(Based on Mark 13:1-8; Dan 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Heb 10:19-25)
The readings for today are all about ‘the end of the world as we know it’, and after I’ve shared the thoughts of others on the apocalypse I will add some thoughts on our current threat of climate change, one of the many changes threatening our lives. In Daniel, the archangel Gabriel announces that some will live and some will die in the apocalypse. In Psalm 16 the psalmist sings, “You, O Lord, are all I have and you give me all I need, and my future is in your hands.” And in Hebrews, the writer says, “Let us hold on firmly to the hope we profess, because we can trust God to keep His promises.”
Then we come to the Gospel: “As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said ‘look teacher, what wonderful stones and buildings.’” Jesus answered, “You see these great buildings. Not a single stone will be left in place, everyone of them will be thrown down.” Which reminded me of how my John admired all the majestic mediaeval cathedrals we visited when we went to Europe, my two favourites being Wells and Vézelay.
And Jesus’s statement was prophetic. On the day of his crucifixion an earthquake caused the veil of the temple to be broken into two.
Later in this reading, Jesus was sitting at the Mount of Olives when Peter, James, John and Andrew came to him in private and asked, “Tell us when this will be. And tell us what will happen to warn us, that the time will come for all these things to take place.” Jesus replied, “Watch out’, don’t let anyone deceive you. Many men claiming to speak for me will come and say ‘I am He’, and they will deceive many people.” This was very true for the early church in 200-400 AD, and we have watched bemused in the past few weeks, as Donald Trump, a congenital liar, gets voted in as President of the USA. When I moaned to my John that Trump got in because of poor school education in the Midwest, he reminded me that my sister got her PhD in Kansas, and I always use Harvard for my medical cross checking. Politicians have always twisted the truth to their own advantage, and I was reminded of Disraeli’s words, that “there are lies, damned lies and statistics”.
But the readings also emphasize hope: there is always hope amongst the gloom and doom.
When this is over, May we never again Take for granted A handshake with a stranger; Full shelves at the store;: Conversations with neighbours; A crowded theatre; Friday night out; A routine check up; The school rush each morning; Coffee with a friend; The stadium roaring; Each deep breath; A boring Tuesday; Life itself.
When this ends, May we find That we have become More like the people We wanted to be, We were called to be, We hoped to be. And may we stay That way – better For each other, Because of the worst.
To return to the Mark Gospel, what a mix of topics in this chapter: the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, linked with the announcement of Jesus’s second coming. Jesus warning us of false prophets and that the disciples will be handed over to the authorities …
The last words of the reading are “this is but the beginning of the birth pangs”, and my optimistic self immediately thought of what do birth pangs lead to? The joy of the arrival of a new child, with the attendant responsibilities, the interrupted nights, and the challenge of caring for a vulnerable child who in spite of having obviously inherited similar characteristics, has their own individual personality, that you have to learn to adapt to and accept.
People will never turn on each other And, golly, we have the utmost care for pregnant women, we’re safe. I’m glad. Imagine living in that type of upheaval; In that world justice isn’t abstract, but a daily commitment. In that world it’s necessary and hard to care for each other. Christians can’t stand by and see how it turns out. They have to be part of how it turns out. They have to bear witness daily – not by saying the right stuff, But by living lives of radical kindness and courage. They have to sacrifice for the sake of love, And dare to be kind to the wrong sort of people. They have to risk rejection, even persecution, For their unconditional kindness. They have to resist injustice and stand up against the Emperor. I mean, in that world they have no security but God. They have no defender but Jesus, no hope but Grace. They have to live lives of death and resurrection. And we might not want that, perhaps.
Our own current anxieties centre around climate change and I was pleased to read evidence in the New Scientist that corals can adapt to warmer seas: and elsewhere to read of community efforts to help others to minimize its impact, so …
Let us create a community that trusts both in God and in one another, and go out today with Hope in our hearts, planning to share more of ourselves with each other. Amen
Have you ever been to a casino? If you haven’t ventured through the alluring doors into a gambling den, perhaps, then, you have seen on a big screen the gambling in Monte Carlo and such places?
Have you heard the expression ‘I’m all in’? This is when a gambler decides that luck is finally on their side and will favour them with a big win. The phrase means, I am betting all the money I have. A pretty big deal – especially when playing games of chance. The expression has become a metaphor to mean total commitment to something. Today I am not using the term to encourage change in your gambling habits; instead I’m hoping it will describe the relationships that we can have for and with God.
