23 Pentecost Cycle B Proper 25 October 28, 2018
Job 42:1-6, 10-17 Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22)
Hebrews 7:23-28 Mark 10:46-52
Hebrews 7:23-28 Mark 10:46-52
The book of Job is a wisdom teaching in the Bible to give us insights into suffering. And on this day after the terrible slaying of our fellow Americans, Jews who assumed freedom and safety their house of worship, we cannot pretend that we don't know the cause of such suffering. It is hatred that was not prevented by our Constitutional laws. It is the hatred that totally takes advantage of our love and respect for freedom and would make us fear freedom and make us believe in the demons of hatred in people more than the angels of goodness. We want to believe in the probable angels of goodness; but an event such as this draws from us a rage that makes us know ourselves in a way that we don't want. The suffering caused by open violence and murder is a completely different class of suffering because we see and know the immediate cause. We are so used to the normalcy of the respect for life that such an attack makes us question the perfectability of our society founded upon some very lofty ideals about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by all.
Suffering is a fact of life; why it happens, when it happens and to whom it happens is shrouded in the mystery of the freedom of life. Within certain specific contexts we think that we know why things happen. When cars run into each other, we observe what we think is direct cause and effect, but even such an event includes the mystery of why the people were in their cars at that particular time. The mystery of everything that happened before an accident also contributed to the accident happening. "If I hadn't returned home to retrieve my cell phone, then I would have been on the road twenty minutes earlier and the accident wouldn't have happened." You see, even when we think we know the direct cause of something, we still are left with the great mystery of how it has been affected by everything else that has previously happened.
The book of Job reveals the human tendency to presume to know why bad things happen, especially when it happens to someone else. They must have done something wrong. They must have some character flaw. The book of Job reveals the human tendency to victimize people who suffering. Job's so-called friends came a calling when he lost everything, and they wanted to lecture him about why he was having bad luck.
Job didn't think that he was perfect but he also did not think that any one to one correspondence between what he had done wrong could be matched with the severe punishments of all of his losses. Job was angry that his friends presumed to know why bad things had happened to him, even while he did not know why he deserved such bad luck.
The book of Job does not solve the problem of suffering especially innocent suffering but it does provide us with some important insights. When God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, God essentially said to Job, "Job you can't understand everything because, I'm God and you're not." What this means to me is that total realm of Freedom includes an unknowable number of past events all in relationship with each other and no one can understand all of the possible causal connections. We can take comfort in knowing that great Freedom does not pick on us specifically but neither are we exempt from the outcomes of the whole range of probable human experiences.
If the book of Job does not provide us with a cogent cause of suffering, what does it provide us? I think one of the chief insights of the book of Job is found in today's reading: "the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends.." Praying for others is called "intercession." When Job accepted his suffering as solidarity with others and offered his experience of suffering as living prayers for others who suffer, he found the meaning of his suffering. He did not find the cause of his suffering; he found after-the-fact meaning for it. After suffering, he knew how to be with other people in a way that he could not have been had he not suffered. And Job could say, "I don't know why I suffered, but my suffering has come to have a blessed meaning because I now have an empathy that I did not have before." Bingo...when we can be beneficial ministers to other from our actual experience, we discover the redemption of our suffering. Because we find redemption for our suffering, this still does not mean it was not the impairment of the good which is what we believe is normal.
What is one of the chief definition of a priest? A priest is one who intercedes for others. A priest is one who accepts the events of one's life as being lived sacrificially for and with others.
Jesus who was not Levitical priest, was called our great High Priest. How can God know how we as human beings live and feel? If God assumes human experience in such an intimate way so as to become one us, then God attains complete empathy, especially if God even goes to and through human death. And this is what we understand to have happened in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus suffered and he received us as friends for whom he prayed.
