INTRODUCTION
I do not know about you, but I was introduced to the vindictive judge and to what Louw call, a rigid bookkeeper of our mistakes. As I grow up, the image changed, it was an image of a blesser or Father Christmas. (EXPAND ON IMAGES)
The image of God as a vulnerable God is the image we do not emphasis it enough. May be it is because of the myths about vulnerability. The common myth is that within vulnerability there is weakness.
On the contrary, Brown is suggesting that within vulnerability rests an uncommon strength – not the strength of power but of authenticity, not the strength of getting what you want but of being seen, not the strength of imposing one’s will but of being authentic, available, and real”.
When we look at Divine figure however, we do not really want to imagine God as vulnerable.
READ: JEREMIAH 8: 18-22 & 9:1-2
18-22 I drown in grief. I am heartsick.
Oh, listen! Please listen! It is the cry of my dear people reverberating through the country. Is God no longer in Zion? Has the King gone away?
Can you tell me why they flaunt their plaything-gods, their silly, imported no-gods before me?
The crops are in, the summer is over, but for us nothing has changed.
We are still waiting to be rescued.
For my dear broken people, I am heartbroken. I weep, seized by grief.
Are there no healing ointments in Gilead?
Isn’t there a doctor in the house? So why can’t something be done to heal
and save my dear, dear people?
9:1-2, 1-2 I wish my head were a well of water, and my eyes fountains of tears. So I could weep day and night for casualties among my dear, dear people.
THIS IS THE WORD OF THE LORD. AMEN
Yet! In this scripture, we see the image of God with tears, the God who weeps for His people through Jeremiah. Classen in her book, Mourner, Mother, Midwife put it this way, “the image of the God who weeps, speaks to people in a way that few others images are able to.”
God desire more than anything to be connected to us, to be in relationship with us, to be, in a sense, completed by our participation in God’s divine life. That is why God becomes so vulnerable – because the only way to connect truly and deeply with another is to become vulnerable. God, therefore through Jeremiah was dismayed, grieved and maybe even disgusted, that the condition of the people have gotten so bad.
We had our own share of misery in our country these past few months.
God probably has been weeping day and night for those dear, dear daughters of His. To inflict injury on a fellow human being is to wound God Himself. Is it perhaps a time in our society to re-image the vulnerable God ? Is it not the time to introduce a God who is inviting us to dwel in him and Him to us? A God who cares.
So I wonder…
Can we allow our images of God to conform to the vulnerability we see in this book of Jeremiah? Can we see the Bible itself as a collection of tales about this vulnerable God? Can we imagine that to be a follower of Jesus is to embrace vulnerability rather than to use our faith to defend ourselves against it? And can we imagine that church isn’t the place you go when you’ve got it all figured out but instead where you go to gather with others on the way, meeting at the point of our brokenness to hold onto each other with the promises of God?
CONCLUSION
Classen: 2012, “The weeping, the pain that a person undergoes by one’s self alone, may have the effect of breaking and bringing down a person, so that the person is incapable of doing anything. But the weeping the person does together with God, that strengthens the person,. It is hard to rise repeatedly above the sufferings, but when one summons the courage, stretching the mind to engage in Torah and divine service,- then one enters the inner chambers where God is to be found. There one weeps and wails with God, as it were, TOGETHER.