Our first reading today, from Deuteronomy, came from a section subtitled “A Call for Wholehearted Commitment”. Hear again: Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. [I continue to wear my 2014 Hope Project bangle on my wrist as a reminder of my commitment to God and His to me.]
Did we grasp the intensity that built through these few verses? Our love for God should be with all our heart, soul and strength. And our commitment to the commands that were given to us will be demonstrated by our attention to them – talking about them with our children, to each other, and strangers, every waking moment. And by sporting physical reminders of them and even decorating our homes with them!
As we have been tracking through the Gospel of Mark we have encountered several accounts of Jesus’s ministry that have hopefully stuck in our minds. As I read and re-read the verses for today I was aware of the players in this account: Jesus and a teacher of religious law, a Sadducee (in one version). This teacher belonged to a group that Jesus variously labelled ‘hypocrites and vipers’. These were the guys that were big on rules and regulations, coming up with 613 of them, to keep the masses largely in tow. Sadly, because of their sheer number, the focus of the masses was always on how they were following them, seldom on the One they were supposed to be engaging with.
Anyway, I was struck by the opening gambit by the Sadducee (I’ll refer to this teacher as the Sadducee to avoid us muddling him with Jesus, who was often referred to as Teacher). We rarely hear Jesus being acknowledged positively by these guys but, in the first exchange between the two, Mark records that the Sadducee was impressed with how Jesus had just handled himself when quizzed by his group about whose wife the woman, who was hypothetically married to seven brothers in succession, would be at resurrection. In answering, Jesus steered the exchange, by Scripture references, to the declaration that God is the God of the living, not the dead, and so the question fades towards irrelevance. So, the Sadducee thought Jesus had answered well and proceeded to test him again by asking which of the commandments was the most important.
Because Jesus had absolute command of Scripture, he responded immediately with, “The most important is, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength’. The second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”
Jesus had taken the first, to love God wholeheartedly, from Deuteronomy 6: 4-5, and the second came from Leviticus 19:18. What Jesus did was amalgamate the two separate components and present them as a ‘combo’. He didn’t go back to the Ten Commandments, which I have always thought of as the ‘standards’, to single out just one as most important.
Each of the Ten Commandments (see here) is worthy of its place in the list but none, singly or even grouped, convey the message that Jesus wanted to convey. He had come to do things differently; not to get us to work harder at our salvation but to transform our thinking and our hearts. He sought relationship. Loading another compliance issue on us would not have the right effect.
So, instead, Jesus offered a simple and effective alternative!
Consider in the exchange with the Sadducee the terms that each uses. In the first component of the answer, Jesus says we must love God with all of our heart, soul and strength (from the Deuteronomy verses) but adds ‘mind’, “putting the last piece of the human puzzle in place”, in the words of the Reverend Chelsey Harmon, a Canadian pastor whose work on this reading I consulted. She explained, the heart was thought to be the seat of our spiritual life, our inner being; the soul referred to one’s emotions and desires; and strength was understood as one’s power or ability to take action. And Jesus added to that the mind, which refers to our understanding and reasoning. While the Sadducee agreed in principle with the sentiments of Jesus’s response, his list of commitments was short. He stated we should love God with the heart, our understanding (mind) and strength. Missing was the soul, our emotions and desires. Straight away he had reduced the human response to God to less than what God expects and wants. Our emotional connection is a key component of the phenomenon of love.
Why is this important?
Think back to what a Jewish faith walk looked like a couple of millennia ago. Largely governed by compliance with those 613 rules and regulations, there was little focus on a personal relationship with God. Things were handled by intermediaries. You paid your money and purchased a variety of sacrificial offerings, depending upon what you were trying to gain restoration from. We have heard these ranged from small birds all the way through to the equivalent of the national intake of beef for several months!
The Hebrews reading argued that, to get right with God, such sacrifices only cleanse from ceremonial impurity. It went on to compare the sacrifice Jesus made for us. The sacrifice of the blood of Jesus purifies our consciences from sinful deeds.
What is the difference?
