Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost; 17 October 2021; Proper 24B (RCL); Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:25-45.
Not very many people are satisfied with God’s answer to Job. God has allowed the Satan to reduce Job’s condition to misery and yet Job refuses to curse God. He even insists that if he could find God, he would lay his case before God, and God would vindicate him. And when God does show up, God calls Job’s attention to the act of creation, even pointing out Leviathan and Behemoth (the hippopotamus?). What has one to do with the other?
Job, perhaps justifiably, given the Old Testament emphases, sees the primary attribute of God to be justice. God’s response completely sidesteps the issue of justice, and instead calls attention to God’s creative activity bringing order out of chaos. The book of Job, then, calls into question Israel’s overriding concern for God’s justice, and their hope for vengeance on their enemies. When Job is given the opportunity to respond to God, he covers his face, and repents in ashes.
We’ll save ourselves a lot of anguish if we stop demanding justice from the universe, and instead behold its terrible beauty. I think the pastoral problem is that we tend to center our own concerns. Certainly, Israel’s belief in their divine election would have encouraged such centering. But, theologically, the problem is acute when catastrophe strikes, as it did in the conquest of Jerusalem by Babylon. To preserve the status as elect, the only option is to see the catastrophe as punishment. That is the answer the Book of Deuteronomy proposes to the crises of exile.
The Book of Job instead calls us to move ourselves out of the picture. God’s response can be summed up as, “Who do you think you are?” We must think pretty highly of ourselves if we think that catastrophe is part of God’s plan for us. Our sins must rate pretty highly on God’s scale of justice if we deserve the punishment of the catastrophe that befalls us. And so, the response, “Who do you think you are?” may be more pastorally comforting that it appears at first sight. This catastrophe is just some random stuff, much like the destructive capabilities of Behemoth. If the world is to hold the terrible and wonderful beauty that it does, that inspires the morning stars to sing in unison praise to God, there have to be things in it like Behemoth. This catastrophe is no reflection on you, but just part of the terrible beauty of the divine creation. If there are to be mountain ranges, there must be earthquakes. If species are to evolve through genetic mutation, there will be cancers.
James and John seem to be operating under the same mistake as Job. They think that their association with Jesus is connected to Israel’s election. Jesus, the Messiah, will certainly be crowned in glory once they have entered Jerusalem. If so, may they sit at Jesus’ right and left in his glory? Mark lays on the irony thick here. Jesus says that to sit at his right and his left is for those for whom it has been prepared. Mark relates the crucifixion of Jesus as if it were the enthronement of a Caesar in the Senate (the purple robe, etc). And two bandits are enthroned with him, one on his right and one on his left.
This paints a radically different picture of Israel’s election than we’re used to. If Jesus recapitulates Israel (as Paul tells the story of Jesus/Israel), then vengeance on Israel’s/Jesus’ enemies is not what God has in mind, but instead, subsuming the violence humans do to one another into the divine self, and redeeming it there. The Book of Job couldn’t yet take that step, but as soon as you allow the incarnation as the crown of creation, you can think of the restoration of creation as the assumption of the whole of creation, catastrophe and all, into the divine self.
That’s the direction the letter to the Hebrews is headed. Jesus enters the divine presence, not with the blood of a goat, but with his own, there to make eternal intercession for creation. Once we’ve moved off center, and stopped thinking of our problems as what matters, and once we have seen that in Jesus God has moved off center, then we can move back on center with the problems of the world on our hearts, knowing that we are participating in Jesus eternal intercession for the world.