Jean Khoury

Summary: This article traces a single biblical and theological line: the God of Israel reveals Himself by a consistent pattern of concealment. He elects what is despised rather than what is admired; He hides His Son for thirty years in a village from which “nothing good” was expected to come; He conceals His glory beneath the wounds of the Passion; and He remains, even in the Resurrection, the God who must be sought rather than seized. Beginning with the abandoned child of Ezekiel 16 and moving through the election of Israel, of David, of Mary, and of the Corinthians, the article argues that divine election is governed by truth and not by appearance, and that God’s hiddenness is not a limitation upon His self-revelation but its very mode. The final sections draw out the practical consequences of this theology for spiritual formation, discernment, and the prayer of recollection, and close with a meditation on the Resurrection as God’s summons to “look again” at the glory already given in the Passion.

Introduction

There is a verse in the prophet Isaiah that a soul who has prayed seriously for any length of time eventually stumbles upon and can never again read as a mere line of poetry: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, God of Israel, Saviour” (Isa 45:15). It is not a complaint. It is not resignation. It is confession: the recognition of something essential about the God who has bound Himself to Israel by covenant and yet continually withdraws from the grasp of human expectation. This article is an attempt to follow that confession through Scripture, to see how consistently, how almost stubbornly, God chooses to act in ways that contradict what human beings consider worthy of attention, and to ask what this means for the one who desires to find Him.

The starting point is a passage that ought to unsettle anyone who reads it attentively: Ezekiel’s description of Israel’s origin as an abandoned newborn, unwashed, uncut, unwanted, “thrown out on the ground as something loathsome, the day you were born” (Ezek 16:5). From this single image, an entire theology of divine election opens up, and it does not stop with Israel. It runs through David the shepherd, through Mary of Nazareth, through the hidden thirty years of Jesus in Galilee, through the scandal of the Cross, and through Paul’s blunt reminder to the Corinthians that hardly any of them were wise, powerful, or of noble birth when God called them. At the end of this trail stands a single, coherent claim: God does not conceal Himself because He has failed to reveal Himself, but because concealment is, mysteriously, His manner of revealing.

I. The Abandoned Child: Ezekiel’s Theology of Election

Ezekiel 16 opens with one of the most disturbing images in the Old Testament. God addresses Jerusalem — and through her, Israel — not by praising her beauty or her ancestry, but by recalling the utter degradation of her beginnings: “By origin and birth you are of the land of Canaan; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite” (Ezek 16:3). The child is not merely poor; she is abandoned. No one washes her, cuts her cord, rubs her with salt, or wraps her in swaddling clothes. “No one looked on you with pity or compassion to do any of these things for you” (Ezek 16:5).

Then comes the divine reversal. God sees the child in this state of absolute helplessness and says simply, “Live!” (Ezek 16:6). Everything that follows — her growth, her adornment, her covenant, her dignity — flows from that one word. God does not find in her a beauty that earns His love; His love is what creates her beauty. As the text later makes explicit, God says, “I bound myself by oath to you; I made a covenant with you… and you became mine” (Ezek 16:8). The theological order is therefore reversed from what human intuition expects: dignity is not the reason for God’s love, but its fruit.

This same logic governs Deuteronomy’s account of Israel’s election: “It was not because you were more numerous than other peoples that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you — for you were the least of all peoples — but because the Lord loved you” (Deut 7:7–8). Israel’s smallness is not overcome by election; it is, in some sense, the very condition in which election becomes visible as grace and not as reward. St. Paul later gives this pattern its most compressed formulation: “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1:27).

What Ezekiel 16 makes clear, and what the rest of Scripture will only confirm, is that God’s love does not respond to lovableness already present in the creature. It generates it. Election is therefore radically gratuitous. The starting point of any relationship with God is not “I am worthy, therefore God chooses me,” but rather, “God has chosen me in my poverty, and His love is what makes me capable of becoming what He desires.” The recognition of one’s own poverty, far from being an obstacle to vocation or to holiness, is precisely the place where grace is received.

II. A Biblical and Historical Pattern: The Little Ones Whom God Chooses

The election of Israel is not an isolated case. Scripture and the history of the Church present a sustained pattern: God repeatedly chooses what is apparently insignificant — the younger son rather than the elder, David rather than his impressive brothers, the barren woman rather than the fertile one, the poor and overlooked rather than the powerful.

