heard, would have still been the same: “Who are you? Where are you calling from? How far have you got?” You can raise the objection: “After all, the Lord must know this very well, so why would He ask these questions, moreover in a situation when one is sick?” The answer is: “Since His very question provides great relief to us all, actually the greatest that God is ever able to offer!” How is this possible? Is the main concern of God not what is actually happening to us? Not really! That is not the cause of our misery at all! The real cause lies in how far we have come, from what distance we are calling Him, and finally, the crucial point – who we consider ourselves to be – in essence, who we actually are. One may assume that there is no one more lost than the person who does not know where he or she is, who is completely lost. Only when one realises where one is, so that you are able to stick a pin on the map at the spot, does one have a much better chance of finding your way. One can even say that if you could truly ask the fundamental question “Who am I?”, you could find the key to knowing the answer to every other single question. Even if you aimed very high, such as to ask “Who is God?”, this is also where the question “Who am I?” leads you, in fact, even by the shortest way. However, this fundamental question is nothing new. It influenced our present destiny as early as three thousand years ago. At that time, God’s help was needed not by a single individual, but by a whole nation, which was groaning under foreign rule, lost in a foreign country. 2 God’s drama The whole history of the Israeli nation is a drama in which God is the main character. Initially, He is merely an “author”, later also a “director”, and eventually enters the play as the main “actor”, and He also finds His life’s “role” in it. What exactly do we mean by a role? The word comes from an actual roll of paper with the text on it that actors would receive to know what their respective roles were. There were often only basic points on it and so an actor had to improvise for himself. Later, the role was identified with the person whose task was described by this role. In fact, the concept of a person arose from the theatre. Originally the concept meant a mask that had a hole in it for sound per-sound – hence per-sona, i.e. person. Like the role, the mask is also identified with the person it represents. Thus, the actor has a role to play and the mask (nowadays, more a costume) signifies what appearance he is meant to have. However, let us return to God’s drama. In the past, as well as today, genuineness and impressiveness are displayed by individual actors, not knowing that God is covertly present in each of them. They play out their life’s roles, thinking that they themselves are the persons they are dressed to play, separated from others and from God. They have no idea that the original, the real Actor in them is no other than God Himself, now long forgotten, hidden behind the mask of a human face and 70 (2) Petr Pavlík
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