Psalm 139.1-7, John 18.33-37
God knows us like our bestest friend. That is both reassuring and alarming.
My wife gave me a birthday card when she was still my girlfriend. It said, 'Lets be best friends for ever and a day!' And that's just what we are.
After a while best friends know exactly what you are thinking. Sometimes my wife and I say the same thing at exactly the same moment.
After a while best friends can tell one another's stories. My wife hates it when I finish a story that she began. But then sometimes she will break into one of my stories. I look at her and she says, 'What?' And I say, 'You're doing it to me!' It's a standing joke in our family.
Best friends know how one another are feeling. Sometimes my wife says, 'Didn't you know that I was upset?' And I say, 'Yes, but I didn't know how to respond.' But I still knew.
And God knows us far more intimately than our very bestest friend. That is both deeply reassuring and profoundly alarming.
Former Vice President Prof Clive Marsh says, "For some, God remains a tyrant who... monitors their every move, curtailing their freedom. For others, God is a warm cosy grandfather figure who receives them into his arms regardless of what they've done without any word of advice, warning or reprimand.'
Which image of God appeals to you? Clive Marsh says, 'While the latter - the indulgent grandparent - is more attractive... It doesn't seem to be quite what Judaism and Christianity have been trying to get at in their talk of God.' God's intimate concern for us can be both reassuring and almost intimidating.
Christabelle Bielenberg, a British woman married to a German lawyer and living with him in wartime Germany, described how she was sat in a stationary train during an air raid. A disconsolate army officer was sitting opposite her and she asked him how he was feeling. The answer was, 'Not very good.' He had seen some terrible things, and perhaps participated in them. 'God sees everything we do,' he told her.
We face our own moral choices every day, what to say, what to do, how to respond; and the Psalmist says, 'God sees everything we do.' That means God can empathize with us, feel sorry for us, encourage us, inspire us, but also challenge us, check us, perhaps even be cross with us. The Psalmist says, 'You are acquainted with all our ways.'
And not just all our ways, but all our aspirations and plans, all our thoughts and feelings, what we're going to do as well as what we've already done. The Psalmist says, 'You search out my path and… even before a word is on my tongue, ...you know it completely.'
God knows us like our very bestest friend. The Psalmist says that level of intimacy, that depth of personal knowledge of finite beings by an infinite Other, is wonderful, too wonderful in fact! Because the Psalmist also says that a knowledge so complete as this hems us in! It's both wonderful and extremely daunting, frightening even, at the same time.
The Septuagint version of this passage, which is the Greek translation made long ago, before the time of Jesus, has a slightly different take on the rather claustrophobic image of being hemmed in by a jealous God who won't let us out of her sight. In the Septuagint God becomes a best friend like my wife, 'who knows all [our] endings and beginnings', a God who knows what we're going to say and do before the idea even forms in our mind. The Septuagunt version of the Psalm says that God has 'fashioned' or shaped who we are.
But, you might be thinking that's not a very Methodist idea. It sounds like predestination, an idea that's found in the New Testament and which many of the early Protestants reformers were very keen on. Predestination says that our genes, the personality traits that come bound up with our nature, will inevitably shape how we behave. So if God knows our DNA, and how our brain will process all our thoughts, God will also know everything that we're going to be and do. You can't get much more intimate than that.
John Wesley rejected that idea. He preferred to think that our behaviour can be nurtured, not just by other people but by a transforming encounter with God's Spirit. That means God becomes the kind of bestest friend who can always guess what we're probably going to say and do but still yearns for us to be better.
With Wesley, I prefer to believe that's the true sense in which we're hemmed in by God. God is that kind of slightly annoying best friend who keeps on nudging us surreptitiously when they think we're about to say the wrong thing.
And yes, my bestest friend has been known to do that, but only because she wants to help. She can see where my worst instincts might lead me and she's trying to head me off at the pass.
A friend like that invades our personal space; and in that sense perhaps, God does hem us in, but not in a controlling way.
So what does Psalm 139 have to say to us? That God is our very bestest friend, forever and a day. But God is not like an all-forgiving cuddly grandmother who's always willing to make us feel good about ourselves regardless of what we've done, without any word of advice, warning or reprimand.'
Instead God is a bit more like the sort of headteacher who's constantly patrolling the school corridors and knows the name of every child. He wants to admonish us when we go wrong, encourage us to do better and nudge us to be more like Jesus.
Jesus tells Governor Pilate that if he were a different kind of leader he would call his followers onto the streets to take up arms to stop our fragile world from being misused and its people mistreated. That is how important it is to him to challenge all that is wrong and put it right. But instead he is the kind of leader who speaks truth to power, and to us. Those who truly want to belong to him will listen to their bestest friend, they will feel his gentle nudging to do the right thing and they will join him in calling out injustice and testifying to his truth in a hostile world, until even the most sceptical listeners are persuaded to become more like him.
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