Suffering Is Honest to the Conditions of Freedom

21  Pentecost b P.24  October 21, 2012

Job 38:1-7, (34-41) Psalm 91:9-16

Hebrews 5:1-10 Mark 10:35-45

 Lectionary Link

   It might be interesting to be able to know the future in precise details unless; the predictions for the future were always for misfortune and bad luck.  Would we want to know the future if we knew for sure that it would be bad luck?  I don’t think that we would; so it is enough for us to use wisdom to understand probabilities and try to take the necessary precautions. 

  The disciples of Jesus wanted for Jesus to guarantee them the knowledge and promise of a future success for them.   They wanted to be promised specific success and specific promotion:  “Jesus, could we sit next you in the best seats of your kingdom?”  And Jesus could not claim access to such future knowledge.  Only his Father could know that and if we understand the plentitude of God to be the one who Jesus called Father, Jesus was simply saying that the future can only be possible, it is not yet actual.

   In the various communities of those who wrote the Bible, there was different reflection upon how can one be guaranteed success and how one could ward off suffering and failure.  There are certain writers who thought they had discovered some success formula.  If you are righteous and obey God, then God will give you success.  However, if suddenly one does not have success and one suffers loss, using that same success formula, one must admit that bad things happen because one is really bad and thus deserves bad luck, even if one’s badness does not seem particularly evident to the one who has to suffer.  How can a suffering baby understand his own sins for such suffering?  And why would a baby be singled out for punishment because of a parent’s sin?  So the success formula really does not work when the punishment of suffering does not seem to fit precisely with any obvious crime.  Other writers in the Bible challenged the formula for guaranteeing blessing simply because it seemed as though in so much of the history of Israel, God’s chosen people suffered a lot.  And it is not always easy to find a one to one correspondence between the suffering and the particular crime that caused the suffering.  And so we have the book of Job as a testament to the fact that some bad things can happen to good people.  In this morality play, in the final scene, God speaks directly out of the whirlwind.  And what does God say?  God essentially said, “the plentitude of God and life is much bigger and older than you Job; you are but a tiny particle on the plentitude of life and so you cannot possibly know why everything happens in the way in which it happens.  Job, you are not fullness of life, you are not God, and so you don’t really have to know everything.  And you certainly don’t have to even pretend to know everything.  And Job, all of those people who pretended to know why you suffered, they were very presumptuous and they owe you an apology and I want you to pray for them in their narrow “know it all” views.”

  People who want future guarantees are people who want to exert a sense of control where they have no control.  The control that we have is acting in wisdom on probabilities; not in any precise knowledge of a future event, good or bad.

  This very same debate governed how various groups wanted to discuss a future messiah.  In some people’s mind Jesus could not be the messiah precisely because he suffered.  A triumphant hero would not be subjected to Roman crucifixion; a triumphant hero would rout the Romans out of Palestine and reestablish a kingdom in Israel like King David did. 

  The group of Jews who later became the Christian community believed the messiah to be a suffering servant.  A God who intervenes in history and knocks some heads is not how Jesus the messiah came to be understood.  Granted, many Christians who proclaimed Jesus as a suffering messiah, decided to delay the triumphant messiah until a future end of history when the one who suffered would be the one who judges.  We need not believe in a precise future narrative but it is quite normal to believe in the victory of justice, even when we cannot fully understand how it will actually happen.  People in every age will spin stories of future justice, future freedom from suffering from pain, simply because we believe that justice and freedom from pain is normal and desirable.  If injustice and suffering seems to prevail, there is still no reason to submit to suffering and injustice as what defines a good life.

  The writer of the letter of Hebrews said that Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered.  And what does suffering teach us?  It teaches us submission to the greater order of all that is.  We must submit in our minds because the infinite number of things in mutual relationships is too vast to understand.  This is not fatalistic thinking; it is the sheer fact of quantity.  The quantity of events in my life and life experience is much less than the plentitude of all of life and of God’s life.  After we do everything in our might and power to work for freedom from pain and suffering and injustice, we find that we have to obey or submit to what is, or what actually happens to us.  This kind of submission is how we avoid denial.

  The Christian life is not a life of denial; it is not a system of giving us easy answers about how we can secure future exact and precise blessing and success, such as the disciples of Jesus wanted.  The Christian worldview does not tell us why suffering occurs except for allowing that true freedom is happening in our world.  What Christians understand is that God in Jesus suffers with us.  God understands the full implications of true freedom in this world and God suffers with us to acknowledge the reality of freedom.

  Yes we are tempted to want a method and theology to guarantee a future of success and exemption from suffering and injustice.  But that is not realistic and it is not honest to God or honest to Jesus.

  Jesus asked his disciples if they could drink of the same cup that he did and be baptized with the same baptism that he had.  They said yes and Jesus agreed.  Indeed, Jesus’ identification with the suffering was very complete and so will ours be.  In all of the occasions of life, the freedom in this world results in various amounts of suffering but also the blessing of success and fortune.  To be human is to be submitted to freedom and freedom’s mysterious consequences in actual occasions.  This is honest to life; this is not some religious huckster message promising you specific blessing or freedom from suffering.

  In faith, like Job and Jesus we submit; we obey the dictates of the permissive freedom of all that has happened.  And we are baffled because we are smaller than towering plentitude of events within which we live.

  In faith we believe that God, who is all, registers and knows our present condition and lets us know from within and from without that we are cared for with a personal care.  And in faith we know that we need to be servants to each other; our hands need to be the hands of God to help each other.  In faith, we know that if God really honors freedom, then we need to use our freedom to serve as much as we can to counter the freedom that permits injustice and suffering.

  Jesus learned obedience and submission in his suffering.  And from this we can know that God suffers with us and lets us know that it is our calling to use our freedom to serve those who suffer and to promote justice in a world where injustice can truly occur.

  Let us today, not be humiliated by the great mystery of God and by the great fullness of life; let us be humbled by knowing our limitations but let us also know that God permits us in our human limitations to know some wonderful events of grace, love, faith and hope.  And if our human limitations are expressed in life occasions that can only be called grace, love, faith and hope, then we can be thankful indeed.  And in our thanksgiving let us be generous in service.  Amen.