God of Profanity?

By Andrew Yang

But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.”
(In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.)

Ephesians 4:7-10

Webster’s Dictionary defines profanity as “vulgar or irreverent speech or action” and profane as “1. Not sacred or concerned with religion,” or basically secular, “2. Not holy because unconsecrated or defiled,” and lastly, “3. Grossly irreverent toward what is sacred”; in a word, blasphemous.

Of course, today when I use the word “profanity,” one immediately thinks of the four-letter words that are covered by bleeps on television, the words you don’t utter in polite company. “Profanity” was first generally applied to rude language because of the King James Bible’s injunction against profaning the name of the Lord, but the word “profane” originally comes from the latin pro fano, or outside of the temple.

Profanity as the Mundane

Let’s look at the first definition: “Not sacred or concerned with religion.” It’s interesting how we have an undeniable human tendency to separate the world of the sacred and the world of the secular, or profane.

Of course we have obvious examples. We’ve all heard of “Sunday Christians,” individuals who behave like Christians on Sunday or in front of other believers, but who you can’t recognize as any different when in other company.

But before we start ranting about Sunday Christians and hold in our minds people we see as examples, let’s think of ourselves. I myself am, and indeed all of us at some point are, guilty of compartmentalizing life. The project due next month: profane. The Bible study on Tuesday: sacred. The carpool: profane. The fifteen minutes of devotional time in the morning: sacred.

Yet Paul in Colossians 3:17 gives us the command, “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

“Whatever you do.” This is a terrifying command. We may accuse Sunday Christians of hypocrisy, but one simply has to look closer at a pious Christian to see how he fails to live up to this standard. We must ask ourselves: do we always remember God in everything? God tells Israel in Deuteronomy 6:6, “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” Do we live up to this standard?

In some ways, compartmentalization seems so natural. The compartmentalization of the sacred from the profane was literal in the Old Testament. A curtain veil separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple. A high priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year with a bell and a rope in case he fell down dead in the presence of God; if the bell stopped ringing, the priests outside would pull his body out with the rope.

Of course the curtain of the temple was ripped from top to bottom when Jesus died. And that is the key, Jesus Christ. For most of history God had revealed himself as something entirely holy and other. The ripping of the temple curtain is also the destruction of the boundary between the sacred and the profane, and the person of Christ is the ultimate refutation of this compartmentalization.

I invite you for a moment to consider yourself. How it feels to sit down listening to me, perhaps you’re hanging on to every word. Perhaps you’re bored. Consider for a moment that the God who existed before time also once sat as you are sitting. Maybe rubbing his hands together or twiddling his thumbs. Feel yourself breathe; the God, the divine essence, who in some mysterious way breathed life into the first human being, once felt himself breathing as you and I do!

If we follow this thinking to its conclusion, how can anything not be sacred? The Word, the I AM, who was too holy for Israel to approach on Sinai, too holy for Uzzah to touch the sacred Ark of the Covenant without dying, too holy for his name to be spelled or pronounced; this God had ten fingers and ten toes, walked on this Earth and experienced happiness, delight, joy, despair, disappointment, loneliness, and betrayal.

Guerric of Igny wrote, “Do you want to see the humility of God? Look in the manger and see him lying there. Surely this is our God. Seeing an infant, I wonder how this could be the one who says, ‘Do not I fill heaven and earth?’ I see a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. Is this the one who is clothed in the beautiful glory of unapproachable light? Listen! He is crying. Is this the one who thunders in the heaven making the angels lower their wings? Yes, but he has emptied himself in order to fill us” (1).

God’s Love for the Profane

It is through Christ we also see God’s love for the “unconsecrated or defiled.” There are countless examples: Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well, Christ and Zacchaeus. As the Pharisees asked Jesus’ disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?” (Matthew 9:11) It is interesting to note that these people, the unclean who could not enter the temple, were the people Christ spent most of his time on. Those with physical deformity, the lame, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, could not enter the temple according to Mosaic Law. Often they would beg for alms outside the temple. They were the literally profane, literally pro fano: “not admitted into the temple.”

(John 9) Imagine this: Jesus and his disciples are walking through Jerusalem. The disciples throw questions at him and he replies with stories and answers. They walk by a beggar, blind from birth: “Rabbi,” one of them asks, pointing, “Who sinned, this man, or his parents that he was born blind?”

The beggar is used to people talking about him as if he is not there, used to people wondering silently even as they give him alms, what he or his parents did to bring God’s punishment upon him, his imperfection that keeps him from being allowed to enter the temple and join others at worship.

Jesus looks into the man’s glazed eyes; “Neither,” he says. “He was born blind so that the works of God may be displayed in him.” The disciples are confused as usual, and the beggar even more so – works of God, displayed in him? The beggar has been a symbol of God’s wrath all his life, a symbol that God punishes the wicked, a symbol that God will not suffer the unclean to be in God’s temple. Then Jesus spits in the dirt making mud, puts the mud in the beggar’s eyes, and commands the man to wash himself in the pool of Siloam. The beggar follows the instructions and gains sight without ever having seen his healer, and of course there’s a lot of hubbub and people being amazed and the beggar eventually comes before the Pharisees, to whom Jesus’ miraculous ability despite his association with the profane is a constant source of embarrassment for them, and the Pharisees question the man again and again for hours until he exclaims, perhaps in sarcasm, perhaps in honest naiveté, “I’ve told you already, why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”

They answer, “You were born in utter sin, how dare you lecture us!” Then they have him thrown out. Even after he has been made whole, they still see him as an outcast, still see him as one who was “born in utter sin.” And he is once again on the margins of society. He walks away with his head hung low, wondering why he must bear God’s curse.