This pattern becomes concrete in the lives of the saints. Mary of Nazareth is the clearest instance: a young woman from an insignificant village who becomes the Mother of God, and whose own interpretation of her election is not that she possessed some extraordinary qualification, but that God “has looked upon the humiliation of his servant” (Lk 1:48). Germaine Cousin was a poor, physically afflicted, neglected shepherdess, mistreated even within her own family. Joan of Arc was an untrained peasant girl with no political standing. Catherine Labouré was an obscure Daughter of Charity. Bernadette Soubirous was a poor, largely uneducated girl from Lourdes. Lucia dos Santos was an apparently insignificant Portuguese child from Fatima. In every case, the pattern is the same: God does not wait for the person to acquire the qualifications that would make her impressive by human measure. He chooses, calls, and only then forms.

The principle can be stated with some precision: God does not choose the beautiful because they are beautiful; His choice makes them beautiful. He does not choose the great because they are great; His grace makes them great. He does not choose those who are already significant; He gives significance to those whom He chooses. This is already fully present in Ezekiel 16 — the abandoned child has nothing with which to recommend herself; her entire story begins with the divine gaze, “I saw you” (Ezek 16:6), and the divine command, “Live!”

It would nonetheless be too simple to conclude that God chooses people merely because they are insignificant, as though insignificance were itself a qualification. The more precise statement is that God is free to choose without being bound by human measures of significance at all. His election manifests the truth that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor 1:25). Nazareth, Lourdes, the Rue du Bac, Fatima, Domrémy, and the hidden life of Germaine Cousin all stand, in this sense, as a historical commentary on Ezekiel 16.

III. Can Anything Good Come from Nazareth? Galilee, Judea, and the Geography of Election

Mary’s origin in Nazareth of Galilee is not an incidental biographical detail; it belongs to the same theology of election. Nathanael’s question in the Gospel of John — “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (Jn 1:46) — reflects the low esteem in which this obscure Galilean village was held. But the deeper social reality is not simply that Nazareth was small. Judeans and Galileans were, in first-century Jewish society, distinct populations, and there was a genuine cultural tension between them. Jerusalem and Judea occupied the religious and political centre of Jewish life; Galilee was regarded by many Judeans as peripheral, and its inhabitants could carry a certain stigma.

The Gospel of John registers this prejudice more than once. The religious authorities dismiss the possibility of a Galilean Messiah: “Search and you will see that the prophet does not arise from Galilee” (Jn 7:52), and the crowd echoes the same doubt: “Surely the Christ is not going to come from Galilee?” (Jn 7:41). Even speech marked the distinction: when Peter is recognised during Jesus’ trial, the bystanders say, “Certainly you are also one of them, for your accent betrays you” (Mt 26:73). To say that Jesus and Mary “come from Galilee,” then, is to say something with genuine social weight. The Messiah does not emerge from the Jerusalem establishment, from a priestly family, from the aristocracy, or from the religious elite. He comes from Galilee, and within Galilee, from Nazareth. And Mary is from that same Nazareth.

The pattern intensifies rather than dissolves: not Jerusalem, but Nazareth; not Judea, but Galilee; not the powerful, but the lowly; not the recognised, but the hidden; not human prestige, but divine election. Mary’s own commentary on this pattern is the Magnificat: “He has looked upon the humiliation of his servant” (Lk 1:48); “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and raised up the lowly” (Lk 1:52); “He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Lk 1:53). The very geography of salvation begins to preach the Magnificat — God chooses Galilee before Jerusalem, Nazareth before the Temple, a humble maiden before the powerful, and, in due course, a manger and a Cross before worldly glory.

IV. Thirty Hidden Years: The Sanctification of Obscurity

The weight of this pattern becomes still heavier when one considers how Jesus actually spends His earthly life. After the flight into Egypt, Joseph “went and settled in a town called Nazareth” (Mt 2:23), and Luke tells us that Jesus “went down with them and came to Nazareth, and lived under their authority” (Lk 2:51). There follows roughly thirty years of near-total silence in the Gospel record before Jesus, “about thirty years of age” (Lk 3:23), begins His public ministry.

