The Right Hand Of God

In the Sunday School class my wife and I attend, our gifted teacher was commenting wisely on the meaning of Christ's being "seated at the right hand of God" (Colossians 3:1). Then, some members of the class wondered out loud about God's other hand. When the teacher asked if I could contribute anything to the discussion, I did the only thing a theologian of my learning and stature could do in a situation like that: beg for time to think of something. For better or worse, here is what I came up with.

Of all the many stops in London that our family loved to make, one stop still stands way out. It was to a little shop that catered to lefties and was filled with wonderful things for our left-handed daughter that we couldn't seem to find anywhere else. The "right" kind of scissors, for one. And school notebooks with the spirals on the "right" side. Pay attention to the quotation marks here; you'll be asked questions on them later.

Across the milennia, human communities have rarely been as accommodating to left-handed people as shops like this one are. The 90% of the population (ok, maybe only 85%) that is right-handed has always shaped things to its own preferences, the very word "right" included, and in a lot of languages besides English. Nobody wants to be wrong rather than right, bad rather than righteous, muddle-headed rather than right-minded, any more than any of us is content with merely a left-handed compliment. Everybody wants to be on the right side of an argument, a fist-fight, or a judge's decision, to be the right man and the right woman for the job, and when the curtain finally falls on our lives, we most definitely want to be on the right side of our Maker. The way to heaven is always upward and to the right --- right?

Unhappily for the left-handed minority of the human race, there is very little affirmation of their own handedness to be found in the symbols of the Christian tradition. The Old and New Testaments are full to the brim with anthropomorphic imagery of all sorts in their references to God: arms and hands and fingers, eyes and ears, not to mention mouth and back and feet. But above all, to God's right --- and not left --- hand. People who keep track of things like this tell us that the image of the right hand of God shows up around 60 times in the Bible. That's a lot of sacred right-handedness.

Once, one of my seminary students shared in class a flashback to his childhood that he experienced following my just completed presentation on the doctrine of the Atonement. We were looking especially closely at a passage from The Book of Acts. After Jesus was put to death ignominiously as a criminal, Luke wrote, God raised him up and "exalted him at his right hand as leader and savior, to grant Israel repentance and forgiveness of sins." (5:31) Embarrassed that his flashback had so little to do with the big point here, my student nevertheless ventured to tell us that he was remembering a painting of The Last Supper and his Sunday School teacher's quizzing him about who was sitting where around the table with Jesus. When he said the Apostles' Creed later that morning in the worship service, my student went on, the image of the Lord's being "seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty" almost knocked him over in its splendor. But then his best friend spoiled the moment by whispering, "why not the left hand?" Seven of my seventy students quietly raised their pens in the air --- with their left hands.

Why not the left hand indeed? Well, primarily because the weight of tradition will likely crush any serious attempt to invest the expression with symbolic power when it comes to speaking about God. To be sure, old symbols in the Christian tradition sometimes do rise to a new prominence in Christian understanding, e.g., the "womb of God." But the divine right-handedness is going to be around forever as a highly preferred image for ultimate power, meaning, and value. This may not be "right," but it is most probably true.

In the face of this symbolic lock-down, though, there is still one thing one thing we can and should do, whether we are lefties or not. It is to ponder how deeply the language of faith, from the Bible forward, incorporates unreflectively the attitudes and values of humanly wrought societies and cultures, and sicklies o'er the transcendent glory of a literally indescribable God with the pale cast of images that often demean whole segments of the human race. The descendents of Ham and Ishmael know this all too well.