Can the Face of God be Seen?

In today's gospel, Jesus appears post-resurrection to his disciples, who are startled and disturbed.  He invites them to feel his wounds, to see that he is real and alive in this world.  The issue for all of us latter so-called disciples of Jesus, is, how can we see (experience) Jesus alive in our lives?

In his book, The Face of God, based on his 2010 Gifford Lectures, Roger Scruton addresses the age-old desire to see the face of God.  He points out that the Hebrew scriptures are replete with this theme.  (E.g. Ps. 13: "How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?") Man's yearning for God, Christians believe, has been fulfilled in Jesus, in his life, death and resurrected life.

But the face of God has disappeared for many in the post-modern world.  I can't do justice to his book in a short blog entry, but I would like to quote the conclusion of his book in connection with the theme of today's gospel.

"So what and where is the face of God for the one who believes in his real presence among us?  The answer is that we encounter this presence everywhere, in all that suffers and renounces for another's sake.  Things with a face are illuminated by the subjectivity that shines in them, and which spreads around them a halo of prohibitions.  When someone enters the moment of sacrifice, throwing away what is most precious, even life itself, for the sake of another, then we encounter the supreme moment of gift.  This is an act in which the I appears completely.  It is also a revelation.  In sacrifice and renunciation the I makes of its own being a gift, and thereby shows us that being is a gift.  In the moment of sacrifice people come face to face with God, who is present too in those places where sorrow has left its mark or 'prayer has been valid.'

"We should not be surprised, therefore, if God is so rarely encountered now.  The consumer culture is one without sacrifices; easy entertainment distracts us from our metaphysical loneliness.  The rearranging of the world as an object of appetite obscures its meaning as a gift.  The defacing of eros and the loss of rites of passage eliminate the old conception of human life as an adventure within the community and an offering to others.  It is inevitable, therefore, that moments of sacred awe should be rare among us.  And it is surely this, rather than the arguments of the atheists, that has led to the decline of religion.  Our world contained many openings onto the transcendental;  but they have been blocked by waste.  You may think that this does not matter  -- that mankind has had enough of sacred mysteries and their well-known dangers.  But I think we are none of us at ease with the result.  Our disenchanted life is, to use the Socratic idom, 'not a life for a human being'.  By remaking human beings and their habitat as objects to consume rather than subjects to revere we invite the degradation of both.  Postmodern people will deny that their disquiet at these things has a religious meaning.  But I hope that my argument has gone some way to showing that they are wrong."

Where do we see the face of God?  In the wounds of Christ, as today's gospel shows.  That is, in the suffering of others and our sacrificial response.

Listen to "The Face of Love" by Sanctus Real:

Listen to "Face of Love" by Miranda Cosgrove.

Listen to "The Face of Love" by Jewel