The Colors of God's Goodness--September 8, 2020"Bless the LORD, O my soul,
and all that is within me,
bless his holy name.
Bless the LORD, O my soul,
and do not forget all his benefits--
who forgives all your iniquity,
who heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the Pit,
who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,
who satisfies you with good as long as you live,
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.
The LORD works vindication
and justice for all who are oppressed.
He made known his ways to Moses,
his acts to the people of Israel.
The LORD is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love." [Psalm 103:1-7]
Here's a bit of science that still boggles my mind when I think about it--every color you have ever seen is all just a matter of a different wavelength of light, and there are colors beyond what our eyes can see that are still sensible to other creatures. Wow.
There's so much to unpack there. You surely know the old experiment where you take a prism and hold it up to the sunlight so that you can see how the cut glass breaks the light into different colors of the spectrum. So you already know that what we call "white light" has all the different wavelengths in it already--they are all the same "thing," but just at different frequencies. But then to add into that the notion that there are shades and colors beyond what our eyes can see--colors below red (that's why we refer to "infrared") and out past purple (or in the technical terminology, "ultraviolet")--and that some birds, butterflies, and other creatures can see them because their eyes are build differently, and well, now it becomes clear that the world is a lot more beautiful and mysterious a place than we realized. And then scientists come along and tell us they have figured out that radio waves, gamma rays, x-rays, and microwaves are all the same thing, too--they are all forms of the same mysterious thing we call light (technically, electromagnetic radiation). And all of a sudden, you realize that we are constantly awash in something good and glorious that exists in countless different forms but is still all really the same "thing."
Wow. Just... wow.
Something like that is the way the psalmist thinks about the goodness of God, too. God's goodness comes to us in a myriad of ways, and yet, in a sense, they are really just different wavelengths of the same divine "stuff." God's goodness, God's life-giving, generous, audacious goodness, comes at us in a million different shades and colors, and yet they are really all one in the end, like the colors of light blending back together into a beam of dazzling white.
"Do not forget God's benefits," the poet says to himself; "benefits," of course, not in the sense of like perks you get for being a Bonus-Card member at your grocery store, and not in the sense of getting insurance coverage or a company car from your employer. Those are all transactional--they depend on you doing something for the giver. God's "benefits" are things that flow simply from who God is--from God's own innate goodness and generosity. Rather like the speed of light, which Einstein said is constant and unconditional and does not depend on whatever else is going on around it, God's goodness is constant. It does not change depending on our behavior, actions, appreciation, or piety. And yet, it comes to us in different colors.
That's what I think is going on when the poet here describes the different things God does that bring things more fully to life: God forgives, God heals, God restores, God pours out steadfast love, God satisfies, God renews, God vindicates, and God gives justice. The verbs are all different, and the actions are all different, but in the same way that red light and green light and blue light are all wavelengths of the same substance (well, sometimes light behaves like a substance/particle, and sometimes it behaves like a wave, but that's a conversation for another day). To eyes like ours, we often see these different colors and treat them like they are separable things, as though yellow is a totally different reality from green or from orange. And for a long time people thought that radio was yet another thing, and that x-rays were altogether different, too. It turns out, though, that in the end, they are all the same thing, each a part of one spectrum.
Why does any of this matter? Well, for one, I think it helps to make clear that there aren't dueling or competing sides to God--despite our tendency to think that there's a "mean" God of judgment in some places in the Bible, and then there's a "nice" God in other places. We often end up pitting "justice" against "mercy" as though these are opposites, and we end up wanting to favor one or the other as the trait that "really" matters, or we feel we have to balance them somehow. You sometimes hear Respectable Religious people saying things like, "Don't talk so much about grace--you have to have an equal emphasis on rule-following, or else it will sound like God loves us even when we sin!" (God does; that's how grace works.) Or you'll hear, "You can't say that God's love is unconditional--that will make it sounds like God doesn't care about our behavior! So talk more about God zapping people who break the rules!" (God does want us to love each other, but God's love for us remains unearned and unconditional. Deal with it.) Or sometimes, on the flip side, you'll hear folks bad-mouth talk about "justice" and say, "God doesn't care about justice--God is just interested in saving souls and getting them into heaven." All of those make the same mistake of treating justice and mercy like they are opposites, rather than different colors of goodness.
And maybe the psalmist was on to this all along--maybe the same God who grants justice for the poor and vindicates the oppressed is also the God who forgives our sins and feeds all creation with what we need for life. Maybe these are not competing personality traits in God, but different wavelengths of God's goodness that we get to see through the prism of our lived experience. Like Cornel West famously says, "Justice is what love looks like in public." We get so hung up on love as an emotion that we forget that in the biblical sense love is much more concerned with action that does good for the beloved, whether or not you "feel" like it. In that sense, justice is very much in tune with love--they are both about doing good for others, whether specific faces and names, or as a matter of policy for all people. They are about spreading goodness and making sure no one is left out, no one mistreated, and no one stepped on. And in that sense, all the things the psalmist describes here in these verses all make sense--they all feel like maybe they are just different "wavelengths" of the same divine impulse to give life.
That says something else important for us--that maybe the wavelengths of goodness that I haven't paid much attention to (or haven't been able to recognize) are things that others are better attuned to and can help me to appreciate. I grew up, for example, in a tradition of Christianity that spoke a LOT about grace, but for a lot of my life in faith, the notion of "justice" seemed opposed to grace. After all, if grace is about getting what we don't deserve, and if justice is exactly about giving what is deserved, then it seems like you have to pick a side--justice or mercy, fairness or grace. But maybe those are just different colors of God's goodness that turn out to be different shades of the same thing. After all, Jesus tells a story about workers who all get paid the same amount no matter how long they have worked or the day, and while that certainly sounds like grace, the foreman in the story insists he will pay everybody what is "right" or "just." Maybe we don't have to be upset or uncomfortable with the idea of "justice," either. Maybe instead of criticizing the voices around us who are calling for justice (perhaps because we have been desensitized to injustice), we can learn from their perspectives to see that justice and love are, like hues and shades on the spectrum of light, different wavelengths of the same reality: of God's life-giving goodness to all. Maybe it turns out that God's justice and mercy, God's generosity and forgiveness, God's grace and God's vindication of the oppressed, are all the colors of God's goodness.
And if that's true, then just as the psalmist says, it is good to remember all the many "benefits" of God's goodness--just to remember that it is wider and deeper and richer and fuller and more beautiful than our eyes can take in. And we can seek to spread all of them in our lives, the whole box of crayons.
Lord God, let your goodness enfold us in all its shades and colors. Let us be saturated by your mercy and justice, and let your light shine through us in all the wavelengths you radiate it.
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