Notes from Lecture by Fr. Corbett, O.P.
God is “Other” or “different”, the original meanings of “holy”. The refrain “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might…” would be better translated as “Different, different, different Lord, God…” What is this difference? Not his power, but his forgiveness of sins. A king on earth has power and seeks to be served but the King forgives and serves.
The great tragedy of the Fall was that we lost knowledge of the real God. Eve thought God was putting something over on her, that God wasn’t trustworthy, and man’s mind is frozen in time in that cast just as the angel's decision to serve or forsake God became changeless. While made in the image and likeness of God, the Fall turned that around and made us imagine God in our image and likeness. The reason that God, in the OT, did not permit images of Himself is because He knew we would make Him in our image – that is, ugly. Take a look sometime at the Babylonian idols at the Natural History museum. They were ugly. Beasts. We made God look destructive and sadistically powerful. We always tend to think God is trying to put something over on us because that is what we do.
Jesus taught us the real image of God. In the Garden of Eden the first Adam didn’t trust God; in the Garden of Gethsemane the Second Adam trusted God under much more adverse circumstances. He taught us how to trust. For humans, our last decision for or against God is the one we’ll have through all eternity. With Jesus, his last choice to obey God and to forgive was his final one and the one he has through all eternity, so we can therefore count on his eternal intercession as our High Priest...You can only father others if you yourself have been properly fathered. The Father taught the Son how to father and the Son raised up a new generation of fathers.
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Babies begin life not knowing they are different from their mother. They don't conceive of their body as separate from their mother's for awhile. The father, by contrast, is the “Other”. The stranger. Boys have to distance themselves from mothers as a model while daughters have an easier time since their model is their mother. A son must find the father to know his true identity. The reason Schwarznegger’s “girly men” resonated so profoundly is because of this fear, at a biological level, of having a man's identity be made again indistinguishable from his mother's.
Father is the stranger with power. That is how we relate to God without the Holy Spirit. You are then still under the Law. He might be obeyed and the rules kept but the Father is still a stranger. Those who only seek to keep the rules do so because they trust themselves, not God. They want to know what the rules to guarantee their own security. Karl Barth was right when he said “we are saved not by ‘therefore’ but by ‘nevertheless’”.
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In the “Our Father” Jesus was actually praying for his own death when he said “May your name be sanctified” (i.e. “hallowed be thy name”). That phrase was only used twice in the Old Testament and both times His name was sanctified by the radical forgiveness of sins, which the Cross would manifest...
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