The Rabbit Who Visits My Garden: The Trinitarian Life of God

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE returns again and again to prayer. We pray by ourselves, and we pray with others. Worship draws us to the scriptures, with the psalter at the center of the Bible, which bears witness to the back-and-forth, the disagreement and commitment, the frustration and intimacy, of God’s communication with God’s people—a textual record of conversations across the ages.

With the guidance of these holy words, prayer transfigures us with divine communion, our lives caught up in the life of God. We find ourselves with the disciples when Jesus takes them up the mountain, where “he was transfigured before them” (Mark 9:2). We are Jesus’ companions. He welcomes us into a life of prayer, which is our union with God.

In After the Spirit, theologian Eugene Rogers uses the traditional language of church doctrine to describe this process of deification. “The Holy Spirit incorporates human prayer into the prayer of the Son to the Father.” In the biblical scene, we are standing there with Jesus on the mountain as the thick presence of heaven descends on him like a cloud (Mark 9:7). “Prayer is a transfiguration of human beings,” Rogers explains. This story is about our participation in the trinitarian life of God.

The Bible passages this month lead us from Epiphany to Lent, with Transfiguration Sunday as our transition from one season to the next. During Lent we open ourselves to how the light of Epiphany’s revelations about God exposes sin’s insidious powers in our lives and in the world.

Creaturely Neighbors

I never disturb the birds when they eat the figs from the tree I planted years ago. I don’t interrupt the neighborhood rabbits when they nibble on cilantro sprouts or broccoli seedlings. The garden produces enough to sustain our block of the urban ecosystem. God feeds all of us from creation’s generosity, even the birds and rabbits. “[God] gives to the animals their food, and to the young ravens when they cry” (Psalm 147:9).

God also has a relationship with the earth, with plants and animals, with ravens and fig trees, with hillsides and grasslands. “[God] covers the heavens with clouds, prepares rain for the earth,” the psalmist notices, and “makes grass grow on the hills” (verse 8). The Bible tells us that God attends to the natural world beyond human beings. However, as self-centered creatures we neglect the scriptures that display God’s connection with nature. The Creator doesn’t spurn a creature’s needs. God feeds young ravens because God hears them crying and isn’t heartless.

In The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics, biblical scholar Mari Joerstad explores God’s personal relationship with other-than-human life. Throughout the psalms, Joerstad observes, nature converses with God: “In the Psalter the world is not mute; it is sonorous, humming with voices.” The psalmist eavesdrops on the nonhuman natural world and offers revelations of God’s relationships with birds and rivers, cattle and trees, clouds and landscapes. “Personalistic nature texts,” as Joerstad calls these passages, invite us to care about our plant and animal neighbors, not in order to secure an environmental situation adequate for the survival of Homo sapiens, but because God loves this world and has offered us “a host of friends, a community that extends beyond our humanness.” I have relational work to do on interspecies friendship. The neighborhood rabbit who visits my garden darts into the bushes when I approach.

February 14

Police Kill

“This is my Son, the Beloved,” a voice announces from heaven (Mark 9:7). This scene recalls the theophany in Exodus when God etched the commandments into stone. Like Moses on Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:29-35), God transfigures Jesus’ countenance. Here, in Mark’s story, the covenant becomes flesh in Jesus, this child of Israel. And this covenant is love. Jesus is the incarnation of divine belovedness. His life will declare God’s love.

God’s law is not in competition with God’s love. Jon D. Levenson explains that the people of God receive the covenant at Sinai not “as the antithesis of love, or love as a substitute for law, but love made practical, reliable, reciprocal, and socially responsible through law, divine law observed in love.” The revelation at Jesus’ transfiguration does not replace what God offered at Sinai. The voice from heaven in Mark’s gospel is the same voice that spoke to Moses.

The life of Jesus, God’s law incarnate, is not a contrast to Torah’s commands but to our society’s legal system, where politicians justify the violence of prisons and policing as necessary to maintain order, even if some people are sacrificed—primarily Black lives, a demographic incarcerated at rates that expose the systemic injustice of the justice system, the racial prejudice endemic to the law-and-order complex.

At the transfiguration, when our attention turns to Jesus’ life as the embodiment of God’s covenantal law, we’re invited to align ourselves with Sinai’s commandments. For example, Jesus demonstrates obedience to God’s prohibition against killing—“Thou shalt not kill”—because every life belongs to God, every person is a beloved child of God. To kill violates God’s command. Christian police officers disbelieve in Jesus Christ as the incarnation of God’s covenantal love when they strap their bodies to death’s weapons—we believe with our bodies; we can’t separate a belief in the head from a belief in a hand articulated with a gun.

February 21

The Rainbow Sign

“I have set my bow in the clouds,” God declares after the flood (Genesis 9:13). The language in this story has produced our English word “rainbow.” The Hebrew word in the verse, qeshet, refers to a bow and arrow. This is imagery from archery, the advanced military weaponry of that era. “Always, the word qeshet designates a weapon of war,” Bible scholar Nahum M. Sarna notes in his Understanding Genesis, “the symbol of divine bellicosity and hostility has been transformed into a token of eternal reconciliation between God and Man.” The rainbow is a sign of God’s disarmament, the retirement of God’s war-bow to the sky, an unloaded weapon pointing away from the earth.

We enter Lent, a season of reckoning: to contemplate, to meditate on who we are, on what we do, and on who we are becoming. This biblical origin story reckons with violence, with bloodshed—that’s the emphasis of the verses preceding today’s passage. God warns Noah and his descendants against killing any animal, human or otherwise. For the shedding of blood, God says, “I will require a reckoning” (verse 5). Central to these postdiluvian commandments is the prohibition of killing, of spilling blood, because that vital fluid coursing through bodies belongs to God. To drain the God-given life force of creation from a person is an incursion into the domain of divinity. To kill is a declaration of war against God’s reign, an act of rebellion against the Creator.

The rainbow is an invitation to a disarmed life with God. That’s the covenant offered to humanity when God lays aside the warrior’s bow. To live in God’s renewed world does not require violence. All we need is the One who has promised to sustain our lives. There is no divine justification to spill another’s blood. Every deathly act is a refusal of God’s will.

February 28

Bear Witness

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). This verse jolts me back to junior high and a T-shirt popular among my friends at youth group: On the front, an image of Jesus’ crucifixion with “No pain, no gain” written at the foot of the cross; on the back, a picture of knees, raw and bloody, with the words, “Pray Hard.”

I was taught that the Christian life was a spiritual workout, to exercise muscles of self-denial until they hurt—one more push-up, one more curl, one more sacrifice, one more day of prayer and fasting. Because “no pain, no gain.” We threw our sense of self into “the Refiner’s fire” as songwriter Brian Doerksen instructed us, and followed lifestyle guidance on gospel purity from seminars by Bill Gothard and Joshua Harris. They taught us that the Christian life was an obsession with individualistic piety—a spirituality that befits a culture focused on pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. If only we would learn to celebrate discipline, as Richard Foster insisted, then we’d be on the right path to spiritual growth.

When Jesus invites his disciples to take up the cross, he’s pointing at the torturous mechanism of Rome’s power to silence subversives, not to evangelical pietism. Jesus wants his followers to know what they’re committing to: a political movement of revolutionary community that will make them enemies of the establishment.

But the pain of sacrifice isn’t the point, nor is crucifixion. Jesus doesn’t call for self-denial as a good in and of itself. The point, Jesus says, is to bear witness to the gospel of life even if such a decision will lead to execution at the hands of oppressors. “Those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel,” Jesus says, “will save it” (Mark 8:35).