This is not an insignificant biographical detail; it is a theological statement. God is evidently in no hurry to make His Son publicly impressive. For three decades Jesus lives an apparently ordinary, hidden existence, submitting to Mary and Joseph, growing “in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” (Lk 2:52), without preaching, working miracles, or gathering crowds. And when His public ministry finally begins, Matthew notes that Jesus “withdrew to Galilee” (Mt 4:12) rather than establishing Himself in Jerusalem, seeing in this the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy concerning “Galilee of the nations: the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light” (Mt 4:15–16).

Jerusalem is the centre of religious prestige; Galilee becomes, paradoxically, the place of the Light. Jesus’ thirty years in Galilee therefore sanctify the hidden life as such. His hiddenness is not merely tolerated before something more important begins; it is itself part of His mission. The Son of God spends the overwhelming majority of His human existence unrecognised. There is, running through the whole of Scripture, an unmistakable divine pedagogy of hiddenness: the abandoned child of Ezekiel, the least of the nations in Deuteronomy, David the overlooked youngest son, Nazareth in Galilee, Mary the humble servant, Jesus hidden for thirty years, and finally the Cross — the ultimate manifestation of divine action through what the world considers weakness.

V. Not by Appearance but by Truth: The Election of David

The theology of hiddenness reaches one of its sharpest expressions in the account of David’s anointing. Samuel looks upon Eliab, the eldest of Jesse’s sons, and is evidently impressed. God stops him: “Do not consider his appearance or his height… The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Sam 16:7). Seven sons are presented, and God rejects them all. Only when Samuel asks whether there are other sons does Jesse admit, almost as an afterthought, “There is still the youngest… He is tending the sheep” (1 Sam 16:11). The one not even considered worthy of being presented to the prophet is the one God has already chosen.

This is not simply that David is young; he occupies the lowest place in the family hierarchy, left with the sheep while his more impressive brothers are paraded before Samuel. Human beings look upward, toward what is admirable; God looks elsewhere, toward the heart. This is precisely what Teresa of Ávila means by her celebrated formulation that “humility is the truth” — that we should not wish to be thought better than we are, but should seek verity in all things. Humility is the opposite of appearance. Appearance asks what impression one makes; truth asks what one actually is before God. And before God no image of the self can be constructed, because one cannot deceive Him however easily one deceives others, or oneself.

This is also the deepest logic of Thérèse of Lisieux’s spiritual childhood. She refuses to live by illusion, even spiritual illusion; she does not want a manufactured sense of God’s presence, still less consolations that would substitute for God Himself, since God cannot be seen on earth. Only Truth feeds her soul. Her confidence before God rests not on an image of herself as virtuous or advanced, but on the truth of what God is and the truth of what she is. Because she knows her own littleness, she has nothing left to defend. David the shepherd, Mary the maiden of Nazareth, the Corinthians who were “not many” wise, powerful, or noble — all become, in this light, a single biblical icon of the same law: God chooses according to truth, not according to appearance, and because He sees the truth, He is free to choose the one whom human beings overlook.

VI. It Is the Glory of God to Conceal: The Hiddenness of God Himself

At this point the argument moves from the hiddenness of those whom God chooses to the hiddenness of God Himself. The universe He created displays an immense variety of forms, colours, and properties, and yet, when one considers how God acts within that universe, one meets again and again the same withdrawal, the same recoil, the same self-concealment. Proverbs states it directly: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to fathom a matter” (Prov 25:2). The verse does not simply describe God’s management of secondary things; read within the whole pattern traced above, it becomes profoundly suggestive of a divine reserve that belongs to God’s glory as such.

This hiddenness is not a refusal to communicate. Wisdom “cries aloud in the street” (Prov 1:20); she is not silent, she is shouting — and yet the street does not hear her. There is no contradiction here, but a paradox proper to divine self-revelation: God does not impose Himself upon a heart that has not opened to receive Him. The parable of the sower makes the same point concretely. The seed that falls on the path is immediately taken away, because the ground is closed; the seed itself is not deficient. Jesus explains the deeper cause: “They have ears, but they do not listen” (Mt 13:13) — they possess the physical capacity for hearing without the interior disposition to receive what they hear.

