God's Pathos

Over the years I have learned a great deal from the writings of the Jewish scholar, Abraham Heschel. Not only was he a strong supporter of civil rights in the 1960s, marching with Martin Luther King, but Heschel's scholarly work about the Biblical prophets helped open up powerful new facets of theological insight for me. Heschel lived his faith that the God of the whole universe is passionately concerned about the well-being of people in our own day.

Heschel helped open up an awareness of pathos - that God experiences what we experience. God not only sympathizes (sym-pathos means to feel together with) but empathizes (em-pathos means to feel from within). So Heschel's work has helped me to hear the prophets anew as people who felt God's presence along with the people's sufferings.

This makes more passionate and plaintive the cries of the prophet Hosea when he says in the sixth chapter, "What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah?" God struggles with our failings and sins. God feels our human limits from within, and the breakage pains God.

Isaiah 65 shows God being ready to be found and saying, "Here I am, here I am" but the people did not call. It is as if God had open arms in a wide open field, but the children had stopped playing hide and seek and had just gone away. It is as if God was ready to be found but nobody wanted to seek - and the prophet shows the pain of that.

Jesus in Luke 13 says with prophetic pathos, "How often I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were not willing." Heschel helped me hear the pathos in God's voice, and the passionate care of God expressed through the prophets. These insights have taken time but have also taken root inside my spirit to convey how deeply God cares about us and about our world. How does this affect the way we approach love, power and justice in our day? How does it affect the way we view God's involvement in our struggles?