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Book of Job

ENCOUNTERING GOD

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A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA

22nd Sunday After Pentecost, October 25, 2015

Proper 25B: Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34:1-8 (19-22); Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52

We’ve heard two strange and difficult stories in our readings this morning, both centering around an encounter with the power of God. It’s a good thing we have stories like this because there’s really no other good way of talking about our encounters with God. As soon as the great mystics start trying to find other language, they start sounding, well, mystical and, for most of us, confusing.

These two stories are very different in some ways—and very much alike in others. And they both deserve closer examination.

The first, from the Book of Job, is really just the tail end of a very long story. Some of you will have heard Bill Trego say more about it last Sunday. In very brief summary, Job is God’s devoted friend. But Satan, the celestial Attorney General, challenges Job’s sincerity and God allows Satan to inflict terrible suffering on him to test him. Job’s old friends gather around. They intend to comfort him, but they wind up in a theological argument about what he must have done to deserve such suffering. They want him to ‘fess up. He insists that he’s done nothing wrong. But he has no explanation for what has happened to him. The one thing he keeps insisting on is that he wants to meet the God who used to be his friend and now seems to be acting like an enemy.

At the end of the book, Job finally gets the meeting he asked for. God unveils for him something of God’s inexhaustible creative power and says, in effect, “Do you really want to go head to head with me?” Then, in today’s reading, we heard Job’s response:

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,

but now my eye sees you;

therefore I despise myself,

and repent in dust and ashes.

This overwhelming encounter with God leaves no room for questions and theological arguments. Job understands who he’s up against and gives in. And yet . . . and yet, he still dares to speak: to address God, the God whom he has known both as friend and, so it seemed, enemy. His words are filled with awe. But they have the ring of authentic faith. God and Job are divided by absolute difference—the distance between the One who is all-powerful and the mortal two-legged creature that is humanity. And still, they speak here to one another; they commune with one another. The Job who can say, in effect, “I see now that I am, by comparison, nothing,” still knows that he has been given the privilege of speaking with God as friend, face to face.

Our other story comes from the Gospel of Mark, at the time when Jesus is on his way up to Jerusalem. Jericho was the last city on the pilgrim road that led there, the last real chance to turn back and avoid the authorities in Jerusalem. There is a sense of gathering danger even in the opening words of the story: “As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho. . .” Aah! that large crowd that will play such a big part in the events to come, sometimes cheering him on, sometimes calling for his death. Events are taking on a momentum of their own. Room for maneuver is shrinking.

And then Jesus hears a lone voice calling for him—as persistent and obnoxious as the voice of Job demanding an interview with God. Many other voices, like the voices of Job’s comforters, “sternly ordered [the man] to be quiet, but he cried out” ever more loudly. And Jesus halts the whole unwieldy parade to respond: “What do you want me to do for you?” “Rabboni, let me see again.” “Go, your faith has made you well.” This brief conversation with the blind man seems almost incidental. But it was, for the blind beggar, just as unpredictable, just as improbable, just as overwhelming as God’s much longer conversation with Job.

There’s something odd in the way Mark tells the story—a signal to us to pay attention. We learn the blind beggar’s name: Bartimaeus. (Mark seldom gives a name to any of the people who have brief interactions with Jesus in his Gospel.) And then Mark explains the name for us: Bartimaeus means “Son of Timaeus.” Well that doesn’t help much, does it? Let’s put it all into into English: “Son of Worthyman.” (For that is what timaeus means in Greek.) This man didn’t deserve to be blind any more than Job deserved his sufferings. Like Job, he is suffering without cause. Like Job, he utters an insistent demand for God’s attention. And like Job, he gets it.

It seems we have two figures here who are both worthy people, whose sufferings in this world are undeserved. And both of them have a strong enough hope in God that they will go on calling out for some meeting, some understanding, some conversation. The people around them tell them they’ve been cast off, but that doesn’t stop them.

This is, I think, a widespread human experience. Maybe we don’t consider ourselves worthy, much less sinless. But what human being has deserved every last misfortune and difficulty that befalls us? Perhaps we have to be pushed pretty hard before we call God to account. But here, in these stories, are two figures who did that and who are held up to us as models. They are models of real, honest prayer: direct, straightforward, insistent.

And in both these cases, the people who called on God received good things. Bartimaeus received his sight. Job got his wealth back and received a new family in place of the old. Is that the point? Just pray the right way and God will take care of everything? No. There are too many examples to the contrary in scripture to think that it’s that simple. God does work miracles in our world—things that cause us to marvel and fill us with hope and new life. But God is not under contract. Miracles are not something guaranteed to follow on the correct execution of the right sort of prayer.

