October 2024 – Relationalrealities

Image: The Book of Job, William Blake

In her sermon two weeks ago, Linda+ introduced us to the recent series of OT lessons from the Book of Job, saying that the much-used statement “Everything happens for a reason” is one of the five cruelest words in the English language to someone who is suffering—right up there with “It’s all in God’s plan.“

I’ve coined the term fable morality for the popular attitude that luck – the avoidance of tragedy in our lives is a sign of God’s grace. Linda+ asked: where are the blessings and the grace of God for your neighbor who has lost everything? You get grace and blessings, and they don’t? What kind of God allows that? What kind of God would do that? She concluded her introduction with Welcome to the Book of Job.

Welcome indeed!

We are mostly familiar with the story of Job – a non-Israelite yet righteous man – whose faith in God is tested in severe adversity. Job is so righteous that God boasts about him in the heavenly council – holding him up as an example of human faithfulness arousing the angelic adversary – the satan’s invitation to enter into a small wager. Here we make a curious discovery – that the Lord God is a bit of a gambler who likes nothing better than a flutter on the forces of fate.

God seems to have allowed himself to be manipulated by the satan with the expectation of a safe bet. Expecting a quick an easy win – the Lord is utterly unprepared for what happens next. At first Job responds as God expects. Twice he refuses to curse the Lord. But then Job does something God didn’t expect – he seeks an explanation as to why his life has taken this calamitous turn. In doing so he appeals to the Lord’s justice as the better side of the divine nature.

Here lies the central theme in the story: Job continues to insist on his righteousness while refusing to acknowledge that the sorry turn of events in his life is the result of sin. Job demands an explanation from God on the basis that the Lord is a just god. In insisting on justice as an essential attribute of the Lord God’s identity, Job exposes God’s betrayal of God’s own better nature.

There’s an old joke among preachers concerning a marginal note in the sermon text that reads – argument weak here so shout and pound the pulpit. From the voice within the whirlwind, God now tries to deflect Job’s questions with a display of pulpit thumping designed to intimidate and silence Job. Pounding the divine pulpit, the Lord roars -who are you to question me? Can you do what I’ve done? Were you there to see my power at creation? Do you know more than I know?

But Job is not questioning God’s power. For Job, God is God not simply because God is all-powerful. God is God because justice is an essential and integral aspect of the divine nature without which God cannot be God.

God begins to realize the bind he finds himself in. He cannot respond to Job in terms of justice because confident of quick victory in his wager with the satan – he has allowed a manifest and brutal injustice to be perpetrated on Job. Thus, God draws the robe of the power around himself – blustering and stomping about in the hope that Job won’t notice that God is changing the subject. Job lies in abject suffering while God waxes lyrical about creating crocodiles and whales.

In Chapter 42:1-6 we have Job’s response. Unlike his earlier speeches in self-defense – Job’s final response is brief and concise. Most English language Bibles use the following translation.

I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. I uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. I had heard of you by hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.

All’s well that ends well – in other words with the explicit warning – who are we – mere mortal beings – to question the Almighty? Repentance before the Lord even in the face of what seems inexplicable injustice is the only acceptable response.

However, this traditional interpretation makes no sense and does serious violence to the integrity of Job’s complaint. Jack Miles in his revolutionary book God: A Biography offers a very different approach to interpretation. Miles justifies this by demonstrating how the traditional interpretation relies on a repentance gloss on the original Hebrew introduced in the 2nd-century Greek translation in the Septuagint. After his long and passionate presentation of his case before the Lord – Miles questions why Job would suddenly abandon his cause at the very end.

Miles contends that when freed from the presumption of the later Greek repentance gloss – the inherent ambiguity of the Hebrew suggests a very different translation of 42:1-6.

[You] know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. [You say] who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore, I spoke more than I realized. [You say] Hear and I will speak, I will question you, and you declare to me. [Ahh], I had heard of you by hearsay (the words of my comforters) but now that my eyes have seen you I shudder with sorrow for mortal clay.