Then, and this strikes me every time, on hearing that the Pharisees have “cast him out,” Jesus goes looking for the man, goes out of his way to find him. And after all this questioning and running back and forth, after the man has been interrogated and thrown out, they are alone, two people approaching each other on the street; and the man has a sneaking suspicion of who the stranger walking toward him is, even though he’s never seen him before.

Jesus says, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The man, in some way, already knows the answer to the question that he is about to ask. “Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” “You’re looking at him,” Jesus says. “He’s talking to you.”

When thinking of this story from the Gospel of John, it becomes obvious that God is a God of the profane. He is a God of profanity because he is not only the God of the unclean blind beggar, but also my God, also our God; and we are each of us profane. The most successful one of us has experienced being treated as profane in some form, has been thrown out, perhaps not by Pharisees, but by our peers, by our co-workers, by our families – has been cast out pro fano.

Then Christ goes looking for us, “sought me as a stranger wandering from the fold of God,” and God willing, we recognize his voice when he finds us.

“Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He asks. Though we have never seen his face, perhaps we are lucky enough to recognize his voice: “Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” The beggar’s hope is our hope, his doubt is our doubt. Hope that Christ is indeed what we have been looking for to redeem us from our profanity, and the doubt that follows hot on hope’s heels; our defense mechanism for all the times we have been disappointed and let down by a world that tells us we are nothing more than profane, but through all the human doubt that remains in us, we are ready to believe, we must believe; ready to believe like an arrow in a bow string taut and ready to fly, ready to believe like a tiger is coiled to leap as it lies in wait for its prey.

“You’re looking at him. He’s talking to you.” And at last the dream of his voice we match with the face of he who has been searching for us, like Mary Magdalene, who tradition says was not herself a stranger to profanity, like Thomas who doubted as we doubt, we suddenly recognize who it is that speaks to us and has sought us out, and exclaim as they exclaimed, “My Master! My Lord and my God!” Or do simply what the blind beggar did, and worship him.

Finding God Where We Least Expect

Of course, the last definition for profane pertains to blasphemy: “irreverent toward that which is sacred”; and once again it is through Christ that God takes on this definition. I stumbled across a line from The Satanic Bible by Anton LeVay: “I gaze into the glassy eye of your fearsome Jehovah, and pluck him by the beard; I uplift a broad-axe, and split open his worm eaten skull!” (2, 3) Of course, my initial reaction was a flash of revulsion and anger.

However, I realize now that all those who attempt to shock people with blasphemy, and however had they try to rip God out of the trappings of divinity; God has already been there, has already willingly subjected himself to the darkest dark that human beings can muster. As the Psalmist says, “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.”

On reflection, of course the death of God is troubling, even blasphemous!

The God of the universe, yes, Jehovah, was betrayed by his own people, mocked, humiliated, beaten, forced to carry his own means of execution to a skull-shaped hill where he was strung up and nailed to a tree with a sign over his head reading, “Jesus from Nowhere, Biggest Jew of them all.” And even more, as the Apostle’s Creed says, “He descended into Hell.”

And so it is. Blasphemers, Satanists, whoever, attempt to humiliate God, and find that he has allowed himself humiliation. Attempt to kill God, and find he has already subjected himself to death. Attempt to lower him into the mire of the depths, and find, as the Psalmist does, that “thou art there.”

The Gnostics, an early Christian heresy, found the crucifixion hard to stomach and wrote in their gospels that Christ was not crucified, but managed to get away and replace himself with a substitute. Muslims, to whom Jesus is a prophet, contend that Jesus was taken bodily into Heaven and that Judas or Simon of Cyrene was crucified in his stead.

In fact, the cross was not even used as a Christian symbol until after it had ceased to be used as an instrument of torture. In this way, too, the cross is redeemed from profanity. This disgusting instrument of torture and execution, perhaps the most sadistic method of execution ever dreamt up by the human mind, becomes a symbol of victory.

It is only when we realize that God is present even in the profane when the torture and death of Jesus Christ becomes meaningful. “He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.”

God is a God who not only ascended higher than all the heavens, but the same one who descended into the very depths, descended from the heavens to the filth of a stable. As you go into the world, I invite you to remember the God of profanity. I invite you to remember the God who has made even the most mundane things, getting up in the morning, breathing, walking, meaningful; meaningful because he himself once had to get up and breathe and walk and face an uncertain world even as we do.

I invite you to remember the God who remembered the profane of the world, the people who society threw out of the temple, and not only that, but lowered himself into profanity in order to redeem it.

I invite you to remember the God who brought the worst profanity of all upon himself. Says Webster’s, “Irreverent toward what is sacred,” or as Paul writes in Philippians 2:7-8, Jesus “made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

Psalm 139:7-12

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

References
1. “Christmas: Quotations to Stir the Heart and Mind.” Christianity Today Magazine. 19 Dec. 2005. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/december/22.62.html.
2. The editorial management is recommending I put an addendum here; I haven’t actually read the Satanic Bible, and so can’t, and don’t, recommend it; the editorial staff wants to be sure I’m not responsible for dozens of people being led astray and going off to Barnes and Noble to buy the Satanic Bible. I came across the quote in Bob Larson’s Satanism: the Seduction of America’s Youth. It is my understanding that the Satanic Bible is not so much a manual for black magic as a manifesto of Anton LeVay’s personal philosophy using Judeo-Christian imagery as a jumping off point. Furthermore, those distracted by my quoting from this text are completely missing the point of everything I’ve written in this article.
3. Larson, Bob. Satanism: the Seduction of America’s Youth. Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson Inc., 1989.