Seeing God

Some years ago a young teenager asked me what the Old Testament meant when it claimed that Moses saw God’s back. It was a tough question.

When I have a religious education class with senior primary students I use the same technique Dame Edna Everidge does in her shows, relying on the students to answer my questions. At that age they are willing to talk. We always conclude by allowing them to ask me what ever they choose.

It was during such a session that I was queried about Moses’ partial vision of God. There are occasionally such questions, worthy of a post-graduate theology seminar, as well the more basic enquiries. "Why can’t women be Catholic priests?" and "who made God?" are two regulars.

Having read in an ancient commentary a few weeks before that Moses, like us, could only see God reflected in the beauties of creation, I was lucky with the young teenager. He was satisfied with the answer.

Jesus has a beautiful teaching that the pure in heart are blessed because they will see God.

In a fourth century sermon Gregory of Nyssa tried to tease out the meaning of this claim starting with some other Scriptural passages which seemed to be contradictory.

At one stage Moses, who received the Ten Commandments, perhaps 1400 years before Christ, claimed that no person can see God and live.

In the New Testament John claimed that "no man has seen God at any time" while Paul describes God as He "whom no man has seen, nor can see".

None of these last pieces of Scripture goes against everyday experience, because while we might not be at all clear on who or what God is, almost no one claims to have seen God, even in a vision. With the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary and sharing our human nature, the story is different. Jesus is not completely spiritual and invisible. He lived among us as a man.

Gregory asked whether God was tricking us. Perhaps it is impossible for anyone to be sufficiently pure in heart to see God, a task beyond us.

This is not the Christian understanding, nor Gregory’s. In heaven we shall see God to the extent that we have developed the capacity to do so; to the extent that our heart is pure and simple, not polluted by selfishness or hatred or lies or bad habits.

Gross sins are like plaster over our eyes. Lesser faults are like conjunctivitis or like a simple inability to understand. At a high-class chess match I would have little understanding of what was happening.

Purity of heart in this life helps us to see God in the beauty and goodness around us, in creation, in some music and art and especially in good, brave people.

In heaven we hope to do even better.