When I was a college professor, I served on a committee which interviewed perspective ministerial students seeking college grants. One student who was around thirty years old, married, and with children came before the committee and shared his “calling” to ministry. He said he didn’t want to be a minister, but he had to become one. His son had been deathly ill. This student promised God if his son lived, he would go into the ministry. The son survived his illness, and his father felt trapped by his promise. He believed that if he abandoned this “calling,” God would kill his son.
I tried to persuade the man that God was a God of love and would not kill innocent children because their fathers had made promises out of desperation—that Jesus revealed a God who always operated out of unconditional love—that God would understand the man’s dilemma. But the man was not open to any reasoning. He was convinced that the day he turned his back on his promise, God would kill his son. He talked about the importance of having “a fear of the Lord” to secure his eternal salvation. When I mentioned that according to I John, God is love and perfect love casts out fear, he remained adamant that God was also holy and would punish him by killing his son if he reneged on his promise to be a minister.
After the interview, I was haunted by the prospects of this man becoming a pastor. In time, he would resent God, his son, his congregation, and his life. I pitied any congregation who would have him as their minister. His parishioners would never hear the good news of God’s unconditional love or the joy of being God’s beloved children. He was on a path which would lead to disaster on many fronts.
Psychologists have long known that we cannot truly love what we fear. As I John says, “Perfect love casts out fear.” Love involves trust. Fear is based on mistrust, suspicion, and foreboding. Love and trust are integral parts of a healthy, growing, and honest relationship. Fear and mistrust are indicative of an unhealthy, unreliable, and toxic relationship. Fear and mistrust are characteristics found in all sick religion.
Children are keen observers of life, but they are often poor interpreters of what they sense and experience. They do not have the maturity and cognitive skills to understand all the dynamics of authentic love. As irrational as it may seem, they can even identify some forms of abuse with love. Children whose parents abuse them (emotionally, physically, or sexually) are confused when those parents also do things kind for them. I once counseled an adult man who was emotionally, physically, and sexually abused by his father. Yet, he still maintained that his father loved him because the father taught him how to repair cars, hunt, fish, throw a baseball, and defend himself from bullies. I asked that man (who was in his fifties) if he had ever abused his children. He said, “Of course not.” When I asked him why he had never done so, he replied, “Duh! Because I love them!” And for the first time in his life, he realized deep down that whatever “love” his father had for him was, at best, sick and twisted. In fact, he later said, “Whatever my father had for me, it was not love.”
Have you ever noticed how many times in Scripture angels and Jesus tell people not to be afraid?
Have you ever noticed how many times in Scripture angels and Jesus tell people not to be afraid? Fear paralyzes the soul and cannot permit love, trust, and joy to liberate and heal our precious but vulnerable selves. Fear erects barriers to intimacy, trust, and honesty. It destroys the possibilities of the present and robs the future of its potential. The God of Jesus is all about unconditional, indiscriminate, self-giving, and everlasting love. As I have said before, God cannot not love. With such a God there is no place for fear. Those operating from a foundation of fear in their religion know nothing about the essence of the One Jesus called “Abba.”
So, what do we do with verses in the Bible which commend a “fear of the Lord”? For example, how do we interpret Proverbs 1:7 and Psalm 111:10 which read, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom”? We need to listen to the rabbis who can help us understand the meaning of the word “fear” in Hebrew. Judaism is the Mother of Christianity. When we forget our Jewish roots, we often misinterpret the Christian faith. The New Testament makes no sense apart from its Jewish heritage. It’s impossible to understand deeply and authentically the teachings of Jesus, the four Gospels, the letters of Paul, the book of Revelation, or any other part of the New Testament without an appreciation and knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish faith.
Rabbis tell us that the word “fear” should be translated “awe” and “reverence” in many passages in the Bible. (There are times in Scripture when fear does mean dread. When I John says, “Perfect love casts out fear,” it’s obvious that fear in this verse means “being afraid.” But that is not true for references to “the fear of the Lord.”)
We have all been overwhelmed by the grandeur, beauty, majesty, and magnitude of creation. Think of the highest mountains you have seen, the immensity of the ocean, the infinite expanse of the heavens on a starry night, the beauty of a wildflower, or the tiny fingers of a newborn wrapped around the finger of a man who can be brought to tears over such a gesture of trust, vulnerability, and potential. These manifestations of God’s glory can bring us to our knees as they help us realize our tiny but providential place in creation. As Rudolf Otto said, there is a “tremendum” in our experience of the mystery of the world before which we tremble in awe. But that “tremendum” also fascinates us with its beauty and grandeur. We feel both outside of it and within it all at the same time. It is radically different from us and, yet paradoxically, it draws us into itself, and we become a part of it. And the only natural response to such luminous glory is deep gratitude, exquisite joy, and a humble sense of belonging.
However, the rabbis would say that awe is only part of what it means to experience such fear of the Lord. From that awe we will practice a reverence for all of God’s creation. If the heavens declare God’s glory and the earth God’s handiwork, then all of creation is sacred. Creation is precious and sacramental because it is the art of God and God is within it. This universe, which is called “good” by God, has an eternal place in the Divine Heart. The New Testament understands the consummation of all time and space to include the entirety of creation. We survive beyond death as a part of this “new heaven and new earth” which will be the restoration, healing, emancipation, transformation, and glorification of the present heaven and earth. Awe and reverence help us see that we are part of a web of life whose source is the Living God.
Recent science reveals how connected we are to everything else in this universe. We are made of star dust. Everything is energy vibrating at different frequencies. Increasingly, scientists, some of whom are Nobel Prize Winners, propose that consciousness is the stuff of the universe and that matter is simply a form of consciousness. Iain McGilchrist suggests that consciousness is the “ontological primitive of all reality.” If these scientists are correct, we have even more reason to recognize and celebrate the connectiveness that makes up God’s creation and to have a reverence for every part of this universe. St. Francis was correct in referring to Brother Son, Sister Moon, and Mother Earth.
I fear our modern and postmodern world, at least in Western civilization, has largely lost the capacity for awe, wonder, and reverence for creation and for fellow humans. Addicted to and paralyzed by greed, production, consumption, arrogance, narcissism, violence, and suspicion, we have great difficulty experiencing and even recognizing wonder, transcendence, the ineffable, mystery, and belonging, all of which make us human and reflect our creation in the image of God. Too many of us have no understanding or appreciation of William Blake’s wonderful words:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
If the rabbis are correct that “the fear of the Lord” is all about the experience of awe and the practice of respect for God and Her creation and that such “fear” constitutes the beginning of all wisdom, we moderns and postmoderns may prove to be the biggest fools in all of history.
