course is every part of your body, and every part of the bodies of everything living, but your face has traits that make it distinctively human and, in the context of today’s readings, an especially useful means of expressing our relation to our God.

The face has a great variety of muscles, arguably the densest concentration on your body for the area that it occupies. Those muscles are mostly unconnected to facial bones. They are essentially free-floating. That freedom to move in concert with their many neighbors allows uncountable combinations of movement. Those two traits permit our astounding range of expressions, which makes the face also a means of communication second only to our voice. A great actor is a great facial athlete, speaking to us with the subtlest and most nuanced movements of those many muscles floating on the front of the skull. And we all can testify of what can happen when an emailed comment does not have our face to show that it is not literal but ironic or joking.

The face is not just distinctively human in structure and use. Faces are almost by definition distinctive to individuals. (Thus the facial recognition on my iPhone, something I will forever think of as a kind of sorcery.) This, plus the face’s power to communicate, makes it the ultimate human connector. Think of looking openly into the face of the person you love most deeply as that person looks openly into yours. It is as intimate as we can be without touching.

All this makes the face a powerful metaphor for expressing relationships. In the passage from Ezekiel, God tells of turning God’s face from the Israelites because of their uncleanness and transgressions. With that they were sent into bondage among heathens, but I wonder whether the deeper wound was their thought of their God turning God’s head and looking away, a denial of intimacy, as when a beloved or a parent or a dear friend turns away in anger or disappointment. And I wonder whether God’s turning back was as cathartic as their freedom from bondage.

Through Ezekiel God promises: “I will no longer hide my face from them.” In our gospel reading from John, Jesus seems, albeit rather indirectly, to confirm this. He implores God to accept those who follow him as God’s own, just as Jesus is God’s own and has been from the start of time. He asks, in effect, for God to keep God’s intimate gaze on us all. As we follow the story to its end, we know that that is just what we all are promised.

I think of our prayer: “The Lord make his face to shine upon you.” Thank God for that.

Written by Elliott West

Elliott is emeritus professor of history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than thirty years.