Living the Word: Goodness in the Face of Evil

CHRISTIANITY IS ABOUT beginnings and endings. Advent is coming. This “little Lent” is a chance to repent and prepare for the Lord’s coming at Bethlehem and in glory. The end of the year is coming. Bookkeepers soon count up the year’s assets and liabilities (interestingly loaded theological terms). The days are getting shorter and the nights longer in the Northern Hemisphere. Ordinary time is almost done stretching out, and brief little seasons of beginning (Christmas, Epiphany) and ending (Lent, Holy Week) are ahead.

As the shadows lengthen, the biblical texts grow brighter, as if especially susceptible to moonlight. Job puts the finest point possible to the question of evil. The Epistle to the Hebrews says Christ is a high priest who suffers evil himself and turns it into a sacrifice that is for the world’s good. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus and the disciples discuss possessions and salvation for a final time before Jerusalem. And the psalmist and Jeremiah offer more wisdom than exultation, more ordinary common sense than world-bending gospel glory. Any of these texts could fund a year of Sundays. But there are treasures here too precious to cut out.

The texts that draw my eye are those on the nature of evil. Preachers often shy from this theme. Why? Parishioners live in it. Job suffers the worst of it, with no apology from God. Hebrews and Mark say Jesus drinks the cup of suffering dry. We have things to say about evil. Why leave them unsaid?

[ October 4 ]
Embracing the Vulnerable

Job 1:1, 2:1-10; Psalm 8; Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16

THE PROPHET JOB is about the best person God has. And God dangles him like bait. The timeless question is whether we love God as God or for God’s benefits. Job demonstrates the former (but later gets plenty of the latter back).

The psalm seems, on first blush, a nature hymn praising the intricacy of God’s creation. But through the lens of the epistle it becomes a glimpse at the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ. The “son of man” in the psalm—originally a designation of a human being—becomes, in Hebrews, the Son of Man, Jesus (this is obscured in some translations committed to the otherwise good gift of gender inclusivity). Jesus is the most human one, suffering on our behalf.

The Epistle to the Hebrews has one of the greatest conjunctions in all scripture. We do not now see all things subjected to God, “But we do see Jesus” (Hebrews 2:8-9). The psalm’s past tense is actually in the future. Hebrews’ otherwise confident eschatology is still on hold, with a note of the subjunctive in it. The gospel messes with your tenses and moods (among other things).

Jesus commands us to hold close those who are most vulnerable and in need. His stringent teaching on divorce is awkward in a Western church where divorce is so common (his stringency here is qualified in some other places, including right away in Mark 10:11-12!).

Immediately after, the disciples are rebuked for sending children away. Jesus transforms children from nuisances to models of godliness (10:15). Divorced wives and parentless children are among the most vulnerable people in any society. Jesus commands the church not to leave those who are vulnerable, and not to shut out those whom society regards as a problem. That’s the way to be human that Jesus learned from his Jewish forebears and that he expects from his church.

A parishioner recently asked why bad things happen to good people. His version of that question when he was 12 years old drew sharp rebukes for lack of faith. The answer from Job and in Hebrews is different. Yes, there’s suffering. God’s favorites—Job and Jesus—undergo the worst of it. And their end is not the end.

[ October 11 ]
Praise Chorus or the Blues?

Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Psalm 90:12-17; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

AS PASTORS, WE experience the delights and desolations of others. One parishioner just had her first baby, and the little family was all radiant. Another has a diagnosis of cancer, and his little family is trying to put on a brave face.

As Christians we are accustomed to saying “Praise the Lord.” We are not as accustomed to lamenting “Where are you God?” But the scriptures sound both notes. Our portion of Job is a sort of anti-psalm. Job wishes for a hearing before God. Roman citizens could claim their right for a hearing before the emperor (Acts 25:11-12), but Job can attain no such hearing before God (23:3-7). Then, in verse 8, Job rolls up and undoes the majestic Psalm 139:7-12. God is actually nowhere to be found.

Psalm 90 also sounds desolate. We are afflicted—and plead for gladness for as many days as God’s affliction (verse 15). Hebrews promises that the word of God is a sword that cuts bone from marrow, and reminds us we all must give an account. In the gospel, Jesus is said to “love” someone explicitly and outright for the only time in scripture (Mark 10:21). He better have poured an infinity of love into that moment, because it vanishes. The man leaves sad and leaves Jesus sadder. There is here more cause for trembling than for consolation.