The real point of these stories comes in what follows—not in the miracles of healing and restoration, but in the change that comes over these human interlocutors with God. Bartimaeus, at Jesus’ word, “immediately regained his sight,” Mark tells us, “and followed him on the way.” He joined the disciples and the crowd going up to Jerusalem. If we had asked him before what he would do if he should regain his sight, he would probably have said, “I’ll go home and get back to work at my business—and maybe read a book.” Instead, he launched himself into a dangerous adventure—a new, bigger, more challenging kind of life than he had ever imagined. That can happen to us when we face up to God. He could tell that danger might lie ahead. He went anyway.

The change may be a little harder to see in Job because Job’s world was so different from ours. But you may have noticed how oddly the story ended. God restores Job to wealth and family. And then we’re told that Job does something new and different with what has been given to him:

He also had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers.

Seven sons and three daughters—the same kind of family as before. But two things have changed. First, we’re told the names of Job’s daughters—something that rarely happens in the Scriptures of Israel. It implies that Job’s perspective has changed. Before the disaster, he valued his sons. Now, it is his children he values. The daughters are specifically noted, even though the sons are never named.

And, a further step, Job makes his daughters heirs alongside their brothers. This goes far beyond the norm of familial justice assumed in the rest of the Old Testament. Sons inherit; daughters get married off. But Job, after his encounter with God, is actually building a new kind of world. Having seen the splendor of God face to face and confronted his own human weakness and mortality, he responds with a kind of humanity and generosity he never conceived before.

Job saw and conversed with God and then gave up trying to figure things out. Instead of explanations, he chose a new life of generosity. Bartimaeus received his sight from Jesus. Instead of going back to his old life, he embarked on a new life of uncertainty and daring, following the one who had communicated God’s power in healing him. There is the heart of both stories. To encounter God won’t give us any explanations, won’t settle any questions, won’t solve all our future problems. But it will give us a new and bigger life—one that we probably could not have imagined without it.

We could put it all in more theoretical terms. But the stories say it better. Meeting God makes the world new. And sooner or later, it will be given to those who seek it.

“HEAD OF PASSES”

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In April, I saw the most impressive play I have seen in many years: Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Head of Passes. The production at The Berkeley Rep did a distinguished job of staging—such a lot of water that, even sitting high up in the theater, I could not help feeling a little at risk. But it was the acting and the play itself that made the evening truly memorable. I am still mulling it over.

The action on stage occurs over a single day and night before and during the passage of a hurricane. The Louisiana town for which the play is named lies in a particularly vulnerable place, but the protagonist, Shelah (played with splendid conviction by Cheryl Lynn Bruce), despite urging from her oldest son and her physician, refuses to be evacuated, and we wind up experiencing the violence of the storm along with her.

That alone contains the makings of a good drama, but this is more. In some ways, it is the thoroughly modern offspring of a fifth-century Greek tragedy with its compressed time and location, the dread news arriving by messenger, the terrible fall of a person who has deep claims on our respect.

One could also see the play as a reworking of the Book of Job—or rather of its first few chapters, which narrate Job’s loss of family and wealth. From this point onward, however, it moves in a different direction. Rather than defending her innocence like Job, Shelah digs deep into her conscience to accuse herself of a very human array of failings. She doesn’t need her equivalent of Job’s comforters to make the point of her guilt (though some of them do prod her along). She takes up the task herself.

And, yet, there is a sense in which her guilt makes no difference. She is a human being struggling against long odds to make and sustain a life—and failing, sometimes at critical points. But she is no more the chief of sinners than she is a saint. It is impossible to see the storm’s mortal assault as anything like just punishment.

Unlike Job, Shelah gets no face to face confrontation with God at the end. Although the violence of the storm and its eerie passing come close to Job’s whirlwind, no audible voice speaks out of it. The play doesn’t merely turn its back, however, on the transcendent or resign itself to complete meaninglessness in human life. The strange and powerful figure of The Angel, mimed (one might almost say “danced”) by Sullivan Jones, somehow combines the challenging role of Satan, the protective role of a guardian angel, and the threatening role of the angel of death. The character is impossible to decipher exactly, though strongly engaged with the action.

In other words, the divine remains as inscrutable in the play as in the Book of Job itself. Inscrutable, above all, to Shelah, who is unaware of The Angel’s presence. Only the audience sees him. We are allowed to spin out our thoughts and theories about who he is and how he is involved. Shelah can only present her case to God in what mostly seems like a one-sided conversation.

Perhaps I appeal to Job too much here, for the play is by no means simply a retelling or recasting of the ancient work—or, for that matter, a revival of Attic tragedy. It is a new creation shaped out of the same age-old realities of suffering as its earlier counterparts—realities no less familiar now than two or three thousand years ago.

The Berkeley Rep production was excellent throughout. There were no weak performances. The pacing was perfect. It was already near the end of its run when I saw it. But this is a play that deserves to be repeated many times. When you get a chance, go see it.