Christ’s own instruction confirms that this reserve originates in God, not merely in the deafness of the hearer: “Do not give what is holy to dogs or throw your pearls before swine” (Mt 7:6). If the pearl is what is most precious, and God Himself is the supreme good, there is a coherent logic here: God does not expose what is most precious to a heart with no capacity to receive it. He gives Himself, but according to a pedagogy of revelation that respects the freedom, and the readiness, of the one to whom He gives Himself. Isaiah’s confession therefore stands as a summary rather than a paradox to be dissolved: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, God of Israel, Saviour” (Isa 45:15). The hiddenness does not stand opposed to His being Saviour; it belongs to the very manner in which He is God and Saviour. Even when God reveals Himself, He remains the hidden God. The Incarnation itself follows this logic to an almost unimaginable depth: God reveals Himself in Christ, but as an infant, in Nazareth, in thirty years of hiddenness, as a Galilean, a carpenter, and finally as a condemned and crucified man. Revelation, in other words, does not mean that God ceases to be hidden; it means that He reveals Himself precisely as the Hidden One.

VII. Ecce Deus: The Glory Revealed in the Passion

This theology of hiddenness reaches its climax in the Cross. Isaiah’s Fourth Servant Song poses the question directly: “Who would believe what we have heard? To whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?” (Isa 53:1). The answer is immediately given in the description of the Servant Himself: “He had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, no beauty to draw us to him. He was spurned and avoided by men” (Isa 53:2–3). The arm of the Lord — God’s power — is revealed not where human beings expect divine power to appear, but in the wounded, disfigured Servant.

Paul draws the full theological consequence of this in his first letter to the Corinthians: “we proclaim Christ crucified… the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:23–24), deliberately setting this proclamation against both Jewish demand for signs and Greek pursuit of wisdom. The Cross is not merely an unfortunate event subsequently reversed by the Resurrection; the Resurrection does not cancel the Cross as revelation but confirms it: the Risen Lord shows his wounds. This is why Paul insists on proclaiming “Christ crucified” and not simply “Christ risen.” Every human expectation is inverted: we expect God to be spectacular; He comes hidden. We expect Him to be invulnerable; He allows Himself to be wounded. We expect divine power to overpower enemies; God stretches out His hands and is crucified. We expect glory to mean magnificence; God reveals glory in humiliation.

This is precisely why the Gospel of John can present the Passion itself as Jesus’ glorification. The Cross becomes, paradoxically, His throne. And it is why the encounter with a poor person, or with the millions who suffer unseen, can become — without in any way glorifying poverty or injustice themselves — a place where the God who identifies Himself with the lowly may be encountered, exactly as Matthew 25 insists: “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me” (Mt 25:40). The same hiddenness illuminates the Eucharist, in which the One through whom the universe was created remains present under the humble signs of bread and wine — the Creator hidden beneath the very creaturely signs He instituted.

Nazareth asks, “Can anything good come from there?” The Eucharist asks, in effect, “Can God really be here?” The Cross asks, “Can this despised, wounded man really be God?” To all three the Christian answer is the same: yes. The fundamental difficulty is not that God fails to reveal Himself, but that human beings want Him to reveal Himself according to their own criteria of revelation — spectacle rather than hiddenness, power rather than the Cross, a beauty defined by their own standards rather than the Servant who “had no majestic bearing to catch our eye.” One is brought back, inevitably, to Samuel and David: “The LORD looks into the heart” (1 Sam 16:7). Human beings judge by appearance; God sees the heart, and because He sees differently, His choices — and His mode of self-revelation — appear strange, even scandalous, to those who have not yet learned to see as He sees.

VIII. Look Again: The Resurrection as the Unveiling of the Passion

The Resurrection must never be allowed to function as an escape from the Passion, as though the Cross were simply darkness that the empty tomb subsequently dispels. The risen Christ who appears to Thomas does not conceal His wounds; He offers them: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side” (Jn 20:27). Thomas does not need a dazzling, wound-free glory in order to believe; he needs to look again, with new eyes, at what he had already seen on Calvary and had not understood. His confession — “My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28) — comes precisely at the sight of the wounds. He sees the wounds, and says God.