We are not without biblical resources for playing in a minor key, for blues and jazz in addition to cheerful melody or easy-listening Muzak. But “Jesus is my boyfriend” praise choruses don’t always fit the mood in the world or the room. What about our selection of biblical texts or our preaching?

Scripture names desolation well—but never without consolation. Consolation is, however, possible without the desolation that serves as its antithesis (we call that “heaven”). In the meantime we’d better feel the depths. That’s where many live all the time. And where Christ descends to save. And calls us to do the same.

[ October 18 ]
Re-enchanting Our Faith

Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Psalm 91:9-16; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45

MODERNITY HAS largely been an effort to demythologize Christianity. Take out the fantastic—the otherworldly god and the fork-tongued devil and the airy angels and the scheming demons and the gaudy miracles—and we’ll have a believable faith.

Problem is when you’re done, what’s left?

Our texts today are fantastic indeed. God finally grants Job the audience he seeks and fires a flurry of haymakers at him (an image I owe to Roger Scholtz). The psalmist promises that angels will not let you dash a foot (91:12)—a text the devil uses to bait Jesus. Hebrews promises an empathetic and suffering high priest—a more human God. And Mark’s gospel encourages us to make bold demands of God even if all we get in return is a promise of a cross. Highly mythological, all. And marvelous, enchanting, the sort of stuff that might make bored moderns switch off the devices.

The problem with those who pine for a more fantastic God is we can fixate on the heavens and ignore God’s beloved creation. The one who promises life when 10,000 fall at one’s side (Psalm 91:7) seems a recipe for mere me and my needs, oblivious to others. But look what Jesus does. He takes their selfish request and doesn’t rebuke them. He delays them. He has them agree to suffer. Then he reorients their desire. We are right to want to be great, whoever “we” are. And the way to greatness is actually service. The trick to being first is actually to hustle to the back of the line.

All this would be so much more mythologization if it weren’t for the gospel’s last line: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life [as] a ransom for many.” Without Jesus’ saving work, the new mythology of first/last and front/back is so much more wishful thinking. But with it everything is different, re-enchanted, remythologized, leaving us a desire to serve, be last, and to give ourselves away.

[ October 25 ]
A Majestic Imagination

Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Jeremiah 31:7-9; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52

WE CAN ALLunderstand why scholars don’t want Job to end the way it does. A replacement family, his fortunes doubled, Job seems more fairy tale than believable good news. Doesn’t this undo the narrative’s insistence that we trust God whatever comes? The sun doesn’t always come out tomorrow.

But one of the Bible’s principal themes is restoration. Renewal. The return and glorification of all that is good and the defeat of all that is evil. Sure it’s unbelievable that Job would have all things restored in this age (see Mark 10:30). But the gospel is about the overlap of a new and fantastic age with this drearily predictable one (Mark 10:27). Who knows what can happen?

Jeremiah’s promise is about the restoration of Israel. God’s own will be gathered back from exile where they have been scattered and will be like a beloved child, and God will be more intimate than can be imagined (Jeremiah 31:9). Unlike every single human religious leader, Jesus will not die, his ministry will not end. And blind Bartimaeus is right to fling decorum aside as lithely as he throws off his cloak and his sedentary posture. Would that more would yell out in our worship, ignore the crowd’s “shh!,” and spring up before Jesus to be healed.

What if we don’t want Job to end that way not because we’re enlightened critical moderns, but because of a failure to believe and imagine? The gospel is always bigger, wider, more majestic than we think. And when God promises to make all things right, do we do ourselves or the world any favors by hedging our bets?

Archbishop Desmond Tutu used to invite the secret police present in apartheid South Africa’s worship services to his own sort of altar call this way: “Join us! I’ve read the end of the story, and we win!” That “we” included “them.” It includes us all. And the God who makes every ounce of goodness will not leave it spoiled or throw it away once ruined. God will gather it up and make it new, in ways we can’t now imagine.

“Living the Word” reflections for September 2015 can be found here.