And we like the blind man Bartimaeus, have the continual permission to ask Jesus our great High Priest, "Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me....have mercy on my friends...have mercy upon my enemies....have mercy on us all, again and again." Today, we seek to be like both Job and Jesus, in that we seek to be priestly. I am a priest, not because I exhaust all priestly work in our parish; I am a priest, because I exist to tell you and the entire church that we are to be priestly people. We are to integrate our suffering and our experience in solidarity with the suffering of all and we do this by living lives of intercession. We are always already, here for each other and for the life of the world, even as we as priestly people approach Jesus our High Priest, and for ourselves, our country and our world, we pray again: "Jesus son of David, have mercy upon us, again. Let us see again the value of our lives and the value of the life of each person." Amen
Suffering is a fact of life; why it happens, when it happens and to whom it happens is shrouded in the mystery of the freedom of life. Within certain specific contexts we think that we know why things happen. When cars run into each other, we observe what we think is direct cause and effect, but even such an event includes the mystery of why the people were in their cars at that particular time. The mystery of everything that happened before an accident also contributed to the accident happening. "If I hadn't returned home to retrieve my cell phone, then I would have been on the road twenty minutes earlier and the accident wouldn't have happened." You see, even when we think we know the direct cause of something, we still are left with the great mystery of how it has been affected by everything else that has previously happened.
The book of Job reveals the human tendency to presume to know why bad things happen, especially when it happens to someone else. They must have done something wrong. They must have some character flaw. The book of Job reveals the human tendency to victimize people who suffering. Job's so-called friends came a calling when he lost everything, and they wanted to lecture him about why he was having bad luck.
Job didn't think that he was perfect but he also did not think that any one to one correspondence between what he had done wrong could be matched with the severe punishments of all of his losses. Job was angry that his friends presumed to know why bad things had happened to him, even while he did not know why he deserved such bad luck.
The book of Job does not solve the problem of suffering especially innocent suffering but it does provide us with some important insights. When God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, God essentially said to Job, "Job you can't understand everything because, I'm God and you're not." What this means to me is that total realm of Freedom includes an unknowable number of past events all in relationship with each other and no one can understand all of the possible causal connections. We can take comfort in knowing that great Freedom does not pick on us specifically but neither are we exempt from the outcomes of the whole range of probable human experiences.
If the book of Job does not provide us with a cogent cause of suffering, what does it provide us? I think one of the chief insights of the book of Job is found in today's reading: "the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends.." Praying for others is called "intercession." When Job accepted his suffering as solidarity with others and offered his experience of suffering as living prayers for others who suffer, he found the meaning of his suffering. He did not find the cause of his suffering; he found after-the-fact meaning for it. After suffering, he knew how to be with other people in a way that he could not have been had he not suffered. And Job could say, "I don't know why I suffered, but my suffering has come to have a blessed meaning because I now have an empathy that I did not have before." Bingo...when we can be beneficial ministers to other from our actual experience, we discover the redemption of our suffering. Because we find redemption for our suffering, this still does not mean it was not the impairment of the good which is what we believe is normal.
What is one of the chief definition of a priest? A priest is one who intercedes for others. A priest is one who accepts the events of one's life as being lived sacrificially for and with others.
Jesus who was not Levitical priest, was called our great High Priest. How can God know how we as human beings live and feel? If God assumes human experience in such an intimate way so as to become one us, then God attains complete empathy, especially if God even goes to and through human death. And this is what we understand to have happened in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus suffered and he received us as friends for whom he prayed.
And we like the blind man Bartimaeus, have the continual permission to ask Jesus our great High Priest, "Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me....have mercy on my friends...have mercy upon my enemies....have mercy on us all, again and again." Today, we seek to be like both Job and Jesus, in that we seek to be priestly. I am a priest, not because I exhaust all priestly work in our parish; I am a priest, because I exist to tell you and the entire church that we are to be priestly people. We are to integrate our suffering and our experience in solidarity with the suffering of all and we do this by living lives of intercession. We are always already, here for each other and for the life of the world, even as we as priestly people approach Jesus our High Priest, and for ourselves, our country and our world, we pray again: "Jesus son of David, have mercy upon us, again. Let us see again the value of our lives and the value of the life of each person." Amen
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