Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Mark 10:46-52

I don’t know if any of you saw the program Foreign Correspondent a couple of weeks ago on the ABC – but those of you who did may recall that it concerned an Australian journalist who had recently returned from Sumatra, where he had been filming the dreadful aftermath of the earthquakes in that region.  But what made this episode special, more than just another story about horrendous suffering and destruction, was a single, brief image of hope; the kind of hope that is unique to faith.

As you are aware, the majority of the Sumatran population are Muslim; and one of the spiritual disciplines of Islam is a regimen of five daily prayers to God.  For most of us, caught up in busy lives and the pressing concerns of family, community, and work, stopping five times a day for prayer sounds like an impossibility.  But imagine if your world had been completely disrupted, your home destroyed, your loved ones killed or scattered or traumatised; wouldn’t praying once a day, never mind five, seem like the least of your priorities?

And yet this was the very image that made this episode of Foreign Correspondent special.  In a town flattened by the ‘quake, next to the shell of a devastated building, the journalist’s camera caught a man in the act of observing one of the five daily prayers to God.  Unobtrusively, unselfconsciously, kneeling on his prayer mat, surrounded by utter destruction: and in the very midst of that horror, a moment of grace, a moment of God’s presence – a moment of hope.

It reminded me of another image, one I saw many years ago and have not seen since.  It was taken during the Normandy landings on D-Day, and in the picture, a dead soldier lies on the pebble-strewn beach.  In the background, hazily, you can see the battle continuing: soldiers rushing past, shells bursting, the sky dark and fuzzy with smoke.  But in the picture, kneeling over the dead soldier, an army chaplain is administering the Last Rights; and the camera has caught him in the moment when he is making the sign of the Cross on the dead soldier’s forehead.  Amid the chaos and senseless butchery of war, a moment of grace, a moment of God’s presence – a moment of hope.

Today’s readings from Job and Mark are about hope, about the restoration of hope.  If they don’t appear that way, that’s because God’s love comes to us in surprising ways, and at the most unexpected moments.  We are rarely on the lookout for the signs of God’s presence among us, and so we often fail to notice the hope that exists, even in the depths of despair.  And just as often we fail to notice when hope has been restored to us, precisely because it is the nature of hope to touch us quietly, unobtrusively, and in the deepest places of our hearts.

Paradoxically, that’s why the Biblical authors were so often forced to use dramatic stories to illustrate this very point.  Hope makes a stark and unmistakeable appearance in these accounts, an appearance that announces itself in miracles and visions.  But if we listen carefully to the words, if we read between the lines, we see the subtle yet unmistakable point: that the Kingdom of God is not only coming, it is actually present among us in the gift of hope that dwells among us and makes God’s presence real in the world, even in this age of cynicism and narcissism and despair. 

What this means is that the coming and yet present Kingdom of God is not merely about endings, about the writing of the final words and the closing of the book.  On the contrary, the Kingdom declares the possibility of new beginnings, of life mended and made whole.  The Kingdom is present in our finite and broken world precisely because it declares that this reality is not the final reality, not the full expression of life and love.  The suffering and hardship and hurt we experience today points, not to pie in the sky when we die, but to the loving grace of God that embraces all things and all realities and makes of them a new reality, a new hope, a new beginning.

Job is the quintessential image of wronged innocence.  A good and righteous man, he suffers the horror of having his children killed, his servants murdered, his property stolen or destroyed.  In the agony of his grief he cries out to God that he has done nothing to deserve such a fate; let God therefore give an explanation of why this has happened, so that Job may prove his innocence and be vindicated by God.  In other words, Job possesses a theology of retribution: bad things happen to those who deserve them, whereas the just and the good are spared suffering.  So when Job’s theology is challenged by his experience, Job turns on God, accusing God of bad faith and not sticking to God’s side of the bargain.

Then three of Job’s friends come along, and in trying to comfort Job, they, too, articulate a theology of retribution: God does not strike down the innocent, therefore Job must be guilty of some sin.  Let him repent, and trust in God, and all will be well.  But Job rejects their theology, even though it is a theology he shares with them; he continues to protest his innocence, and demands that God make an accounting of what has happened.

Toward the end of the Book of Job, just before the passage in today’s reading, there occurs one of the most extraordinary passages in the whole Bible.  God appears to Job out of the whirlwind, shows him all of creation, nestling as it were in the palm of God’s hand, and says, in effect: Okay, Job, you think you’re entitled to answers: here’s the universe – explain it to me! And if you can give an accounting of creation, I’ll justify myself to you.

And confronted by the wonder and the terror and the majesty of the cosmos, Job realises his folly and backs off: I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. In other words, Job realises that his simplistic theology of retribution is hopelessly inadequate, that relationship with God cannot be summed up as a kind of quid pro quo.  Rather, relationship with God involves the risk that exists in all relationships: the risk of being hurt, the risk of making ourselves vulnerable to another.  In other words, engagement with God involves the risk of engagement with life: the risk of things going wrong, of suffering undeserved hardship, of experiencing grief and pain.  But within that risk lies the seed of hope: that hurt implies a capacity for healing; that suffering implies the possibility of relief; that grief implies the moment of joy. 

