The King and I

Monday in Easter Week:
AM Psalm 93, 98 • PM Psalm 66
Jonah 2:1-9 • Acts 2:14,22-32 or 1 Cor. 15:1-11 • John 14:1-14

A useful activity for Sunday School—or Adult Forum—might be to draw a picture of what God looks like.

In Psalm 93, the first of today’s two morning psalms, the psalmist renders God as a magnificently robed, strong, eternal King, who has created an unmovable world.

1 The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty;

the Lord is robed; he is girded with strength.

He has established the world; it shall never be moved;

2 your throne is established from of old;

you are from everlasting.

Though this image of God is compelling, I can’t say that this is what God looks like all the time, or even what God looks like at all. Further, despite what we say in the “Our Father,” issues of gender may not tell the whole story when experiencing God. I am proud to belong to a church in which some members can refer to God as our mother.

But to return to Psalm 93, if God the king is “robed in majesty,” then what exactly does majesty look like? When I was a boy, I imagined God as an old man wearing robes of sumptuous purple velvet. The look and feel and luxuriousness of the robes were enough to connote majesty. Merriam Webster’s on-line definitions of majesty include “sovereign power, authority, or dignity…. royal bearing …. greatness or splendor of quality or character.”

But doesn’t the poorest man, woman, or child also have a certain dignity? A certain quality or character? A certain majesty?

In Luke 9:48, Jesus says: “Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me, for the least among all of you is the greatest.”

To be “the greatest” sounds like majesty to me. And I don’t know how many of those children are wearing sumptuous purple robes.

The point is not that Luke is right and the psalmist is wrong, but rather that both the psalmist and Matthew render majesty or the greatest at a particular point at a particular time for a particular purpose.

They see God from different perspectives.

The word majestic, a form of majesty, shows up later in Psalm 93 when the psalmist says that God’s majesty is even greater than mighty waters and waves of the sea. In verse 4 alone, the word majestic shows up three times, in case we miss the point:

3 The floods have lifted up, O Lord,

the floods have lifted up their voice;

the floods lift up their roaring.

4 More majestic than the thunders of mighty waters,

more majestic than the waves of the sea,

majestic on high is the Lord!

I am reminded of a prayer ascribed to Breton fishermen, a prayer on a small plaque on the desk of John F. Kennedy (and on my Facebook page):

Oh Lord, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.

Consider, too, that today’s reading from the Old Testament concerns a man who has been swallowed by a great fish at the bottom of the sea.

Jung posits we project onto other people, places, and things possessed of qualities, abilities, or images (for good or ill) which we are unable to deal with inside ourselves. If God or aspects of God are within us (as some would suggest) then we might project those aspects—such as a king on a throne--onto something that appears at first glance to be outside ourselves.

My own work in comparative literature has included the study of Jungian archetypes—infinitely small points of energy that Jung asserts are within everyone. Depending on culture and circumstance, clustered around these points are specific archetypal images. Useful to my studies has been a book by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.

These days, mention of anything that is masculine (let alone mature masculine) rightly raises questions. My teacher John Locke might ask: what do you mean by masculine? What do you mean by mature? My own ideas on what is masculine and feminine have continued to evolve over the years. Labels such as masculine and feminine might be useful if considered in all their fluidity, but ultimately it is a fair and important question to ask whether such labels are useful at all. If we say God is a (masculine) king, and leave it at that, we might be missing a lot. And our missing something can be harmful.

There are a number of constructs which posit feminine archetypes corresponding to those listed in Moore and Gillette’s book. Not only has Jean Shinoda Bolen written a book called Gods in Every Man, but also, she has written one called Gods in Every Woman. These amalgams of psychological archetypal images are not, I would argue, definitive or static. Rather, they give us a provisional way of talking about men and women—ways that, again as John Locke might say, are useful when they are useful, and are not when they are not.

I would suggest these images also can be useful when experiencing God.

Consider the archetypal image of God in Psalm 93, the God who is robed in majesty. Elsewhere in the Bible, God is a warrior. In other places, God’s is a magician—not someone on stage who performs cheap tricks, but someone with extraordinary transformative power. And in at least one other place, “The Song of Solomon,” God, as Jesus, is considered by some to be a loving bridegroom.

One of Joseph Campbell’s ideas is that each culture, through its religion(s), tries to come to terms with the essence of the universe. Imagine a chart on which is drawn a circle. At points around the perimeter of the circle are Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and other religions. An arrow points from each religion toward the center of the circle, the center representing the essence of the universe, which is empty on the chart, because it is unknowable.

It is not that all religions are alike, and certainly not as some assert, in a strawman argument, that Christianity is a “copycat religion.” But all religions do ask some of the same questions, even if they don’t provide, at least at first glance, the same God(s).

So to return to Psalm 93, we know there is more to God than a king whose majesty is even greater than crashing waves and floodwaters. Projecting that image onto God gives us an important, though by no means exclusive, way of experiencing God.

Failure to consider the fluid possibilities of archetypal images of God could harm our relationship with God.

And with our children.

I wonder what those pictures drawn in Sunday school would look like.

Written by James Gamble

James Gamble celebrates Opening Day in Baseball, when every team, including his own Cincinnati Reds, is in First place.