The Resurrection is therefore best understood as God’s “Look again.” It does not say that the Cross was darkness and now there is light; it says that the light was already there, and it was not recognised. Look again at the crown of thorns, the pierced hands, the opened side, the silence, the abandonment, the obedience, the forgiveness, the love. What appeared to be weakness was divine power; what appeared to be defeat was divine victory; what appeared to be humiliation was divine glory; what appeared to be the absence of God was God revealing Himself. John draws attention deliberately to the pierced side, from which blood and water flow (Jn 19:34), so that the very body of the Son becomes an opened revelation — the wound becomes, so to speak, a window. And this is why the Prologue’s summary of the whole Gospel can stand as the theological foundation of everything traced above: “No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, who has revealed him” (Jn 1:18). The invisible God remains invisible; the Son reveals Him in the humanity He has assumed; and the supreme revelation of that humanity is the hour of the Cross.

Practical Consequences for Spiritual Formation

1. Formation must begin with the truth of one’s own poverty, not with an inventory of qualifications. Following the pattern of Ezekiel 16 and the election of David, formators should help souls recognise that God’s call does not presuppose merit, ability, or an impressive history; it precedes and creates whatever dignity the soul comes to possess. A formation that implicitly rewards only the visibly gifted risks contradicting the very logic of divine election it claims to serve.
2. Humility should be taught, following Teresa of Ávila, as fidelity to truth rather than as self-deprecation. The spiritual director’s task is to help the person distinguish between a constructed self-image — however pious in appearance — and the truth of who one actually is before God. Thérèse’s refusal of illusion and of manufactured consolation offers a concrete criterion: does this practice, this devotion, this account of one’s progress, serve truth, or does it serve the appearance of advancement?
3. Discernment must resist the criteria of appearance. Vocational discernment, whether for religious life, priesthood, or lay apostolate, should be conducted with Samuel’s corrected vision in mind: “the Lord does not look at the things people look at.” Institutions charged with discernment should build in explicit safeguards against favouring candidates for reasons of eloquence, social standing, or visible charisma, and should attend instead to interior truth and readiness of heart.
4. The prayer of recollection should be taught as the primary discipline for learning to perceive the hidden God. Since Wisdom “cries aloud in the street” yet is not heard amid noise, formation in silence and interior attention is not an optional refinement but the basic condition for perceiving a God who does not compete for attention on the world’s terms.
5. Preaching and catechesis on the Passion should resist any move that treats the Resurrection as simply erasing or superseding the Cross. Following the pattern of Thomas, the faithful should be led to “look again” at the wounds as the very place of glory, rather than treating Good Friday as a regrettable prelude quickly left behind for Easter joy.
6. Ministry to the poor and the hidden should be understood theologically, not merely as social duty. Because God consistently identifies Himself with what is overlooked, formators, deacons, and priests should be trained to expect and to name an encounter with Christ in the poor, the marginal, and the unrecognised, rather than treating such encounters as peripheral to the properly “spiritual” life.

Conclusion

The trail followed here — from the abandoned child of Ezekiel, through Israel, David, Nazareth, the thirty hidden years, the Corinthians, the Cross, and the wounds shown to Thomas — converges on a single, demanding truth. God of Israel, you are truly a hidden God. And His hiddenness is not an obstacle placed between Himself and the soul that seeks Him; it is the very form of His self-gift, and it summons a corresponding movement in the one who would find Him. If God does not give Himself to a superficial glance, then the seeker must go beneath appearances, must dig, and dig deeper, refusing to be content with whatever is first found. The man who discovers treasure hidden in a field “sells everything he owns and buys that field” (Mt 13:44); the merchant who finds the one pearl of great price does the same (Mt 13:45–46). One must be willing to sell what competes with the Pearl in order to possess Him who is worth more than everything.

And yet the deepest word here is not effort but gift. God hides Himself so that the soul will seek Him; He withdraws so that she will follow; He remains silent so that she may become capable, at last, of hearing. But beneath even this pedagogy lies the prior truth that He was seeking her first. The abandoned child of Ezekiel 16 did not discover God because she made herself beautiful; God found her while she lay abandoned, and said, “Live.” The entire journey, from beginning to end, begins with divine initiative. This is why Jeremiah’s promise can stand as the final word: “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart” (Jer 29:13) — not with half the heart, not while clinging to every other treasure, but with all of it. Because the Pearl, the hidden God Himself, is worth everything.