Ceremonial impurity relates to uncleanness that is without moral component. Ceremonial impurity could result from eating the wrong food, menstruation, sexual intercourse, certain skin conditions, and so on. When the sacrificial benefits of Jesus are highlighted alongside ceremonial impurity, the morality of the mind comes into consideration. The conscience of the sinner is taken into account. By his sacrifice Jesus is able to purify us when we confess and repent. There are no blood sacrifices other than his that can do this. His is the one true and perfect sacrifice for our sin. He is the only intermediary we need. He is the one who changes hearts.
The Sadducee was stuck in the old way. Jesus had come to launch the new way.
The second part of the “most important commandment” is that we should love our neighbour as we love ourselves. This, although derived from Scripture, put the Sadducee in a spot. He was a member of an elite group of wealthy upper-class men who made up what we could call the ‘Jewish aristocracy’, and would have benefitted from his position. The Sadducee would have been, in all likelihood, self-absorbed, self-focussed. The call Jesus is making in his “most important commandment” is about turning the God relationship into an other-focussed one. The change requires a turn from inward-focus to outward-focus.
So, for a number of reasons, Jesus perceives the response from the Sadducee to the most important commandment to be less than wholehearted. After praising the answer Jesus gave to his question, the Sadducee admits that to God, loving God and your neighbour matters more than performing any other religious duty or task, or keeping any specific law. It is this insight that Jesus takes note of, as a sign of the man’s wisdom and understanding. Jesus says to the man, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” “Not far from” implies to me, “Not quite there yet.” The Sadducee was not “all in”. Was Jesus offering a compliment, simply making a statement of fact, or was he giving a warning?
Mark’s Gospel has quite a few reminders about being ‘all in’. Remember the account of the rich man in Chapter 10 – he too was not far from the kingdom, and understood what Jesus was telling him, but he couldn’t do what was required of him. He was close, not far from the Kingdom, but he was not ‘all in’. In Chapter 8, after speaking of his coming crucifixion, Jesus tells the disciples that to follow Him they have to be ‘all in’, turning from their selfish ways by “taking up their crosses” and following Him. And there are repeated messages about how we should treat the marginalised and children; that our service to others is the way that we serve God. Taking these things together, the gospel message becomes clearer. Agreeing with and understanding the idea, or the law, or the commandment, gets us close to the Kingdom of God, but obeying it through action is what actually shows that we are part of God’s Kingdom. How we live shows whether we have gone ‘all in’ for the love of God, ourselves, and others.
So, what does it mean to love God and our neighbours all in? How can we be all in?
In answering this question I would highlight two references. The first is from Word for Today, 31 October 2024 (see here).
The second is from Reverend Doctor Selwyn Hughes, who concludes his series looking at ‘God’s story and the part we play in it’:
“On this last day of thinking together about God as the divine story writer, I would like to drop into your heart this thought: no matter how insignificant you may feel, if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and have been born again, the truth is that you are included in God’s big story. Your name is written into his universal epic. One day, when the whole story is unfolded in eternity, you will see what part you have played in the eternal scheme of things. You don’t have to spend your time scrupulously trying to figure out in what scene you appear. Trust that the Casting Director has given you a role that highlights not only your special talents and individuality but, more importantly, the way in which divine grace is at work in your life. Just to be part of God’s great epic, to be caught up in the narrative he is telling, is one of the highest privileges afforded any human being. A friend of mine says, ‘I don’t mind being just a spear carrier as long as I am part of God’s big story.’ How different life is when we realise that through all that happens to us a divine story, a bigger story, is being written. Drop your anchor into the depths of this reassuring and encouraging revelation. In the strongest currents of life it will, I promise, help to hold you fast.”
[And I love Selwyn’s prayer for that day: My Father and my God,how can I ever sufficiently thank youfor the priceless privilege of telling in my own voice your story?Help me from this day forwardto see all things from your point of view. In Jesus’ name. Amen.]
And if you are still not sure about how to be “all in”, perhaps think about this idea promoted by Joyce Meyer: that we do everything for God, and with God. A sure-fire way to start changing our thinking. And you know that our thoughts determine our words, and our words determine our actions, and our actions determine our character! If we determine to think of everything in terms of being for God then we will find that he is right there with us providing the wherewithal for us to be successful for him. Not about us any more, but “all in” for and with Him!
Two weeks ago, the Gospel reading from Mark gave us the story of a rich man who came to Jesus asking, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Today, in contrast, we have heard the story of the blind beggar’s encounter with Jesus: a man named Bartimaeus, whose sight was restored.
