Minister: Why do you say that?
Child: Because he has created us and put us in this world in order to be glorified in us. And it is right that we should relate our life to his glory since he is at the origin of it.

(Calvin's Catechism, 1545)

Creation: God's glory or God's anguish?

"Have you eaten from the tree which I forbade you?" (Gen 3.11), God asked Adam in a trembling voice. God's worst premonition seemed to come true. "Please, Adam," God was almost pleading in the heart, "say that you have not eaten from it!" But the answer that came back from Adam must have broken God's heart: "Yes, I have eaten from it." What a fateful answer! In the Garden of Eden, Adam's answer was a whisper mingled with regret and remorse. But as time went on, the whisper turned into loud echoes on the stage of human history. And in the present world of a persistent arms race, it has finally developed into a shouting match of nuclear threats. We are compelled to ask the question: Is creation God's glory or God's anguish?

We human beings have undone what God has done. And what we have done even God cannot undo. This is the terrible secret the story of the Fall tries to tell. A really fearful thing has happened: the relation of power between God and human beings has drastically changed. Human beings are determined to have creation reflect more human glory than God's glory. In creation human power strives to prove itself superior to the divine power. Science that can split the atom to produce horrendous power of destruction on the earth - is this not clear evidence of human power over God's power? Technology that can splice genes to change the nature and course of heredity and perhaps produce new forms of life - does this not prove that human ingenuity has overtaken God's creativity? To God's anguish and to our confusion, human beings have become "co-creators" with God.

A fundamental modification is called for in our theology of creation. For too long we have assumed that human creativity is compatible with God's creation. Too easily we have provided theological grounds for human exploitation of the world of space and time as a prerogative granted to us by God. Too arrogantly we have believed that God has given us the mandate to subdue the earth for the sole benefit of the human species. But we should have known better. In actual fact, we did not have to wait until this scientific and technological civilization of ours to know that our anthropocentric theology, which explains the complex relations of God, creation and humanity, is bound to fail. Despite our doctrine of sin - a doctrine so strong that we are proud to say there is no match for it in other world religions such as Buddhism or Hinduism - we have tragically underestimated the power of evil holding humanity in captivity. We are forced to face the sad fact that in-humanity is deeply embedded in our humanity.

Let us think for one moment of the creation specifically theo-centrically and not anthropo-centrically. Then the dark side of human civilization begins to have a powerful impact on us all. Can anyone say a human civilization, ancient or modern, reflects God's glory and that alone? Just visualize before your eyes those historic monuments such as the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the Roman Colosseum, the Hiroshima cenotaph, and many others. We cannot but be staggered by their enormous cost in human 1ives. And as we think of the ominous shadow of nuclear holocaust hanging over us today, can we still say the earth is the theatre of God's glory? The earth has, in fact, become a theatre where "people eat people", to use a Chinese saying. The rich eat the poor; the powerful eat the powerless; the developed eat the underdeveloped; the oppressors eat the oppressed. The earth, to put it pointedly, is the theatre of human terror and God's anguish.

As we learn to see creation in relation to the hard realities of history, we cannot but understand creation differently. As a matter of fact, the Bible has not asked us to think of creation in separation from history - from the rise and fall of nations, from the life and death of people. The creation story in Genesis 1 is not a cosmogony but a history - an intensely historical story. It does not tell us how the world came into being. What it does tell us is how God entered the agony of history. There is no blanket affirmation of the creation as such as good in the creation story. God had to separate light from the darkness, cosmos (heaven-earth) from the chaos. And as God's struggle resulted in creating a space of light in the realm of darkness, God saw that it was good. Light was good in the midst of the darkness and cosmos was good despite the chaos. The darkness is still there and the chaos still returns.

Creation is the history of God's engagement with the powers of darkness and chaos. It is the story of the "redemptive" goodness God has to win with toil and labour, with sweat and blood. It is this "redemptive" goodness and not creation as such, that reflects God's glory. In this "redemptive" goodness God holds the key of hope for the whole creation. In it creation becomes linked up with the incarnation. That is why in the very centre of God's creation there is the cross of Jesus Christ.

The cross: the power of God's anguish

The distance between creation and the cross is very short. The difference between God's glory and God's anguish is infinitesimal. This amounts to saying that God the creator comes to us as God the redeemer. We do not, and we cannot, experience God's glory except as the glory of God's anguish on the cross. This is the profound experience of Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz, who, with other prisoners, was forced to witness the hanging by the Nazi SS of three Jews, one of whom was a small boy. As the boy was struggling between life and death, so Wiesel tells us in Night, the agonizing question was asked over and over by anguished onlookers: "Where is God now?" Wiesel heard an answer from behind him saying: "Where is he? Here he is - He is hanging here on the gallows."

