Job 23: 1-9, 16-17; Mark 10:17-31

A couple of years ago, the renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough was being interviewed by Andrew Denton.  Denton raised the issue of Attenborough’s agnosticism, and in explaining why he found it difficult to believe in God, Attenborough made the following revelation:

I frequently receive letters from people saying, in effect, “You’ve travelled around the world, you’ve seen all the marvels of nature, how could you not believe in a loving God who created the world”.  I reply to these letters by asking their authors to picture an eight year old child sitting by a river in Africa.  That child is guilty of nothing more than the usual childhood foolishness.  And yet there is a worm burrowing under that child’s eyelid, a worm that can only exist by burrowing under the eyelids of children, and it will cause that child to go blind and live out their life in disfigurement and pain.  How can you tell me that a loving God created that worm to do that to a child?

 This is a common response to what might be called “The Problem of God”: how can we reconcile a loving God, a God who cares for us and desires relationship with us, and whom we think of as holding out to us an invitation to salvation – how do we reconcile that image of God with all the terrible, seemingly arbitrary things that happen to us and to those we love?

It’s a question that’s been pressing us with unusual urgency in recent times.  The tsunami in Samoa and Tonga; the earthquakes in Indonesia; the typhoons in the Philippines; the flooding in India.  In all these events, thousands of people have been killed, tens of thousands left homeless, and perhaps hundreds of thousands traumatized by an experience of extreme suffering.  And to make things worse, all this hardship is completely unwarranted: every person who has been killed, injured, displaced, and traumatized was – in relation to these events – completely innocent of any wrongdoing.  Their only “crime” was to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the ground shook, or a huge wave or a flood tide came along.

Where is God in any of this? Indeed, if God is present in these events, how can God possibly be understood as good or loving or caring?

Before we begin to explore this question, let me make one thing clear: I think it simply does no good to say that God has a master plan, that events happen for a reason that we can’t fathom, that some larger good or purpose is being served.  I not only think that this is a proposition that is fundamentally untrue, it is one that is profoundly cruel and inhuman.  It reduces human suffering to an instrumental level, making pain and loss and death nothing more than items in someone else’s agenda.  I don’t for a moment believe God operates that way; human beings might, but I don’t understand God as being prepared to let people suffer as casualties of some divine plan.

Likewise, I don’t think it’s appropriate to just shrug our shoulders and say: “That’s life”.  Natural disasters are a part of life, but pointing out the obvious does nothing to address the questions they raise.  If suffering, loss, hardship, and pain are “built in” to life, then what does this fact tell us about life, about creation, about God? More to the point, what does the expression “that’s life” tell us about ourselves? That when we are confronted by seemingly arbitrary suffering, all we can do is lapse into apathy and despair and the indifference of cliché?

These are questions that resound through the Book of Job.  Job, a righteous man, is overtaken by disaster: his children are killed, his servants are murdered, and his property destroyed or stolen.  More to the point, the text makes clear that it is God who causes Job to suffer: engaged in a cosmic wager with the Satan, God points out Job and brags about his righteousness.  The Satan responds by suggesting that Job is righteous only because he is well-to-do; let God strike him down with misfortune and he’ll change his tune.   And God says to the Satan: okay, do what you like to Job and we’ll see how he responds.

Well, the Satan does what he likes, and Job responds with what we might these days call post traumatic stress: he tears his clothes, covers himself in ashes, and sits on a rubbish heap lamenting his fate.  Then three of Job’s friends turn up and are shocked by his distress, so they try and comfort him.  But their idea of comfort is to resort to some very familiar platitudes.  God, they tell Job, doesn’t afflict the innocent and the righteous: Job must have done something to deserve his fate.  But let him repent, have trust in God, and everything will turn out for the best.