The rich man came asking what he could do to earn salvation. Jesus gave him what turned out to be an impossible task: give up his wealth for the benefit of the poor, then come and follow him, Jesus. Bartimaeus, on the other hand, sits at the side of the road and simply calls out to Jesus asking for mercy.
Although the crowd tries to silence him, Jesus hears him and asks what he wants. “Rabbi, I want to see,” is his reply and this request is immediately granted. “Go,” says Jesus, “your faith has made you whole.”
The rich man is told to give everything up and then follow, but he goes away. Bartimaeus, in a sense, is given everything when his vision is restored and told to go on his way, but he follows.
There are several ways of looking at this account from Mark’s Gospel. We could just say that Jesus took pity on a blind man begging by the city gate and healed his blindness, and wasn’t that a wonderful miracle? We could pick up on the fact that Bartimaeus became a follower and think that was great too. But perhaps not really surprising in the circumstances.
We are nearing the end of the church liturgical year now and our continuing stories of Jesus’s life and ministry will take a pause while we celebrate Advent and Christmas. But in the last few weeks we have become aware that the Mark is telling about Jesus and his disciples and followers ‘on the road’ or ‘the way’, teaching and healing and making their way to Jerusalem. In other words, walking towards what we know will be the end of Jesus’s earthly life. Quite often the stories we’ve heard along this journey have also been saying that the disciples were not getting the message, or really seeing and understanding what Jesus has been trying to tell them about himself.
A vital link piece in today’s story is the blind beggar shouting out, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me.” “Son of David” is a recognition of the fulfilment of the ancient prophesy of the promised Messiah being of King David’s line. With Jesus thus identified in this account, we might not be surprised that Mark gives the blind man a name, when very few people in the Gospel stories are named.
Names were important in the ancient world; they weren’t just labels; they conveyed meaning, and an odd name would capture the readers’ or listeners’ attention, and add to the meaning of a story.
So, what does the name Bartimaeus signify?
Mark’s listeners would have noticed that Bartimaeus was not a familiar name. It begins with the Aramaic ‘Bar’, signifying ‘son of’, but attached to a Greek name Timaeus. So, Bar-timaeus … ‘son of Timaeus’.
Some scholars attribute the name’s meaning to an Aramaic word meaning ‘honour’, giving the blind man a worthwhile background. However, others see the name Timaeus and the situation of the beggar as being linked to a word meaning a ‘son of poverty and shame’, reduced as he was to sitting with his cloak spread to receive coins from passers-by.
Rev Dr Eric Funston, an Episcopal priest in Ohio, has another suggestion, thinking about this story in the context of Mark first sharing it to his largely Gentile audience in Rome, who would have had little knowledge of the Aramaic language. They would have known some Greek though, and many would have been familiar with Greek literature.
Timaeus is indeed a Greek name – rare but well known. Because there was a Timaeus of Locri, and also Timaeus the historian, who lived in Athens around two and a half centuries before Christ. His histories were later declared unreliable and a wilful distortion of the truth by some. The historian Polybius condemned him as “an old ragwoman”, nothing more than a collector of old wives tales (which we might call mis-information or dis-information these days). If this historian is the Timaeus of whom the roadside beggar is a “son” or follower, Mark may have been telling his readers, and telling us, of the blindness that can come from untruth, distortions of fact, or someone else’s ‘alternative truth’, blinding ourselves to the truth of Jesus’s teaching about truth. Capital T truth, the Truth that will set you free.
However, Dr Funston concludes that it’s Timaeus of Locri, a famous character in Plato’s philosophical Dialogues, who is very likely the candidate for Mark’s reference. That Bartimaeus, “son of Timaeus,” should be blind in Mark’s Gospel is noteworthy because in the Dialogues, Timaeus sings the praises of our sense of sight. The blessing and benefit of sight and, thus, observation enables our understanding of the nature of the created universe, God’s place and our place as individuals and community in the ongoing story.
If Mark’s blind beggar Bartimaeus is recognisable to his listeners from this ancient connection it does seem to me that the blindness is more about being unable to see the possibilities of a new way of being.
How could this passage speak to us us today? Like Bartimaeus sitting outside of Jericho, we can be blind to the way we are existing and stay our comfort zone . We can be blind to the needs of the world we live in. We can be blinded by self-preservation and self-sufficiency; blinded by the influence of others’ opinions.