The gallows! What a most unlikely place for God to be! Ever since Jesus was crucified on Golgotha, outside the city of Jerusalem, the world has not really accepted the cross as the place where God ought to be. Those classical words of Paul to the Christians in Corinth still ring in our ears: "Yes, Christ nailed to the cross; ...this is a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks" (1 Cor 1.23). If there are people of faith for whom suffering is not a mere concept but a life-and-death religious matter, it is Buddhists. They perceive the world as a sea of suffering. They feel the suffering of their fellow human beings in their bones. They are ready to give up the nirvana (the Buddhist kingdom of heaven) for the suffering multitudes. But even for them God on the cross is too tragic, too perverse, too ghastly to envision. Is there not a more comfortable place from which God could save the world? Not only Buddhists would ask such a question. Christians, too, are tempted to ask it. But this is an anthropological question, and not a theo-logical question.

The fact is that there is no place other than the cross where God's anguish for human suffering can be most powerfully revealed. The cross sums up all that is not-God and all that is against-God. Precisely because of this, the cross embodies all that is not-humanity and all that is against humanity. The cross, in a word, is humanity-against-humanity. On the cross and on the gallows we are forced to become witnesses of how people eat people. Human community has become such a cross. The world has come under the power of such gallows. And the creation is threatened by this power that sets itself against both God and humanity. According to God's logic, if not ours, that is where God must be.

Is it possible for us to know the thoughts of God who is in Jesus on the cross? We wonder! How can we? But one of the things Jesus said on the cross may give us some clue. At the height of his agony and pain Jesus cried out loudly: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mk 15.34). How could God forsake God? God might be able to forsake us human beings, but one thing God cannot do is to forsake God. No, no forsaking of God by God has taken place on the cross. Because the power of God's anguish is so great that God is even more strongly, vividly and visibly present on the cross, in human community, in the world, and in the creation. That ultimate anguish of God's forsakenness burst from the lips of Jesus is in reality the ultimate affirmation of God's presence.

Anguish has this power of presence. If you have no anguish for your bereaved friends, you are not present there with them. If you feel no anguish for those emaciated children in refugee camps, stretching out their frail hands for a bowl of rice, you are non-existent to them. If you experience no anguish for battered bodies of political prisoners, you are to them no different from stone or wood. It is all very clear: no anguish, then no presence; relative anguish, then relative presence; extreme anguish, then extreme presence. What could then be a more extreme anguish than the anguish of the cross? Since that is God's anguish, God's presence with the world is the extreme presence, the most really real presence. The cross is Immanuel, God-with-us. The power of the cross is, over and above all things, the power of Immanuel. In the cross, God the creator and God the redeemer is present as God-with-us. That is why it is from the cross and not from an armchair, from a power-conscious church, or from richly endowed congregations and institutions, that we begin to know the past, the present and the future of the creation. It is from the cross that we know what kind of God's power and glory we must look for in the world.

Anguish is where God and human beings meet. In anguish for the pain and suffering of people, God finds us and we find God. Many Christians today are rediscovering and re-experiencing the power of anguish as the power of presence - the presence of God with us and our presence before God. Kim Chi Ha, a Korean Catholic Christian who has had more than a bowl-full of anguish through torture and imprisonment under authoritarian ruling powers, has his satirical play "The Gold-Crowned Jesus" begin with a song coming from backstage:

Where can he be?
Where can he be?
Where is Jesus?

That frozen sky
That frozen field
Even the sun has lost its light
That dark, dark, poor street
Where can he be?
Where can he be?
He who could save us

Where can he be?

Oh, Jesus
Now here with us
Oh, Jesus, with us.

Where else could Jesus be - Jesus who is God-with-us on the cross. Jesus who is God-with-us on the gallows? Kim Chi Ha, like Elie Wiesel, has heard the answer. Jesus is God-with-us in the frozen field. He is God-with-us in that dark, dark, poor street. He is God-with-us in the cruel torture chamber and in the solitary prison cell.

Those of us who are brought up in the long tradition of faith which teaches that God is omnipresent may not believe it. but the truth of the matter is that God is not to be found anywhere and everywhere. It becomes more and more evident that God can be found only where poverty dehumanizes people. where streets are dark and where life is bitter and uncertain. This brings us back to the creation story. It is into darkness that God brings the light. It is from within the chaos that God creates the cosmos. We are also brought face to face with the story of "the word become flesh." It is the story of the cross which makes powerfully real God's redemptive presence in the world through the power of God's anguish. The cross is the throne in the reign of God (basileia tou theou). From the cross God reigns, not with economic-political power or military glory, but with the power and glory of love crucified and risen.

Love: the power of faith and hope

So it all has to do with power, does it not? We live in the world of "power explosion". We see power exploding everywhere. It explodes in power struggle within a totalitarian system of government. Then new "powerful" leaders emerge to replace the liquidated ones. Power explodes in geopolitical campaigns. Then the world hangs on a thin thread of crisis, waiting anxiously for the outcome of confrontations between "power-obsessed" nations. Power also explodes in a democratic society. At regular intervals political parties engage themselves in a combat to win the power to govern. And the power of the rich to humiliate the poor, the power of the strong to dehumanize the weak... Power is God! Whether we know it or not, the world today is engulfed in power cult. High priests of this power cult are those who hold political, military, economic, and perhaps also religious, power.

