(Introduction to the Texts)
I want to say a few words to set us up to understand the chapters from Job that we’re about to read. I find it helpful to remind myself of just how powerless I am before reading these texts. There are two things that I remember every time I start to think I’m strong or highly capable.
One is that I used to be the Scout Master for Boy Scout Troop 32 in Canandaigua. Every Memorial Day and 4th of July they put a float in the Canandaigua parade. They use our church’s farm wagon and they assemble it behind my house. Our wagon is not large or heavy and I can push it around by hand on a flat surface. But there is a slight incline from the back of my house and into the driveway. It doesn’t look like much. You can tell it is uphill, but if you were asked casually is the ground level, you’ll probably say yes. Yet even that slight grade is too much for me to push our wagon up. I tell myself that the wagon isn’t all that heavy, and that it has wheels and rolls easily. Surely I can push it up a slight short incline. But no luck. I stand there with my feet slipping and my muscles aching as I try with all my might to move it. It only takes the strength of one more person to get it up over there, but it is still more than I can do. I am not strong or powerful at all.
The second thing has to do with digging with a backhoe. I’ve used backhoes a few times in my life. I don’t do too bad in soft dirt. But when it comes to hard shaley soil, forget it. I can scrape and scrape and scrape and feel like I’m doing nothing. Advice from an old and skilled backhoe operator I’ve been given is that when you don’t feel like you’re accomplishing anything, shut off the machine, climb out, grab a shovel, and start digging by hand. You’ll be back in the operator’s seat soon enough! Indeed that is true. While I can dig okay enough in soft soil, when it comes to hard packed soil or rocky stuff I struggle. I’ll spend a whole day with a pick and shovel working myself into a lather of sweat and muscles aching with fatigue, and if I’m lucky I’ll have a couple tons of dirt to show for it; which isn’t much at all.
We’re about to hear God’s response to Job and his friends after they’ve been arguing about why there is suffering. They haven’t come to any conclusions. Several times Job takes God to task calling God unfair, and saying he wants to argue his case before God. Job has convinced himself that he understands things and God isn’t being just.
God’s words are not things we want to hear. But they are true. They remind us of just how small and limited we are. Think for a couple moments about God’s power and majesty. The universe is enormous, but God is bigger. Every atom in this infinite universe and every bit of energy and all of time only can exist because God makes them exist.
We think we understand things through science and we can come to predictions about how long the earth will last and the sun will shine, and all that sort of stuff. But it is entirely within God’s power to end it all before I end this sentence. God can change time, create or annihilate anything and everything at every moment. Existence itself can only be within God. Heaven and hell can only exist because God makes them exist. Everything about us could be changed by God faster than I can snap my fingers.
God is simply bigger. God is more. God cannot be understood.
Those of you who grew up Lutheran and studied the Small Catechism in confirmation class know that Martin Luther wrote many times that we are to “fear and love God.” To fear God is to acknowledge God’s power, and to acknowledge our complete and total eternal dependence upon God.
We are weak. God is strong. No matter how much we think we know, we cannot truly know anything. God alone knows. We are about to hear God remind Job of those realities.
(Read Job 38-40)
When you think about all the innocent pain and suffering Job has endured this response from God comes across as unduly harsh. God rips into Job. God is challenging and sarcastic. Can’t God come across as firm but pleasant instead? Couldn’t God say, “You know, Job, being me is complex. It’s beyond what you can handle. And you just aren’t sophisticated enough to do my job. You really can’t understand what it is to administer justice in this universe. I’m sorry for the suffering you have experienced.”
But if that’s the response we think Job should get, then we are mistaken as to God’s nature. We would be trying to domesticate God into a big soft cuddly teddy bear. That is not God.
God is God. God acts as God chooses to act. Sometimes things may make sense to us. We should not be surprised when things do not.
If God’s words to Job in what we read today were the be all and end all of our understanding of God, we’d be in a real mess. We’d live in constant fear and uncertainty. How could we depend upon God like that? But there is more to the story.
Yes, God is God. God acts as God chooses to act. But God also respects us and makes promises to us that God will not break. God does love us.
Our gospel reading may not seem to connect to the passage from Job at all, but it does. It connects because it points to something very ironic about Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion.
We’ve talked about this before. In John’s gospel it looks like Jesus is on trial before Pontus Pilate, and Jesus is condemned, and Jesus is executed. That is humanity’s judgment upon Jesus. But what is actually going on is the reverse. Jesus is not on trial before Pilate. The world is on trial before God. Pilate is not the judge. Jesus is the judge. Except Jesus is not actually condemning the world. Verse 19 of our gospel reading says, “this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world. And people loved darkness rather than light.”
So, God is God. God acts as God chooses to act. And in God’s judgment God decides not to condemn the world, despite it rejecting him. God decides to save the world by suffering for it, so as to prove to the world how much God loves it.
I think the crucifixion of Jesus speaks to us more powerfully when we consider it in light of what we read from Job today. God can do anything. God can change the rules any time God wants. God can make justice be whatever God wants it to be. God can do anything to us and we have no power to the contrary. But God puts limits upon himself. God makes promises to us and keeps those promises.
Where were we when God created the universe? Nowhere to be found. We are weak and helpless creatures. But God is loving. This is not a cuddly cosmic teddy bear love. It is a powerful and ferocious love, that is willing to suffer wrongly too; and at the hands of humans. Even as that happens, God does not judge humanity for its failings. God only bids us to live in the light.
Next week we’ll conclude our look at Job and we’ll see what ultimately happens to him. For this week, when we look at it through the love of Christ, we realize that God’s justice is not at all like our ideas of justice. And that is a good thing for us! For we do not stand up before God as good enough by our understanding of justice!
We remember that when we are suffering, and when we are crying out to God for help or guidance and it does not come, that God truly is beyond us. We know that we may never understand. And yet we know that we are always securely in God’s love and that God will ultimately do good things with us.
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