We can see the blindness of political and religious differences in the extreme violence of wars currently raging and the lie that violence is a solution to our disagreements.
And this can lead to our being blinded by anxiety and hopelessness.
Maybe we are all the rich man seeking salvation; we are all blind Bartimaeus sitting with our cloaks and begging bowls by the side of the road.
Jesus is coming by. What shall we do?
Will we like the rich man hold on to whatever blinds us and turn back into the darkness? Or will we be like Bartimaeus and seize the opportunity with eyes wide open?
I’m intrigued that Mark, writing what most understand to be the first account of Jesus’s life and sharing this teaching with an early Christ-centred community, gives us this account of Bartimaeus. And that so many details in the story can still connect with us more than two thousand years later. I keep thinking of the verse that mentions Bartimaeus casting off his cloak at Jesus’s invitation to come to him. That cloak represents his whole way of life, his livelihood, his persona, as he spreads it daily to mark his place by the roadside, to bear his begging bowl where people could leave coins or other offerings. The cloak would keep him protected at night and people would know him and recognise him wrapped in it. Even for a beggar, it was a still big move to leave all that and go to Jesus – then, with his vision restored, follow the way of Truth and Love.
For us, there is blindness in our own lives, behaviours we want to cling on to. It can be hard to face but in our deepest hearts we know that they separate us from God and need to be cast off like Bartimaeus’s cloak, so that we too can lead a full life as followers on the Way.
Jesus is coming by. What shall we choose? Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on us.
~~~ Open the eyes of my heart to see your grace in every moment, to see with hope and gratitude, with trust and humility. Teach me to look with my mind as open as my eyes; teach me in every gaze to look and see as things really are, not as I already think they are, not as fear (mine or anyone’s) tells me to see, but to see with grace as you see. Let me see with the eyes of love. Teacher, let me see anew.
by Sharon Marr, adapted from earlier work by Chris Ison
(Based on Job 38:1-7, 34-41 and Mark 10:35-45)
It’s funny how things from childhood stick in your mind. This short rhyme I recall was in the front piece of a ‘Children’s Book of Knowledge’ that I had a youngster. I believe it was attributed to Rudyard Kipling. It very much reflects an attitude to the acquisition of knowledge that I suspect most teachers would strongly approve of and which lies at the heart of our modern culture. For us, ‘scientific enquiry’ is the way we are taught to make sense of the world. And like all societies and cultures, past and present, we need to make sense of the world in which we live. There is nothing more disturbing than trying to cope with the irrational or chaotic or inconceivable.
Living in an age in which human progress, based on rationality and scientific enquiry, seems to be collapsing around us … should give us some pause for thought as to whether we are actually asking the right questions. It should also provoke an increasing humility about the limits of human knowledge. We now know infinitely more facts about the world than at any time in history, and yet seemingly we cannot live in peace with one another … or look after our world.
This need to make sense of the world, and to cope with reality as it presents itself in the ordinary circumstances of daily existence lies at the heart of the ‘wisdom’ literature in the Old Testament. Job is arguably the most profound book in the Old Testament’s wisdom genre because it tackles uncompromisingly the most difficult and perplexing aspects of human life – the relationship between God, evil and the suffering of the innocent – and in doing so turns the rest of ‘wisdom’ teaching on its head.
Why, why, why?
A little aside – Many years ago, or perhaps just the other day, when I was a child of about seven and my brother was three, he went through a stage of … Why? Come inside, Marty, it’s time for your bath, called Mum. Why? Because it’s nearly tea time. Why? Because dinner’s ready to go on the table. Why? Because that’s where we all eat. Why? By this time Marty was directed smartly by an exhausted mum to the bathroom. This stage of ‘why’ was not fleeting; it doggedly went on for many months until one day … No, I’ll wait till the end of the reflection to tell you what happened next.
