The Adventurous Lectionary – The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost – October 13, 2024
Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22:1-15
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31
This Sunday’s scriptures focus on the absence and presence of God. Good theology joins both the apophatic and the kataphatic approaches to knowing God. God is beyond our imagining and cannot be limited by our scriptures, ecclesiology, rituals, or doctrines. God is more than we can imagine. Yet, God is within all things, constantly providing us with insights and inspirations that from the basis of these same scriptures, ecclesiology, rituals, and doctrines. We can describe God, and our rituals and doctrines are icons of the holy. God is and is not available to us. We can’t fathom or control God and yet God is our deepest reality, constantly present in our lives and inspiring us.
Philosophers, theologians, and everyday people speak of God, sometimes in ways that are helpful, other times in ways that promote violence and hate. How valuable are our images and words of God? That question joins the apophatic and kataphatic approaches to God. In the enormity of the universe, we know that our solar system is but a small speck. With the poet of Psalm 8, we wonder if amid 125 billion galaxies or more, God takes notice of our lives. We wonder if we matter at all. The grandeur of the universe gives birth to the apophatic approach to theology and spirituality, the belief that God is beyond anything we can say or imagine. Yet, many who claim that we can’t say anything about God or must live in mystery, nevertheless, suggest that the ultimate is unchanging and all-determining, privileging changelessness, when in fact God may be the most moved mover. Though God’s ways are not our ways, when we speak of God, we need to consider the character of the God about which we speak. Psalm 8 gives us license to engage in God-talk, for we are created a little lower than divinity, and given the gift of creativity and agency. But, God-talk must be done with care and honesty.
Let me repeat: the fact that we can’t fully fathom God or discern the meaning of suffering does not give us the right to image God as omnipotent or arbitrary or unchanging or hold that events spring entirely from the hand of God. That God’s ways are not our ways does not mean that suffering comes from God’s hand. There are many other options in explaining the suffering we experience, and that is the point of Job. At the very least, we are left with the questions such: Is an event good because God wills it? Or does God will it because it is good? Is there a meaning to suffering or do things just happen? Is the reality of God compatible with randomness and chaos?
In today’s reading, Job is trying to make sense of a god we can’t understand and who seems hidden when we most need God. He keeps asking and looking but receives no answer and finds no path. Job wants a god he can communicate with; he also hopes that God is on his side and will appear to ease his suffering. Explaining the suffering we or others experience can be theologically problematic, especially in pastoral situations. Often, we attribute to God actions that would lead to indictment and arrest if performed by a human. Despite the mysteries of suffering and evil, we need to assume, as Jesus suggests, that God is at least as moral as a good parent or grandparent. The God we can never fully fathom is, for Jesus, the loving heart of the universe.
Job’s challenge to God is ultimately an act of faith. God is absent, but Job’s challenge makes God present. Job’s doubt and complaint are indications of the existential importance of God for him. This is no “praise the Lord anyway” theology or “only believe” perspective. It is coming to God with our whole selves – anger, doubt, and forsakenness as well as praise and gratitude. Job reminds us we need to sit loose with mystery and not provide easy and often unhelpful answers for ourselves or others,.
Psalm 22 describes the experience of being forsaken by God. Other people prosper but we feel alone in our suffering. Our suffering alienates us from everyone, including God. We feel set apart by our suffering, and others treat us differently as a result of our current situation. We wonder if the God who once was real will show up again to dry our tears and ease our pain. No amount of counsel from prosperity gospel preachers or new age pundits can ease our pain, when God appears to have deserted us. Even in absence, we must as keep “listening for God,” as Renita Weems says. We must keep asking, praying, and acting even if the answers are unclear to us.
Jesus repeated the words of Psalm 22 on the cross. Jesus, God’s Chosen One, feels forsaken and bereft of support. Jesus experiences our suffering and hopelessness, and this reality points to a God who is with us, though not always obvious, in our joy and suffering. We must honor those who feel forsaken, trusting that God is present even in their feelings of divine absence.
Hebrews describes Christ’s saving presence. Christ can save us because Christ is one of us. Jesus as Christ is not immune to suffering or temptation, nor is God immune from suffering and pain. Our salvation emerges because of God’s identification and understanding of our experience. Hebrews’ words are bold. They suggest that only a suffering God can save, and that God’s power is made perfect in weakness, as Paul asserts, our own and God’s own weakness, God’s inability to “make things right” in every occasion. The evil may appear to triumph, but God’s sacrificial love gives us hope in the moral arc of history and our own ability to share in God’s transformative love. God’s suffering challenges us to ease the suffering of others. God is the fellow sufferer who understands, as Alfred North Whitehead asserts.
The passage from Mark reveals the temptation of wealth. The approach is countercultural, then and now. As a culture, we have a bias toward the wealthy. Many complain about welfare mothers, and food stamp frauds, while failing to critique tax breaks and subsidies for the wealthy. In the spirit of Job’s friends and much orthodoxy, there is a tendency to identify prosperity with morality and poverty with moral deficiency. Tax policies and the justice system favor the rich over the poor. Yet, Jesus turns this upside down. The insulation wealth provides alienates us from experiencing the pain of the poor. Further, our security tempts us to rely on our own wealth and our so-called goodness rather than God’s grace. We may even think that our largesse ensures that we will always be “healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Without a safety net, the poor must cast themselves upon God for their salvation. They have no hope but God’s future.
The wealthy cannot escape the human condition, and may lose their souls in their pursuit of wealth and power. As the Book of Job reveals, wealth can’t insulate us from suffering. Even the wealthiest will eventually face sickness, aging, and death. Will a life built solely on earthly treasures enable us to face what is beyond our control? Spiritual wealth, grounded in our humble identification with God and humankind in its diversity, alone can inspire a healing lifestyle, justice seeking, and earth care, and enable us to trust our futures to a power and wisdom greater than our own.
(For more on Job, see Bruce Epperly, Finding God in Suffering: A Journey with Job; for reflections on Mark, see Bruce Epperly, Mark’s Holy Adventure: Preaching Mark’s Gospel for Year B, and for the vision of process theology, see Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed and Process Theology: Embracing Adventure with God)
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Bruce Epperly is a pastor, professor, and author of over eighty books, “Jesus: Mystic, Healer, and Prophet,” “Process and Politics,” Spirituality, Simplicity, and Service: The Timeless Wisdom of Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure,” and “The Elephant is Running: Process and Open and Relational Theology and Religious Pluralism.” His most recent books are “The God of Tomorrow: Whitehead and Teilhard on Metaphysics, Mysticism, and Mission,” “Head, Heart, and Hands: An Introduction to St. Bonaventure,” and “Homegrown Mystics: Restoring Our Nation with the Healing Wisdom of America’s Visionaries.”
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