How do we know God loves us? Is there any evidence in the Scriptures telling us that He does? Is there an image perhaps to which we can easily point to prove that we are loved by God in the most intimate and unmistakable way? There are actually a whole busload of examples, of which the following may be the most profound and compelling of all. It is certainly the most recent, appearing just the other day in one of the Lenten readings taken from the prophet Isaiah (49:6-15).
What is most arresting about the image is that it reveals a God speaking to Israel as though He were addressing a young child, frightened and alone in a world too menacing to face. He wants to allay the child’s fear of abandonment, of that sudden desolating state in which the child sees no hope of escape, no prospect of rescue or relief. And so the Lord reaches out to the child, to comfort this child after His own heart, with the certainty that He at least has not forgotten him, that He will never forsake him. It is an unspeakably beautiful passage, evoking an intimacy never before expressed between God and the people of the book, of the promise uniquely given to them by God.
And so, seizing upon the most perfect image, He asks, “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb?” Such an astonishing image that must have been to those about to undergo the pain of exile and loss! What greater consolation could there be than the certainty of knowing that God, not unlike a mother choosing to love her child, is no less moved to love His own child, the offspring of the covenant He first made with Abraham?
Now, of course, God is their Father, the Primal One who fashioned Israel into a people, a nation whose mission will be to provide that point of entry for God Himself to enter the human story, making it His-tory because our own stories will never be enough to overcome the iniquity of a fallen universe. And, accordingly, as our Father, His aim is to reshape the whole of that universe, redirecting its course back to Him. But notice how He loves Israel precisely as a mother, indeed, as would any good mother whose love for her children remains resolute, steadfast, and fierce, freshly dispensed each hour of every day.
There can be no other relation among men as necessary and natural as the bond between a child and his mother. In the order of nature, it remains the first and most formative of all the connections we make. How could it be otherwise with one who has not only given the child life from out of her own life, the very loins of her own body, but who, by choosing to nourish the child at her breast, bestows a meaning upon this child, a meaning of imperishable value? Where else but in the primordial relation of the child to its mother, given the sheer indestructible intimacy of that bond, will there awaken that sense of the child’s importance and value as a person?
And what other astonishing thing does God say to Zion through the prophet Isaiah? What does He tell this people He brought out of bondage and death, in order finally to put to flight whatever lingering fear of abandonment may persist? Nothing less than God’s absolute guarantee that “Even should she forget, I will never forget you.” That however wayward the exercise of a mother’s love may prove to be, God’s love is not subject to change, that it will always burn with an intensity of love for those who have won His heart.
And because the exercise of divine love is not in the least arbitrary or capricious, every human creature who has ever lived, or will ever live, is entitled to receive that love. It is not like a government contract, revocable over time. It lasts forever.
And yet we still fear its loss, don’t we? We still suffer the anguish of being abandoned. Hasn’t it always been the deepest, the most fearful privation of all? That those we love, those on whom we depend to love us, will maybe decide someday to stop loving us. That they will choose, however perversely, to leave us in the lurch, alone and bereft, lost in a world we were never created to have to endure. And isn’t that the whole point of being lost, that we simply do not know when the ax will fall?
Alas, when it comes to being lost, we are all like the children of Israel. Or our own children as well. In her moving account of her father, writer John Cheever, Susan Cheever explains the origin of her book’s title, Home Before Dark. “My father liked to tell a story about my younger brother Fred,” who, at the end of a long summer’s day, suddenly sees their father.
And when he saw daddy standing there he ran across the grass and threw his little boy’s body into his father’s arms. “I want to go home, Daddy,” he said, “I want to go home.” Of course, he was home, just a few feet from the front door, in fact. But that didn’t make any difference, as my father well understood. We all want to go home, he would say when he told this story. We all do.
And if there were no home to go to, no one to welcome the child when he got there, what then? Or if his father should tell him in words so final that nothing more could be said to soften the sentence: “I do not know you”? Would that not force one out into a state of aloneness, of solitude and sorrow that, again, none of us were created to have to endure?
If there really were a loneliness so final that nothing in this world could remedy the pain of it, an abandonment so total that neither word nor gesture could deliver us from it, wouldn’t that be the equivalent of what we mean by Hell? Isn’t Hell that very depth of loneliness where no love, no relation of real communion, can reach one in order to set free the soul of one’s solitude? It would be as if we, too, were the Prodigal Son, only fated never to find our father’s love. An eternity of grief, no less. Who could possibly bear it?
This is why we must cling, and always with the most desperate and tenacious desire, to a God who is not content merely to know us but who loves us as well, who longs to hold us as close to Himself as a child bathing at the breast of its own dear mother.
This originally appeared on Crisis Magazine.
