The Playful God
by John Watson
A little while ago a young child of six years old blew my mind away – asking my then six year old son ‘What does your daddy do?’ to which my son replied he is a Vicar – this penetrating and wonderfully subversive comment came back ‘WOW – he gets to play with God all day!’
Play! What a thought. Here is a an idea that might transform the world – the world is the playground of God – not in an old Greek Jason and the Argonauts way, where capricious gods play with human destiny aka a game of chess.
The world is the playground of God in the sense that as children play, create, imagine, react, invite, laugh, run and become abandoned to the moment – so God is ‘working his purpose out’.
Yet play can also be risky. In this playground we too run, trip, bruise our knees, bicker about which direction the game should go, let loose our passions and desires.
Psalm 104:24-26 captures this playground
How many are your works O God
In wisdom you made them all
the earth is full of your creatures
There is the sea, vast and spacious
teeming with creatures beyond number
living things both large and small
There ships go to and fro
and the Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there. (NIV)
The Leviathan is often seen to be a dangerous beast, sometimes a symbol of enmity or even destruction; a creature renowned for its strength and danger. Like Moby Dick it is a beast charged with imagery and suspicion.
Even more mischievously in the Talmud God is presented as playing with the Leviathan for part of the day! Avoda Zara (3b) says :
"Rav Yehuda says, there are twelve hours in a day. ... the fourth three hour period God plays with the Leviathan as it is written: "the Leviathan which you have created to play with""
We should therefore banish any romantic notion that creation has a serene sense of order about it with Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite playing in the background. Perhaps we should be playing ‘Wild Thing’ by The Troggs as the backing track!
There is something powerful and profound in being able to see our relationship with God as playing. It catches our imaginations and it is when we start to imagine a new world – a new humanity in the words of Paul – that the new way of living begins. God calls us into his world to play – to imagine a new reality, his
John Watson is Vicar of St Paul's Tupsley with St Andrew's Hampton Bishop, he is also on the Fulcrum Leadership Team
John is the Vicar of St Paul’s, Tupsley and St Andrews, Hampton Bishop in Hereford Diocese. He’s also currently doing Doctoral Studies at Kings College London.