Rahner: God is Far From Us
by Allison R.
Not long ago, Caravaggio’s painting of the Supper at Emmaus was on display at the Art Institute. It is, at least to me, one of the most beautiful paintings in the world, because of the great truth in it. The disciples are reacting in astonishment to the risen Jesus as Jesus lifts his hand to bless the bread and the wine, while an innkeeper looks on in bewilderment. Jesus is looking down, and smiling a little, but very sadly. This is not surprising, since the next line of this story in Luke’s Gospel is one of the saddest things I have ever read. It says, “Their eyes were opened, and they knew him, and he vanished from their sight.”
The writer of the Gospel strings these three movements breathlessly into one sentence, or at least most of the English translations do. Their eyes were opened, they knew him, and he vanished. As I once heard an old gentleman at my church observe with disgust about the preacher of a very short sermon, “He was over before he got started.”
But why? Why does he always seem to leave just when we start to recognize him? Why, in another story, wouldn’t he let Mary Magdalene touch him or cling to him just when she seemed to need it the most? Why does it so often seem to be true that he is gone just when we need him the most? If he gets lost in our daily lives at times, isn’t it because he sometimes seems all too easy to lose?
Karl Rahner writes beautifully of this experience in his essay “God Is Far From Us.” He begins this essay by writing, “We suffer not only from lacking the contentment and the carefree security of life, not only from sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, but above all – dare we be bold to say how it really is? – we suffer because God seems to be far from us” (Rahner, p. 216).
Our experience of life and the world, then, can unfortunately be a challenge to our experience of God. One part of the problem, according to Rahner’s theology, is that although God is indeed present in our everyday lives, God is also absolute mystery. And our first impulse when faced with any mystery, especially in a society raised on Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, is to solve it. We expect there to be a cognitive solution to the problem of God’s seeming absence, and there does not seem to be one. On the level of our experience and our cognition, God’s presence or absence is just mystery. But if we consider it as freedom and as love, it becomes holy mystery, which is a very different experience.
Holy mystery is the mystery that we don’t get to solve, the mystery that is not there to be solved. It is not categorical knowledge, the kind that we’re used to. We might say that in order to try to understand why God so often seems distant, we might need to begin seeing in a different way. Reasonably enough, because of our human experience and limitations, we expect becoming closer to God to mean gaining more knowledge about God. We want to know more and to learn more. But Rahner would say that becoming closer to God actually means becoming closer to mystery.
Rahner would say that this holds true even after death. Most of us have probably imagined that after death, we will experience something rather like the climactic scene in a mystery novel, where everything is explained by the detective. It is finally revealed why everything was the way that it was. But Rahner does not believe that this is what we should expect. He does not even seem to say that we will be any closer to understanding God than we are now. We may be in union, or, as is often said, face to face with God, but that does not equal gaining any more cognitive knowledge.
Rahner ends his essay on this subject by writing, “Our poor heart, that now in Jesus Christ shares with him the night, which to the believer is nothing other than the darkness of God’s boundless light, the darkness that dazzles the eyes, the heavenly night, when God is really born in our hearts” (p. 220). Luke’s Gospel says that Jesus vanished from the disciples’ sight, but not that he vanished altogether. Was he really gone? In an essay about paintings of the resurrected Jesus, Anglican theologian John Drury writes that Mary Magdalene, when she is implored not to touch the resurrected Jesus, is learning how to love him in a different way. It is not the way of physical touch that she is used to, but it is not any less important. A Savior who cannot be touched, Drury says, is a Savior who can never be taken away. Rahner might agree that learning to find God is about learning to see, and to love, in a different way.