We humans make the mistake of thinking that God’s loving kindness involves only those things that make us happy or which suit our purposes.   But this is simply a selfish illusion; and God is greater than our self interest, than our desire for easy, comfortable, sheltered lives.  On the contrary, God is life, and life in all its abundance: the good, the bad, and the indifferent.

And we see this at the end of the Book of Job.  God chastises Job’s friends – who, in giving voice to their theology of retribution, presume to speak on God’s behalf – and restores Job’s fortunes.  Now take careful note of that word restores.  God does not bring Job’s dead children back to life; God does not resuscitate Job’s murdered servants; God does not return Job’s stolen and destroyed property.  In other words, God does not change the past, or wipe the painful memories from Job’s mind, or make things new as though they had never happened.  To suggest that God gives back to Job everything he lost as a kind of compensation or reward, is to utilise the same simplistic, inadequate theology used by Job and his three friends.  What God does is restores hope to Job: the hope of new life, of new beginnings; of new children, of a new household, of a new legacy to leave to future generations.   Faith, as I have said, is not a quid pro quo, an exchange of belief for prosperity; it is an engagement with the mystery and depth and risk of life, for which journey God supplies us with the coinage of hope.

And we see that coinage expended in today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel.  Writing to an early Christian community stunned by the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, a community that saw itself as blinded by the calamitous loss of its spiritual focus,  Mark does not offer the reassurance of empty platitudes – he offers hope.  Remember, this passage occurs just after Jesus has predicted his own crucifixion, and just before his tumultuous entry into Jerusalem, the event that begins the countdown to Calvary.  So this is hope offered in times of chaos, of anxiety, and of change.

Approaching Jerusalem by way of Jericho, Jesus encounters the blind beggar Bartimaeus.  As usual, Jesus is surrounded by a large crowd, and when Bartimaeus cries out to Jesus – Son of David, have mercy on me! – some in the crowd try to silence him.  But he persists, and Jesus calls him over, asks him what he wants, and being told by Bartimaeus that he wishes to see again, restores his sight.  Seemingly, a straight-forward miracle story, a demonstration of power proving Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God.

But there’s more to it than that.  By calling Jesus “Son of David”, Bartimaeus was giving voice to the great hope of Jesus’ time – that a Messiah would rise from David’s line, drive the Romans out of Judea, and restore the ancient Kingdom as it had once been under David and Solomon.  And in using this title, Mark is identifying Jesus as that Messiah, as that hope made flesh: but not in the way that the people were hoping for, a way that reflected human political and national structures; but in a way that reflected the architecture of the Kingdom of God, an architecture that did not need buildings or cities, but which dwelt within the hearts of people. 

In other words, Mark was saying to his community: don’t lose heart over the destruction of Jerusalem.  God does not dwell in one place, but in all the earth.  The realm of the human passes; the realm of God endures forever.

And here the metaphor of sight restored reflects the surprising, unlooked-for love of God.  Because Bartimaeus does not return to his old life once he can see again; as Mark tells us, he follows Jesus along the way, that is, toward Jerusalem.  So no longer being blind is more than just the reversal of a physical affliction; for Bartimaeus, it represents a new way forward, a new mode of living – a new beginning.  In the depth of his suffering, reduced to begging and the precarious living it offered, new hope dawns, a new life makes itself apparent – a new beginning that arose out of the very suffering that seemed to represent a long, dark road to oblivion.

And here again, Mark offers hope to his community.  Yes, we live in a time of strife, a time of conflict.  Yes, we are surrounded by darkness and uncertainty.  Yes, everything we grew up with and knew and loved as familiar is changing.  But that is as it should be; the road is not easy because it was never meant to be easy; the journey is not about our comfort and security, it is about being open to the richness and abundance God offers.  Hope is not the same as certainty; it is deeper and richer and more mysterious; it is, as the English poet Andrew Marvell said about love: vaster than Empires, and more slow.

And who does not doubt that what was relevant in Mark’s day is still not relevant now? Threatened on so many fronts by so many dangers, how often does it seem that we are like the early Church, under siege and by no means assured of survival? But if we dare to take up the challenge of the future; if we dare to care for each other and for our world; if we dare to look for true strength in unlikely places – then the surprising love of God will always meet us, holding out the prospect of hope, of new life and new beginnings. 

God found Job and Bartimaeus when they least expected it, and the hope God offered became a real presence in their lives.  And that presence remains with us today, if we but look for it: in the image of a dead soldier receiving a final blessing; in the image of a man praying in the midst of his shattered town.  In the darkness that is itself the source of light.