A Good Question

I was chatting to my friend Daisy the other day, and she said how her uncle always used to ask, “Why does God want us to worship him?” I didn’t really have anything useful or interesting to say at the time. But then as I was going to sleep, a thought came to me, and I wrote it down for her. And here it is:

                When I was sitting on the banks of Victoria Falls (before I dropped my passport in) I was looking at the bit in Mark’s gospel which describes Palm Sunday. And I saw the bit where all the people are laying down their cloaks on the road, and running to find palm leaves and lay them down. And it occurred to me that the road in question was probably much more like a Malawian dirt-road than I’d previously been imagining. And then I realised something I had never really noticed before: Jesus is riding a baby donkey, on a seriously bad road – it would have been a bumpy, uncomfortable ride. And then it struck me that the really beautiful thing about Jesus choosing to ride the colt, or whatever baby donkeys are called, was that it meant that the cloaks actually made a difference. The palm leaves were not pure symbol, not simply an expression of deference or duty, they made the road smoother. They made a difference to Jesus.

                And I realised that this is true, it’s a massive thing about Jesus. The God who created black holes and B minor humbled himself and became a child, and then a man, and then even a convict, a prisoner, and a corpse. In love, he gave us power over him. He put himself in a position of weakness, by loving us he made himself vulnerable to us. So that what we do – whether we return his love – is capable of truly inflicting upon him agony or delight. C.S. Lewis said something like this once: “to be loved, not merely pitied... to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness... it is a weight of glory almost too great to imagine, but so it is.” Love makes us vulnerable. There is no position more powerless than that of a man, down on one knee. That, in fact, of a God nailed to a cross.

So to ask God why he desires our worship, is to ask a lover why she desires kisses. It is to ask a father why, when he walks through the door, he longs for the sight of his child, running towards him, arms outstretched, wanting to be picked up. It is to ask God why he loves us so much.

And in that sense, I suppose, it’s a good question. I don’t know why he loves us this much. But he does.