Awaiting the Arrival of the God Who is Man (movie Arrival)

God Only Knows

  What would we do if we were God?  “Well”, we might think, “what wouldn’t I do!”  I'm sure we could all think of things we would do differently if it were up to us.  Hunger, disease, suffering . . . who needs those?  Gone! Looks easy, doesn’t it?  

The Fall of Phaethon by Ferrau Fenzoni

It looks easy, that is, until we start to think about it a little more deeply.  Holding the entire infinitely complex universe in being requires multi-tasking of a sort we can’t even imagine.  To get just a glimpse of the problem, consider ancient Greek story of Phaethon. Phaethon was a young man who eagerly leapt at the chance to drive the chariot of the Sun - what could go wrong?  Plenty, as it turned out: the foolish, overconfident mortal couldn’t control the Sun god’s horses, and left the world a smoking ruin.  We have seen real-world parallels in more recent times in the calamity that has consistently resulted even from more down-to-earth ambitions, such as planned economies (see: North Korea, mass starvation).

    And yet we can’t seem to help ourselves.  We all understand what Phaethon’s crash is supposed to tell us, and nobody will deny that our intellects are finite.  We still seem to think, however, that we can judge the mind of God.  For instance, we have all heard objections to Christian beliefs phrased as, “Why would God do that? Why would a good God allow suffering? Couldn’t God have made a world without sin? Wouldn’t an all-powerful God find a more direct way to make his wishes known?” and so on.  All such objections can really be reduced to: “That’s not what I would do if I were God!”  But we’re not God, and a God capable of creating an entire universe ex nihilo can’t help but be something, or better yet someone, of an entirely different order than ourselves.  

The Lord Works In Mysterious Ways

    Understanding the radical difference between our Creator and ourselves is essential to accepting and working within our own limitations.  Explaining it to an unbelieving world, however, presents something of a challenge to Christian evangelists.  One the one hand, an infinite God is necessarily beyond our comprehension in many respects; on the other, as sceptics have correctly pointed out, simply dismissing difficulties with “The Lord works in mysterious ways!” can be an awful convenient way of skirting potential problems . . . and will persuade precisely nobody.   And yet we Christians are called to “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15).   

Louise (Amy Adams) attempting to communicate with alien in Arrival.

    My sons and I watched a film recently, Arrival, which raises similar questions.  Arrival is the story a linguist named Louise Banks (played by actress Amy Adams) who is called upon by the U.S. government to attempt to communicate with the occupants of one of twelve UFOs that have come down to Earth.  Like the Star Trek episode “Darmok” (which I discuss HERE), this film explores the difficulties, and potential rewards, of learning to comprehend not simply the language, but the very different thought processes of beings whose way of understanding is profoundly different from ours. As far as I know, the makers of the movie did not have any any specifically Christian intent, but there are some interesting connections.  Bishop Robert Barron has published an insightful essay in which he uses Arrival to explore the way in which God speaks to us through the human writers of Holy Scripture.

How Can We See God?

    Bishop Barron addresses himself to a specifically Scriptural question; when I saw the film, it led me to think about some other aspects  of God’s self-revelation as well.  Let's start, however, with "Darmok", the Star Trek episode mentioned above: here we see human beings interacting with utterly alien creatures who are nevertheless at a roughly equal stage of development.  In Arrival the aliens are clearly much more advanced than the earthlings in a number of respects, but they still struggle mightily to make themselves understood.  Their human interlocutors need to work just as hard as they do to make a connection, and the whole project nearly ends in world-wide disaster. In some ways their more developed technology and (for lack of a better term) more developed awareness makes them even more threatening and inaccessible to humans, making the task of establishing communication that much harder.

    Let’s consider now the situation of the Infinite God, immeasurably more advanced than the aliens in Arrival.  How can this gap, infinitely wider than that between the movie aliens and humanity, be bridged? Suppose he were to reveal himself to us directly, as the doubters demand.  How would He do that? If  a being so radically beyond us were somehow visible, would we even understand what we were looking at? Also, if other creatures can frighten us, how do we react to an entity more powerful than the entire universe itself?  As God tells Moses, “No one may see me and live” (Exodus 33:20).  How can He reveal himself to his creatures without overwhelming them?

The Face of the Living God

The Crucifixion, by Leon Bonnat

An all-powerful God, fortunately, who created us and knows us better than we know ourselves, can do what otherworldly aliens, however advanced, cannot: he can speak to us clearly through our fellow humans. We see this pattern throughout Salvation History, from Abraham through Moses through the prophets.  Even here, however, it was all too easy for people to reject God’s messengers; after all, weren’t they only men as well?  Jesus Himself explains this difficulty, and the solution to it, in a parable:

There was a householder who planted a vineyard, and set a hedge around it, and dug a wine press in it, and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went into another country. When the season of fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants, to get his fruit; and the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first; and they did the same to them. Afterward he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.'  (Matthew 21:33-37)

In Jesus Christ, then,  the Eternal, Infinite God comes to us in human form.  As Jesus says in another place:

He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, 'Show us the Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? (John 14:9-10)

In Jesus Christ God does reveal himself directly, but in a form we can truly understand, as a fellow creature with whom we can identify. When we look at Christ we look at God, “For in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9).

His name shall be called Emmanuel, which means God With Us (Matthew 1:23)

    Even that, however, is not the whole story. Let’s return to Jesus’ parable from the Gospel of Matthew,  and see what the wicked tenants do when the the Father sends his Son to them:

But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.' And they took him and cast him out of the vineyard, and killed him. (Matthew 21:38-39)

The Annunciation of the Shepherds, Jules Bastien Lepage

    In real life, as we know, the true Son is indeed killed on the Cross, then proves his Divinity by rising from the dead: a clear, tangible sign.  Through his Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, he shows us not only what sort of God he is, but also what sort of men and women  we can be if we follow his example.  And in fact he has continued to communicate to us through men and women who have followed that example over the past two millennia, and we now venerate these people as Saints.

    The Incarnation, then, is the Big Breakthrough that the Aliens in Arrival can’t hope to accomplish, the Breaking Through of the Infinite God into our world in the form of a finite man.  God’s answer to the problem is suffering is that, as a man, He shares in our suffering; if we in turn join our suffering to his, we can spend eternity with Him far beyond the pain and sorrow of this world.  That’s a better solution than anything we could come up with on our own.

    For this reason the Incarnation is, as the Angel tells the shepherds of Bethlehem, “good news of a great joy which will come to all the people” (Luke 2:10). That is why we devote these four weeks of the Season of Advent preparing for the arrival (adventus in Latin) of the Messiah in the form of the baby Jesus: He is the One Man who truly knows how to be God.