That’s Life
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Oxnam Chapel, Wesley Theological Seminary
October 5, 2003
Job 1:1, 2:1-10; Mark 10:2-16
I. INTRODUCTION
I was at a party once in law school with some friends of mine—it was at the end of the year when you’re feeling good because a long and difficult year is over. And we were standing around in the back yard of this friend’s apartment admiring the night sky. There was one brilliant star in the middle of the night sky. A friend of mine asked,
“What is that?”
“It’s Venus,” I replied. We both nodded knowingly. But one guy, Nick, asked, “Wait a minute—how can that star be Venus? Isn’t Venus between us and the sun?”
“So?”
“Right now the sun is on the other side of the world, so we’d have to be between it and Venus. How is that possible? That’s why you can only see it at dusk or at dawn.”
“… Shut up, Nick.”
Yeah, he was one of those guys who is always asking those annoying questions. We were having a perfectly fine evening, marveling at Venus, or Jupiter, whatever it was.
There are those questions that pop up that just seem to cause us trouble. Whether it’s because they challenge something that we believe or they challenge the way that we’ve been viewing the world, they make us wonder about the things we believe in or the things we think we know.
II. THE TEXT
We have two very different texts tonight for our scripture: one from Job the other from Mark. These texts are scheduled in the lectionary—they have no other natural connection to one another and over the next few weeks we will be hearing more from Job and Mark as we go through this cycle of readings.
III. QUESTIONS OF FAITH
But there is something that they have in common—they both deal with questions of one kind or another. Mark deals with the kind of question that we hear most often in our faith: when people ask us how things work, or whether we believe in a certain thing. These are the kind of questions that challenge us at the doctrinal level of our faith. Jesus was being asked a question about divorce, being asked to clarify his beliefs and opinions of divorce in the context of Jewish law that allowed it. This is one of the “hard sayings” of Jesus—a difficult text for us to hear. In it Jesus prohibits divorce for any reason. As we hear Jesus being questioned himself, we ourselves are asking a question: “Do we believe that?” And we can hear others asking us: “Do you really believe in a religion that doesn’t allow for divorce?” And it gets worse when we consider that in Matthew’s version of the same story, it does allow an exception to this rule. These kind of questions make us uncomfortable when they require us to wrestle with such issues regarding our faith.
IV. QUESTIONS OF LIFE
But Job asks a whole other set of questions. Job asks questions that are harder to answer because they are not questions of doctrine, but about how we understand the presence of a merciful, loving, and just God in the midst of a world of unmerited suffering.
Job is described as a righteous and blameless person—there is no one like Job in all the earth. In a contest between God and Satan over how faithful Job would be, Job is afflicted: he is covered with sores, his cattle die, his family members are killed. His life takes a turn for the worst. We ask ourselves: “What is the point of such suffering?”
Job is perplexed by this. He has three friends who come to talk with him during his suffering. They evidence a worldview which we call the “wisdom worldview”—the idea that if you do the right thing, good things happen to you. We are often tempted to think that way, particularly in this culture which strives to be about merit and having earned one’s blessings or curses. Because these three friends believe in this worldview, they insist that Job must have done something wrong because he is being punished. It must simply be a case of not knowing what he did wrong. He just doesn’t realize what he’s done. Job knows he hasn’t done anything wrong, but the only thing he can think of is that he hasn’t gotten a hearing before God. If only he can get his hearing and have his plea heard, everything would work out. The idea that a righteous person would suffer, just doesn’t compute.
When Job finally gets to have his audience with God, God simply pulls rank and says, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” That is, ‘How do you presume to question my ways?’ Thus, the whole book of Job leaves us with more questions than it answers.
We look at Job’s story and say, “Yeah, that’s life.” Life is like that. Unfair. Full of brokenness. The righteous suffer and the wicked prosper. It has the effect of questioning our faith on a level more profound than questions of theology or doctrine. I’d be willing to field nothing but questions about the Trinity, if I had an answer to the question of why good and innocent people suffered. If I had that answer, other things are merely academic questions to be debated among the faithful. It’s the questions that we can’t answer that really trouble us. Very few Christians lay awake at night wondering how to reconcile the fact that Jesus is both truly human and truly divine. Many people lay awake wondering about God because God can seem so absent, so distant. Those are the tough questions.
V. GOD’S ANSWER
God doesn’t really ever promise us all the answers. What God does promise is something else. God has answered some of our questions. God has answered the questions: will brokenness rule forever? Will sin and death, violence and war, reign forever? Will injustice and poverty reign forever?
God has answered that question. In the resurrection he answered that question with a resounding “No!” These things will not reign forever. We as a Christian community have glimpsed something of God’s answer. Those eleven frightened disciples in that Upper Room glimpsed this answer to the question of history. They glimpsed something of the promise and the hope that all of the brokennesses of the world do not hold sway forever.
That’s a pretty big answer to a pretty big question. It many not answer our questions about why it at least gives us an answer about what.
VI. OUR ANSWER
We can begin to supply the answer to the questions of our age. What do we do with this message? As a Christian community we are supposed to be empowered by this answer, to answer the world’s question in a very different way.
I get a number of people in my office who want to talk about things in their lives: tragedies that have happened, losses they have suffered. And the question of “Why?” come up a lot. Some would tell these people that asking the question “Why?” suggests a loss of faith. Friends, asking “Why?” is a question of faith. Demanding that God be God is a faithful act. It is something that Job did, that the prophets did, the apostles did… that Jesus did from the cross.
On a fundamental level, however, we may not ever get the answer to that question. We may never know why bad things happen to good people. We may never know why the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper. The only thing we can know is what we’re going to do about it. The only thing we can know is what we, as a Christian community in light of the Resurrection, are going to do in response.
We may not know why millions of people are born into poverty each year, but we can know what we can do about it. We who have the resources and the ability know what a simple thing it is to provide for another’s need. We may not know why people have to suffer injustice, but we know what we can do about it. We know what the life of a faithful Christian can say to the world.
VII. CONCLUSION
It is those answers that are far more important. Our lives are journeys of mystery and there are things we will never know. But with regard to the rest, we can ask ourselves: Are we content simply to write off the brokenness and injustice of the world with a simple, “That’s life”? Or are we going to do something about it?