Reviewing these tactless remarks, we might be tempted to think ourselves greatly superior to Job’s friends; surely we would be much more sensitive and constructive! But I suspect that, in similar circumstances, our responses would be very much like theirs, because the idea of poetic justice, of someone getting their “come uppance” or “just deserts” is deeply ingrained in our psyche.   Even in the face of some patently undeserved hardship, we often respond with “how ironic” or “couldn’t happen to a nicer person”.  In other words, they mightn’t have deserved this, but they did deserve getting punished for something, so this will do.

Of course, when the shoe is on the other foot, we see things differently, and Job reacts against his friends’ platitudes with dismay and anger.  I am innocent! he cries in anguish; God has done this to me, God has punished me unjustly! I don’t deserve this!

I…don’t…deserve…this! – the cry of outraged innocence down the ages.  But, of course, the point of the Book of Job is that Job is innocent.  And this innocence resonates through today’s reading: Job laments that if only he could find a way to contact God, then God could not help but agree with the reasonableness of Job’s position.  That being the case, Job would be vindicated and returned to his previous prosperity.

There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.  In other words, if only God would explain to Job why these things have happened to him, then Job would be able to convince God that he’s been unjustly targeted, and God – like a judge in a Court of Appeal – would say: yep, wrongful conviction, go free Job.

And it is this conceit that makes Job’s lament the mirror image of his friends’ inadequate platitudes.  Because just as they wrongly accuse Job of wrongdoing, so Job wrongly accuses God of a kind of spiritual breach of contract.  In his lament, Job effectively says: Listen, Lord, we had a deal: I be good and upstanding, and you protect me from hardship and suffering.  In other words, if God is good and loving and caring, then life should be a breeze and there should be nothing in creation that causes us harm or grief.

And this is the theme that undergirds David Attenborough’s hesitance to believe in God.  According to him, an innocent child suffering pain and disfigurement through infestation by a parasitic worm is evidence that either God doesn’t exist, or that God is cruel and arbitrary.  But what makes Attenborough’s position so astonishing is that, as a naturalist, he of all people should know better.  Having witnessed at first hand the intricate, complex relationship that binds all living things, he knows that life and death, disaster and opportunity, growth and decay are built into the very fabric of existence.  Far from been opposites, one positive one negative, they are, in fact, the very foundations of life. 

What this all means is that denying God because God doesn’t meet our demand for a sheltered, comfortable life amounts to a denial of life.   Life is rich and full and abundant; and part of that abundance is suffering and hardship.  That sounds counter intuitive, because most people instinctively want to avoid hardship, they consider suffering and grief to be abnormal, to be that which impoverishes us.  But the problem with thinking this way is that it leads people to construct a warped, one-sided definition of happiness: that happiness is all wealth and material goods and fulfilled ambition, and no sickness, or unemployment, or death. 

And this is a one-sided perspective we bring to our imaging of God: that God is all light, and peace, and granting wishes, as though God were some kind of over-indulgent parent or cool celestial guardian.  But God is none of these things; God is God.  And God’s caring and loving kindness and goodness can embrace and include situations and outcomes that, from the human point of view, involve injustice and unfairness and wronged innocence.

That, of course, is cold comfort to those in pain, and the cynical might suggest that it’s an easy theology for me, a comfortable, white, middle class male to espouse.  But the thing that I’ve noticed in all the media coverage of the recent disasters is that the people of Samoa and Tonga and Indonesia and the Philippines and India aren’t sitting around feeling sorry for themselves and saying: “God, where were you! Why didn’t you stop this from happening to us?” Yes, they are grieving; yes, they are traumatized; yes, they are crying out in anguish and despair.  But a lot of that expression seems to be taking place in their temples and churches and mosques.  Instead of turning away from or against God in their grief and rage, they are bringing their anger, their hurt, their outrage to God.

And isn’t it an interesting thing that the bitter, disillusioned rejection of God seems to be coming in large part from comfortable, white, middle class guys like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens – and from others like them.  Some might suggest that the people devastated by the recent disasters are responding with prayer and worship because they’re not sophisticated like us Westerners, and their worldview is simplistic and susceptible to religious manipulation.  But I suspect that, having lived with tsunamis and earthquakes and flooding monsoons for untold generations, they in fact possess a more sophisticated notion of life’s richness than we do, a notion that includes and involves life’s tragedies and sorrows. 