We have God's omnipotence to pit against such power, some of us may want to affirm. So we have our own powercult too! God is the High Priest of our power cult. But what many Christians are learning today is the fact that God, the High Priest of our power cult, is no more powerful than the high priests of military, political and economic power cults. Martial law courts continue to pronounce guilty those Christians and others whose only crime is to speak up for human rights. Poverty continues to threaten the lives of great masses of people in the third world. The balance of terror only serves to increase the military spending of nations, even those nations which keep the majority of population in malnutrition. What has happened to our omnipotent God?

Just as we misunderstood God's omnipresence, we have also misinterpreted God's omnipotence. God has not joined the world's power club. He has refused to be part of the "power explosion". The story of Jesus' temptation is particularly poignant at this point. Why did Jesus reject the kingly authority thrust upon him? Why did he refuse the economic power to feed the hungry? Why did he not manifest the divine glory to gain the homage of the whole world? There must be many reasons. But one basic reason must be this: the power of God is deeply, fundamentally, and categorically, incompatible with the power of kings, presidents, prime ministers, entrepreneurs, or business tycoons. God is not a high priest of a power cult. God is God!

But we have not turned our back on power, even though we have refused to take part in the power cult. Faith must have power. Powerless faith does not serve us believers, the church, or the world. The faith in the not-omnipotent God must be a powerful faith. A weak faith wants to cling to an omnipotent God. It looks for a sign that "a wicked, godless generation asks" (Mt 12.39). Such a faith is a wicked faith, a godless faith. Our faith must be strong enough to believe in the God who does not seem in a hurry to being in an apocalyptic time, destroying all God's enemies. It must be so powerful that we are enabled to continue believing in God who in Jesus did not come down from the cross.

Hope too must need power. Powerless hope is no use to us. It is a mere illusion into which we escape when we can no longer bear the pressures of powers that hunt us and harass us. Hope in a new human community in which justice and peace may reign must be a powerful hope. Hope in a new heaven and a new earth in the midst of this old heaven and old earth should be an extraordinarily strong hope. And hope in life eternal when death overtakes the world relentlessly and persistently ought to be an unusually durable hope. As Paul says, "But if we hope for something we do not yet see, then, in waiting for it, we show our endurance" (Rom 8.25). Paul understood the nature and demand of hope. But above all, he understood that what we must have is a powerful hope a hope powerful enough not to be threatened by what we have to face in the dangerous present and not to be disheartened by what seems beyond our reach in an unseen tomorrow.

What is this power of faith? Where is this power of hope to be found? Once again, Paul gives us a clear answer. "There are three things that last forever: faith, hope and love," he tells us. "but the greatest of them all is love" (1 Cor 13.13). Faith is not just power; it is the power of love. Hope is not merely power; it is also the power of love. Those of us who follow Jesus cannot talk about power without qualification. Our power is a very much qualified power. It is qualified by love - the love of God who is Jesus in extreme anguish for the world, the love of God who is with us in Jesus to suffer with us, and the love of God who is in Jesus being crucified with the world. This power qualified by the love of Immanuel becomes an unqualified power to change the world.

If we have this power of love, we can have faith. When we are equipped with this power of love, we can have hope. It is in this faith and hope empowered by God's love in Jesus that many Christians in the world today become witnesses of God's saving love for all humanity. Arrested and brought before the military court for harbouring a human rights advocate, Christians of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan testified: "The love of God compelled us to do what we did: to give food to the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, and to give shelter to a stranger" (Mt 25. 31-46).

It is not military power that makes this world a safe place; it endangers it. It is not geopolitical struggle that brings peace to the community of nations; it threatens it. What can make this world safe, what can bring peace to humanity, and what can make God really real to people, is this power of love - the love that is the light in the darkness, the love that is nailed to the cross, and the love that rises from the dead. Only love such as this can give power to Christians and others to testify to the ultimate meaning of life and the destiny of the world in God. What a faith! What a hope! And, above all, what power of love! The earth must be the theatre of glory for such love. Churches and Christians, in the company of many others, are called to be actors in this theatre of the glory and power of God's love. Is this not the mission of God's people in the reign of God today?

Questions

How should we as Christians understand creation in the light of modern scientific and technological culture? Are there some insights in the creation stories in the Book of Genesis that have not been fully explored?
What is the power of God? Where and how do we see it at work in our respective social-political and religious-cultural settings? Can you give some specific examples from your experience in your own society and in the church of which you are a member?
What kind of glory does the cross represent? What is the hope it stands for and offers to the people today? How do you grasp and express the glory and hope of the cross in the midst of suffering both personally and collectively?
What does the reign (kingdom) of God mean to you today? What does it consist in primarily? How can it be made "really real" in the present world?
How can a church become a hope-ful community? How should it be reformed-renewed in such a way that it may play its part in God's mission of reconciliation within human community?