OU . . . YOU WHOM we love . . . You cannot see us. You cannot hear us. You imagine us so far away, and yet we are so close.¹

In the opening scene of the movie In Weiter Ferne, So Nah! (“Far Away, So Close!”), the angel looking across the city is reminiscent of Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem. As the angel surveys the traffic and people going about their everyday business, he realizes the distance they attribute to God, how far they think He is from them. They have little consideration for the possibility of God and His angels playing any real role in their lives. God is a distant God, removed from what they see as the real world around them.

The thoughts expressed by the angel identify our greatest difficulty in regard to God. We imagine Him as being far away. Yet He is so close!

Our first difficulty has to do with our imagination of God. In our frustration we try to place God in a box, shaped by our own ideas. “We degrade Providence by attributing our ideas to it out of annoyance at being unable to understand it.”² Our God is not big enough. This difficulty can be overcome partially by realizing our own smallness in a vast universe. And in this regard, our physical insignificance in relation to our world can be instructive. From our smallness in relation to this small planet we may then extrapolate about our true position in the context of the vast expanse of the universe. (Despite the fact that we often forget, we are indeed very small in a universe far bigger than our minds can comprehend.)

A Power so great as to both create and perpetuate this vast array of galaxies and worlds can be recognized as definitely worthy of our respect, our worship, and our obedience.

A God Small Enough to Hug
Once we grasp these realities, however, new difficulties arise. This God is so far away. How can we ever love Him? Isn’t He a God to be feared?

As human beings, we need a God small enough to hug. This is the way we love. We need a God small enough to care—a God who is close. C. S. Lewis suggests that God is so large as to be able to fit the whole of the universe inside Himself without being distended, but so small as to be able to fit inside the tiniest flower seed without being compressed. In this paradox lies the true greatness of God and His dealings with our world.

“‘God is great’. . . is a truth which needed no supernatural being to teach men. That God is little, that is the truth which Jesus taught man.”³ In Jesus we have the human face of God. God set up a branch office in our little corner of the universe. It is this God that we can love comfortably. It is this God who evokes our service. We understand Him as a God who can feel our pain, our sorrow, our frustration, our joy, our hopes.

Too often we accept a faraway God without appreciating, at the same time, the closeness of God. We acknowledge the Almighty and await a coming King, but fail to recognize the God who dwelt among us and who is our present friend. While the hope of final deliverance is real and should not be undervalued, it is only God’s sacrificial stoop to our level, His identification with us and His sympathy with our predicament, that makes “the blessed hope” blessed.

We can rejoice in the incredible greatness of God. But unless we also understand His smallness, His hugeness can be truly terrifying. In fact, it’s only through our appreciation of the littleness of God that His even more incredible greatness is revealed. This is a God whom we can worship and love—one who truly loves us. It is a God who is more real than everything that we see around us, a God who can and wants to be a part of our lives.

This is the glorious paradox of God. He is the ultimate and all-powerful ruler of the universe, yet our personal friend. Our distance from Him is determined only by our response. He will always be found if we turn and look for Him. God is at once farther from us than we can fathom and closer than we can ever imagine.

_________________________
¹ The opening lines of In Weiter Ferne, So Nah! (“Far Away, So Close”), a 1993 film by Wim Wenders.
² Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, p. 398.
³ Father Neville Figgis, as quoted by Phillip Yancey in The Jesus I Never Knew.

_________________________
Nathan Brown writes from Queensland, Australia, where he is a freelance writer and is pursuing a Ph.D.