And it is this deeper notion of abundance that is present in today’s reading from Mark.  Jesus encounters a young man who seemingly has a good deal of richness, both in terms of his financial wealth and his moral credentials.  But Mark makes a point about the young man being rich and morally upright, not in order to take gratuitous swipes at the well-to-do or the pious, but in order to illustrate that if we think these things constitute spiritual richness, then we are in fact spiritually impoverished.   

Because the young man thinks that these human measures of abundance will earn him a share of eternal life.  It’s a presumption that is evident in his opening question: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” As if eternal life was a matter of obeying the rules, of accumulating enough brownie points with God so that when you die God will check your record and say: “Yes, okay, fine – you’ve accumulated enough frequent flyer points, eternal life is your reward.”  But Jesus’ response informs the young man – and tells us – about his and our insufficiency: “You lack one thing”.  And that one thing is to enter into the abundance of faith, an abundance that quite often makes life more difficult for us.  An abundance  that, far from being a comfortable bolt hole in which we can hide from all the troubles and complexity of life, actually forces us to confront life’s troubling questions and deal with life’s tragedies – even when we don’t want to.

And it’s this image of abundance as difficulty, as hardship and suffering, that is implicit in Jesus’ instruction to the young man to go and sell everything.  Jesus is not romanticising poverty any more than he is demonising wealth.  But what he is saying is that, in faith, there is a richness, a wealth, that is greater than mere material well-being or mere moral goodness: it’s the wealth of encounter with God, with the One who is both creator and Lord of all, and who is present to each and every one of us.  In other words, it’s the wealth of relationship, of abandoning our own priorities and desires in order to be open to another.

But relationships are difficult, complex, and often quite fraught.  And in opening ourselves to someone else, we are required to make ourselves vulnerable to them, to run the risk of being hurt.  And we cannot expect to enter into relationship with God, with the One who is utterly Other, without experiencing pain and difficulty and hardship.  Because God, ultimately, is mystery; and the invitation to relationship with God is an invitation to explore the mystery of God – without any false promises or hopes, without any guarantees that our explorations won’t sometimes bring us to painful places.

In other words, Jesus is saying to the rich young man: don’t expect that faith will make life comfortable and easy for you, and that at the end you’ll get a first-class ticket to eternal life.  And Jesus is saying that to us today, and especially to the people who think that God’s goodness and love mean that we should be sheltered from hardship and suffering, or that our congregations should be full, or our youth groups overflowing with ardent young people, or that the media and society should be paying more attention to us and saying nice things about us.   Those kinds of desires are characteristic of what some philosophers call “the religion of comfortableness” – but they have nothing to do with the wealth of eternal life.

Rather, that wealth is present in Jesus’ reaction to the young man.  Jesus looks at him – and in the very moment that he knows the young man will fail him; indeed, precisely because he knows the young man will fail him – Jesus loves him.  Simply, completely, fully, and unconditionally loves him.  That is what is meant by grace: Jesus tells us what faith involves, what relationship implies, where real wealth resides; and then continues to hold us, even when we reject the invitation to love.  It is the grace that wounds us because we are vulnerable – which, in C S Lewis’ words, strikes us so hard that we can scarcely bear the pain – and which transforms us into healing.  It is the grace that caused Job to lament on his rubbish heap, and told the rich young man to give away all he had.

And it is the grace by which Christ willingly went to the Cross for all our sakes, to suffer alone the most horrendous and humiliating death imaginable.  It is the grace that affirms, in the squalor and injustice of Jesus’ crucifixion, the essential and unbreakable dignity of all life – and which therefore transforms the undeserved suffering we’ve witnessed recently into something more than meaningless and arbitrary death. 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.