21st Sunday after Pentecost
Job 38.1-7; Psalm 8; Hebrews 5.1-10; Mark 10.35-45
Church of Scotland, Geneva, Auditoire de Calvin, Geneva, October 17 2021
God asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
And Job replies, “I was at home, watching it on television.”
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When I was trying to study theology in Edinburgh half a century ago, the late John MacIntyre liked to tell his first-year class, “Every day you should learn something new.” And then, twinkling at us through his glasses, he would add, “Sometimes two things.”
We can learn two things from our readings today. Or even three.
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The first thing we learn is that we do not understand God.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756- 1791) wrote so much beautiful music in his short life, we wonder how he had time to eat or sleep. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote so much beautiful theology in his short life, we wonder how he had time to eat or sleep.
But Aquinas never fell into the trap of thinking that he understood God. He knew he didn’t. He knew he couldn’t. Not because he was stupid, but because he was human.
This is the point God makes in our first reading.
The book of Job is a long poem, topped and tailed by a prelude and a postlude in prose.
When the poem begins, Job is lamenting his sorry lot. “Perish the day that I was born,” he says. ““Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?”
Job has fallen on hard times, and over and over his friends tell him it’s all his own fault. They tell him that if someone suffers, the suffering must somehow be deserved. Somewhere in his youth or childhood, Job must have done something bad.
Job will have none of this. He insists that he is blameless and upright. He is not a bad person.
And we should have none of it either. We know from experience – sometimes painful personal experience – that bad things don’t just happen to bad people. All too often, they happen to good people too.
Towards the end of the poem, God shows up, and we heave a sigh of relief. Surely, we think, God will explain what is going on.
But God doesn’t explain anything. Instead, God asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
God isn’t pulling rank here. God isn’t saying to Job, “Who are you to question me, you miserable little man?”
God is making the simple point that it’s beyond Job’s ability to understand God, because it’s beyond anyone’s ability.
We are well equipped to understand the world around us, the world we can see and touch, although even that takes a lot of effort. We’re not at all equipped to understand God, who creates the world and us in it. We may know what mice or microbes or molecules are, but we do not know what God is.
If we are Mozart, we may compose music that glorifies God, even when we’re just dashing off a divertimento. If we are Aquinas, we may say many things about God that are true, even when we’re just dictating a commentary on Mark.
But we don’t understand, and can’t understand, God. God is beyond our understanding.
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The second thing we learn from our readings today is that God is love.
We learn this from our Gospel, when Jesus tells us that he has come “to give his life a ransom for many.”
It may not be immediately clear why this tells us that God is love. Sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking about Calvary as a bizarre cosmic transaction between a loving Jesus and an angry God. Jesus negotiates with his irate Father – “If I die on this cross, will you let all these other people off the hook?” – and God says, “Oh, all right, go ahead then.”
We can fall into this trap because we all have parents who are sometimes angry with us, who do not love us perfectly, and who sometimes do not love us at all. We fall into it all the more easily because the Bible often speaks of God as angry.
But it’s still a trap.
When the early Christians were trying to sort out their ideas about God, Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215) argued that we must not think of God as moving or being in a place, standing up or sitting down, or having a right hand and a left hand, even though the scriptures say all these things.
Likewise, I want to argue, we must not think of God as being angry with us, about to take us down to the woodshed and give us a good whupping.
From the cross on Calvary, rightly understood, we learn two things.
The cross shows us what kind of people we are, or can be, and what kind of world we live in. The chief priests and Pilate put their heads together and put Jesus on a cross because he was a threat to their power. In their shoes, we may well have done exactly the same.
But by going willingly to a death that we and our world forced upon him, Jesus shows us that God is love, and there is no length God will not go to to save us from ourselves.
John and Paul are the greatest theologians of the New Testament, and they see this clearly.
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world to God,” says Paul (2 Cor 5.19). Jesus doesn’t go to the cross to reconcile an angry Father to us or our world. It’s the other way round. God is in the crucified Christ, reconciling us and our world.
“God so loved the world that God gave his only Son,” says John (3.16). God loves us even when our world has gone astray. Even when we are far from blameless and perfect, God loves us anyway, and this is why the Gospel is good news.
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The third thing we learn is that, just as Jesus came to serve and not to be served, so we are called to be slaves and not slave-owners.
“You know,” he tells the twelve, “that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.”
Everyone knows this. This is how imperial Rome behaves, and five chapters later, Rome will underline the point by nailing Jesus to a cross.
But the kingdom of God, the kingdom that Jesus lives and dies for, turns the world upside down, beginning with the twelve, and beginning also with us.
Jesus here is talking about how we are to live in community.
Community is, in the first place, face-to-face. We are called to love and serve our families and friends, our neighbours, and this congregation. Never mind how annoying they may sometimes be: we can be annoying too.
But it’s also the wider community of our world and our planet. For our world today is still off the rails.
Look around us, and we see soaring inequality, as the rich and powerful reward themselves, leaving others to fend for themselves.
We see official enemies, who may be real enough but distract us from dealing with the real problems. For most of my life, the designated enemy was the Soviet Union, and more than once the cold war brought us within an inch of nuclear catastrophe. For the last three decades, it’s been Islam, to the great cost of the peoples of the Middle East. And now, it seems, it is to be China. When will we ever learn?
Above all, there is the climate disaster we see already in melting glaciers and rising seas, in floods, and in fire.
Will the conference in Glasgow next month be like all the others that have gone before, where governments make commitments that don’t match the needs of the hour and then fail to meet even these commitments?
How long will it take for the world to wake up to the grim reality that the climate emergency really is an emergency and action can no longer be deferred?
And what part will we play in all of this?
We are, of course, like all congregations: a congregation of mixed ages and mixed abilities. What you can do, I may not be able to do. But what matters is that each and all of us should do what we can.
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Of one thing we can be certain.
When the kingdom comes, and God asks us, “Where were you when I was creating new heavens and a new earth?”, it won’t do to reply, “We were at home, watching it on television.”
Brothers and sisters, we have work to do.