Why do bad things happen to good people? It would be so much easier to cope if only we knew why! In the previous chapter of Job, Job’s friends, who came to comfort him in his suffering, thought they had the answer. God has created an orderly universe and the job of the wise is to uncover its secrets and live in accord with them. Those who do will be blessed – those who do not, the foolish, will suffer grievous consequences. Health, wealth, honour, longevity – these will be the rewards for following the teachings of the wise. If Job was suffering, then it was obvious he had sinned in some way, and he needed to work out how. But Job – upright and righteous, as even God recognised – is adamant that he has not sinned, and this is the basis for the increasingly angry confrontations that take place between Job and his friends. He insists on his integrity and eventually, after lengthy confrontations, Job ceases to pay attention to his friends, his anger is focused on God. This climaxes in his final speech in which he demands an answer from God:
“If only someone would listen to me! Look, I will sign my name to my defence. Let the Almighty answer me. Let my accuser write out the charges against me. I would face the accusation proudly. I would wear it like a crown. For I would tell him exactly what I have done. I would come before him like a prince.“
God’s answer to Job comes from “out of the whirlwind”! And if Job was expecting an answer to his complaints, this is not it! God displays his majestic power, just as Job hoped, and he is crushed by it.
“Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorant words?Brace yourself like a man, because I have some questions for you, and you must answer them.Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much. Who determined its dimensions and stretched out the surveying line? What supports its foundations, and who laid its cornerstone as the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?“
In the reading following, Job is satisfied and his friends are humiliated, but our focus this week is on God’s response. How can this be an answer?
Well it isn’t; certainly not in our terms.
But in a deeper and more profound sense, it is! Job had been demanding an answer to an unanswerable question. As did the disciples in our Gospel reading. God in his awesome power shows Job that he knows nothing of the mysterious nature and workings of the universe, and that no-one, not even someone declared blameless and upright by God, has the right to march into God’s presence and claim any rights. God’s power is not to be constrained by some ‘heavenly Human Rights Act’. God’s action in the world, and his love, are unconstrained and grace filled.
The more we try and probe into this the more we meet mystery. We can explain moral evil as a consequence of free-will. If free-will is to be meaningful then humankind must be as free to do evil as to do good. But what about natural evil, disease, earthquakes, tsunami? Well these days, for example, we know that earthquakes are the result of the movement of tectonic plates – and tectonic plates will do what tectonic plates have to do.
So why doesn’t God stop them?
At one level we could say that it would be a funny sort of world where God kept intervening to modify the laws of physics, or biology or chemistry – chaotic in fact. And in view of my earlier comments, I wonder how we would find living in a world in which nothing behaved with any predictability. But this is too much of a pat answer. We have to accept, as Job did, that we are confronted with a larger mystery than we can understand. At a fundamental level we have to accept that human rationality, human knowing, does not constitute wisdom in its deepest sense because we do not, and cannot, see the wider and deeper picture. [Refer to The Weaver poem – Ed]
This, of course, is taking us further forward into a New Testament understanding of God’s redemptive activity and, as we see in the Gospel reading, the disciples have just the same problem in coming to terms with the mystery of God’s activity in the world. James and John have signed up for the messianic mission, and once the Romans have been expelled and God’s rule restored over Israel, then what could be better than being second in charge – seems obvious!
Their problem is disbelief. God’s redemption of the world will not take place in some cataclysmic battle with the Romans, but in a cruel, violent execution on a wooden cross outside the walls of Jerusalem. Something that neither the religious insight of the Jews nor the wisdom of the gentiles could come to terms with.
Job’s friends were the leading promoters of the theological wisdom of their day. They knew what Job’s problem was, yet were humiliated by finding God rejected them. Job didn’t know what the problem was, but he wanted an answer, only to find that the answer was beyond his understanding and lay deep in the mystery of Creation. He accepted this with reverent humility. As Job discovers, God has made foolish the wisdom of the world.
Like Job, we want answers, and we live in a world in which, like Job’s friends, we believe we have the intellectual equipment to define the answers. But we must not fall into the trap of believing that the truth of the Gospel is dependent on our sophisticated philosophical arguments or eloquent speech-making, as did some in the early church. No. The Gospel rests on supremely unconvincing, unreasonable, unconstrained and grace-filled folly, Christ crucified! By no human standards would anyone suspect the crucified Jesus was the power and wisdom of God.
For us today, that message needs to be taken to heart. Faith derives not from wisdom – but wisdom comes through faith. This is beautifully expressed in this short extract from the prayer of St Anselm, that I would like to conclude with:
I do not endeavour, O Lord, to penetrate your majesty, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that;but I long to understand in some degree your truth, which my heart believes and loves.For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe – that unless I believe, I should not understand.Amen
Oh, I’ll finish my story of my brother’s why. Well, in response to yet another ‘why’ from Marty, mum turned around and said, ”Just cause!” And silence reigned. The Supreme Loving Being always has the last say!
stfrancischurchtairuanz 