Holy Thunder

When we hear the word “holy”, what images pop into our heads? Do we think of a stereotypical stuffy church lady wearing conservative dress and judging you for your music tastes? Do we think of an angry street preacher calling fire down on his enemies who happen to be everyone within earshot of his diatribe? Is it a building? Is it a book? Our thoughts and images about these concepts that are central to the story of Scripture are important. They can either be a help or hindrance to drawing closer to God. The above images will probably cause us to run far away from Him. 

However, the word that translates to holy in English is the Hebrew word “Kadosh”, meaning “otherness” or “set apartness”. It is not a word that means moral perfection or religiosity as we tend to think it does. God is morally perfect but that’s not the primary concept behind Kadosh. The living God is completely different from every other person or thing; there is simply nothing else like God. He is uncreated and self-sustaining, He is not dependent on any other force or energy for sustenance. He needs no permission to exist; He simply exists and because He does exist, everything else does too. He is the cause of all other causes. This is what is packed into the idea of holy in the Bible, it is a type of life and divine Being who lives in another category altogether. 

Because God is so other than all else, there is a type of primal fear when we approach God (or God approaches us). He is scary because He is so beyond our ability to understand who He is. We sense and see power that has no limit and intelligence that stymies even the brightest of us. We cannot figure Him out, no matter how hard we try. It is like the same primal terror and fear we feel encountering a thunderstorm out on a Midwest prairie. It is huge, powerful, and so much more in regard to mass and energy than any human could ever hope to be. We fear it as much as we are fascinated by it. We don’t know whether to run inside and take shelter or sit somewhere where we can experience its raw power. 

When Jesus walked the earth, it was God in the flesh. The holy became something to touch, to handle, to be healed by. The primal fear was replaced by a love so strong it could crush us under its weight, its infinite heart. 

The storm was still a storm. Jesus was still perplexing, mystifying, and even scary. When he calmed a literal storm, the sheer otherness of this action (after all, who can stop a raging storm?) terrified the disciples and caused them to ask, “who is this man?” When the crowd was hungry Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed thousands of people, doing what only the Creator can do. When Christ rose from the dead, this action was so completely foreign to the human experience the women who were witnesses to this event: went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid (Mark 16:8 ESV). 

Jesus shocked our senses with his otherness. He still does. He is still power and might beyond our wildest dreams. But he is also crucified love. He is a love that lets us defile his otherness. Instead of destroying us, God forgave us. This should teach us who God really is. The storm is still scary, but it is not scary in an abusive or violent way, it is scary because the same infinite depth of power in God is simultaneously an infinite depth of mercy and love for the creation he birthed. 

What images go through our minds when we think about this? How does the storm move you now? Does the thunder still hold the same dread, or has it now become sacred—something fascinating but also a divine spark of life? The only thing left for us to do is to enter the storm with open hands and let its waves and billows pour over us. We embrace the wind and trust the One who can still them enough for us to try to understand him, if only a little.