Twelfth Sunday of 1997

This Mysterious Other Who is not Calculable

We have quite a collection of readings for today, and I think the first of the three is a sort of "red thread," as the Germans say, to guide us through the other two readings. The first reading is from the Book of Job, and Job is understandably the most famous book in the entire Bible, both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Certainly as literature it is on par with anything written anyplace and by anybody. But also in terms of a religious perspective. Even an atheist like Archibald MacLeish whom some of you may remember wrote a play called J.B., took all the material that was present in the Book of Job.

What’s Job about? Well, the Jews had for a long time this tradition of believing that if they were faithful to God, then God would somehow enable them to really prosper in life. Now, we have to be careful: this was not some kind of mercantile arrangement. They just thought that was how the world worked out. They were legitimately and honestly faithful to God and God was going to respond to them in kind, and they lived for centuries out of that belief until somebody woke up and said, "Gee, it doesn’t work that way!" And so some very profound Jew who was aware of a comparable story from the Babylonians, created the story about this man who was utterly faithful to God and who suffered radical catastrophe after catastrophe. The agonising that Job does is a very complex thing: Job is suffering from the loss of his children, his flocks, and his own physical health, but far more urgent for him is his sense that "this should not be happening to me, the world should not be constructed in a way where I, who am faithful to God, have to undergo all this." So, in very dramatic fashion the book plays out until in the last couple chapters God shows up and starts asking Job a series of questions. What do the questions have as their point? Simple natural phenomena. God just asks Job about where the mountain goat goes, and where the wild donkeys have their babies, and how the sea is constructed... The point of the questions is this: Job was unable to answer any of the questions about the normal natural phenomena which were part of his world. The result being that Job should have come to this insight: if I don’t understand the most natural things, then how is it plausible for me to have the arrogance to believe I know how the world is constructed between me and God or that I should know God well enough so that I can calculate what God is going to do? The power of this astonishing text is that Job is brought to a radically different sense of the reality of God as this mysterious Other who is not calculable, or manageable, who cannot be reduced to one element in his moral universe. And that’s where it ends.

With the figure of Jesus, the ante is upped considerably because here we have a person who died in the most miserable way possible in the Greco-Roman world: by public execution. He died not just because he was a nice guy who didn’t get in people’s way, as Job was, but precisely because of his persuasion of the reality of this God. This enabled Jesus to act in such a way that people really got disturbed by his presence because of his failure to observe the usual social niceties: "you don’t talk to these people, you do talk to those people; you don’t regard these people, you do regard these people..." It is impossible to run a society in that totally boundless fashion, and so Jesus had to be done away with because he was profoundly, socially disruptive. So, in a sense, the ante is raised because here is a person who is profoundly faithful to God, and, in the process of working out that fidelity, gets killed.

What has all this to do with us? Well, Paul in a sense intimates it in this passage from Corinthians. We no longer regard Jesus from the human point of view, and so for our purposes this means that we can’t go on making normal human estimates and calculations about how the world is supposed to go. In other words, to be faithful to God means to leave behind all of our comfortable securities in terms of who we think we are, how we think the world ought to go, and how everything is supposed to work out. For those of us who work in academia, this is subversive stuff. It is to say that the power of reason is not adequate to live a fully faithful, a fully human, life. The opposite however is not to live some sort of absurdist life, but rather to live with a kind of humility and readiness to seek this Other, God who nevertheless does love us. There is this great line from Job: "Though He slay me, I will still love Him." Now that sounds almost absurdist, but what the point is, to put it in somewhat more accessible fashion, we don’t know what love is. We neither know how to love, nor what it is to be loved. All of us walk around trapped in the certainty that we know what love is, and we are loosened up by these readings. I don’t know what love is, but I do know love is at the bottom of the whole business if I am prepared to become religiously serious, instead of using religion, as we so frequently do, as a sort of short cut through the darkness and turmoil of life. Religion simply redirects us to where the real and honest human dark areas are and therefore disabuses us of the facile construction of reality. In other words we are called as we are always called by the tradition and by these readings to greater honesty with ourselves, to greater openness with our lives, and to more earnestly search for the face of the living God.

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RT 22/5/97