Job 42:1-16, 10-117 Psalm 34:1-8
Hebrews 7:23-28 Mark 10:46-52
Lectionary Link
The Psalmist wrote, "I will bless the Lord at all times..." And the the skeptic might reply, "Really?" Why would you bless the Lord in this world of diversity which experiences the terrible inhumanity of people with each other? Why would you bless the Lord when so many innocent people are caught in harms way of disasters and unwanted plagues and sicknesses?
Sometimes people seem to reduce God to a self evidential cosmic karma machine, meaning that God's blessings and curses are evident in what happens to anyone. And if you have more bad things happen to you, it is because you are more bad than good. And if you are lucky enough to have more good things happen to you, it must mean that you are more good than bad, so God as cosmic karma authenticates one's goodness through the resulting good luck.
People are often attracted to the "good luck and prosperity theology." They use it to justify their own comfortable lives as being validated by God. "I'm lucky because I'm good. You're unlucky because you're bad."
The writer of Job wrote a rather satirical wisdom story to challenge the naive view that bad things happen only to bad people and that bad things are actually punishment for their corresponding badness.
Job was a good law abiding man and yet in the conditions of freedom in his life lots of bad things happened to him. Job's friends tried to convince him that he knowingly or unknowingly had been a serious transgressor and his bad luck was an arising punishment for his sins.
Job might be tempted to doubt his Torah lifestyle? What the use of trying to follow the rules if so many bad things happen to me? And anyone can look at what happens to people and note that really bad and greedy people can seem to have more success and good luck than those who adhere to the law.
We follow the rules not to guarantee good luck for ourselves; rather we follow the rules to promote the best values for living well with others. The rules will help us because in the realm of community behavior, they are actuarial wisdom about making careful choices in our community relationships. And if we follow those rules, we can avoid results that occur from having undisciplined lives.
The Psalmist and the writer of Job present some wisdom about God, and it includes the wisdom about God's weakness. Ironically, God is the greatest because God encompasses everything as the container of everything. God is the greatest in freedom, and that freedom is proportionally shared with every creature and thing in creation. For human life to be truly morally and spiritually valid and not machine like, real and true freedom must exist. And this is where the weakness of the great God is known; God does not interfere with genuine freedom within the order of things. Therefore we and God, are vulnerable to the entire field of probability in a truly free world. So, all combinations of good and bad things happen to good or bad people and we can know about probable happenings but we cannot know why, when, and the precise time schedule for such events. The inscrutable combinations of causal actions of freely acting agents cannot be precisely known.
We have to accept the vulnerability of the world of probabilities, like Job did, and like the Psalmist did. But this situation is not the condition to disbelieve God; it is the proof of God's greatness as the purveyor of genuine freedom in our world.
The purpose of the words of wisdom in the Bible and of the Gospel for us today is to know how to live best given the actual conditions of what probably will and can happen to us and anyone in this life. And how does God inform us how to live given the always already uncertainties of what might happen to us?
Jesus was found among us a the God-person who was to show us how God lives with the freedom of the world and how we should live with the way life actually is.
Given that good and bad outcomes and events occur, Jesus is God's message to us that God shares our vulnerabilities to what might happen. And the witness of Jesus affirms our preference for good things, like health, sight, salvation, love, kindness and justice. Jesus is God's affirmation that it is normal and natural to prefer life, freedom, love, justice, health, and kindness. The ministry of Jesus is presented as a healing ministry bespeaking that health is always a preference over disease and sickness. The really big cosmic issue of health is what one might call salvation. Salvation is the holistic well-being of the person in this life and the next, but also for the life of the entire universe. There is a greater health of reconciliation beyond the individual experiences of health or disease or death which we experience.
God as the great container of this cauldron of freedom in which we live is also the eventual health and reconciliation of all that happens, and Jesus came to proclaim this life of reconciliation health to us.
How should we respond to the biblical readings for today? We, like the Psalmist can bless God at all times, in spite of the troublesome things which might be happening to us and to our world. We can be thankful for the genuine freedom abroad in our world because it makes our moral choices truly valuable. We can follow Jesus, as God's chief exemplar for us, in his ministry for the healing of the people of this world. We can find our Christ-like vocations in preaching freedom to the captives, by loving mercy, doing justice, and walking humbly before this great God of freedom.
God has given us Jesus as the divine lure for how we can best live within the free conditions of life: Be healers, lovers, and cherish goodness, kindness, and justice. Amen.
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