Miles suggests that this translation fits within the larger context of Job’s consistent refusal to back down in the face of God’s attempt to intimidate him. What seems to upset Job at this point is the realization that if God insists on deflecting questions of justice with displays of power– then all humanity is done for.

Job may have been reduced to silence but so has God been silenced by being brought face to face with the internal tension between his better and darker selves. The Lord now seeks to avoid facing his inner conflict by restoring Job’s fortunes. In the Lord’s time-honored behavior when he realizes he has gone too far – he makes double restitution without admitting culpability. Might we see in this a hidden expression of divine remorse?

Throughout the historical development of the Tanakh the Jewish scriptures struggle to reconcile the unfettered exercise of divine power with the constraint of divine justice. In other words, how can the split nature of the divine be understood – for the Lord God seems to have a dark as well as a light side to his identity, or in Job’s words the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; yet blessed be the name of the Lord.

In the Psalms, we find the main divine assertion – I am the Lord whose power is made manifest through justice. Earlier in the Torah, we find Abraham repeatedly appealing to God’s better nature – invoking the attribute of justice as a necessary curb on God’s darker power-driven impulses. In effect, this is the argument Job now uses with God. Like Abraham, Job reminds God of the human expectations for God to live up to his assertion that divine power is made manifest through justice.

Accordingly, Jewish tradition understands that justice is imperfect – guaranteed by God but also at the mercy of his darker impulses. Time and again the Tanakh witnesses God’s justice winning over his power impulses. But as Job reveals this struggle is sometimes touch and go.

The encounter between God and Job has reduced both to silence. After the book of Job, the Lord God never speaks again in the Tanakh. In all the books that follow – God is either absent with the focus being on human interaction or heard through human repetition of God’s historical statements quoted from earlier passages in the Torah or the prophets. God makes a fleeting appearance in the book of Daniel but as the very remote and silent Ancient of Days.

The book of Job leaves a somewhat bitter aftertaste in the mouth. Yes, God restores Job’s fortunes and doubles his prosperity, and his better self eventually wins out over his darker impulses. But as Jack Miles notes – no amount of compensation can make up for Job’s loss of his previous family and servants – all merely the collateral damage flowing from the misjudged wager with the devil.

As for the Tanakh’s image of divine justice – well it’s mixed. In the books that follow Job, the simplistic fable morality – God rewards the good and punishes the bad – reasserts itself. We do find attempts to deal with unpredictability with the assertion that God will do neither good nor bad – somehow remaining detached and impartial. Only in the book of Job do we encounter a groping after a deeper and more paradoxical wisdom– that the lord will often do good but sometimes do bad. Justice is imperfect. From now on Job not only knows this about the Lord, but the Lord cannot escape knowing this about himself.

In the current political climate women’s and children’s issues are spotlighted by an age-old paradox. On the one hand, the anti-choice political-religious agenda – with renewed energy seeks to impose a Kafkaesque level of government overreach into women’s reproductive lives threatening disastrous consequences for the integrity of medical professionals dedicated to women’s health. It’s ironic that this movement is championed by that part of our political and religious culture that has traditionally coined the slogan – keep the government out of our lives.

Yet, the paradox becomes more glaring when we note that the political and religious championing of the rights of the unborn is matched by a reluctance to legislate for the welfare and protection of the already born. Recent Republican refusal in the US Senate to extend the child credit is a sorry truth that for an electorate that practices a high degree of selective cognizance cannot be highlighted enough. Child-family credit is the single most effective instrument in dramatically reducing child poverty.

The political terrain of women’s and children’s welfare remains an area of fraught intersectionality. Anxieties about women’s reproductive rights meet head-on with accompanying white anxieties about race and class. The origin of American abortion prohibition has its roots in the murky history of white protestant racial anxieties in the face of late 19th-century immigration from southern and eastern Europe – anxieties that today find a voice in conspiracies of racial replacement.

It’s ironic that the strident claims of the religious right’s assertion that God and the Christian tradition abhors abortion find no support or evidence in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures which remain completely silent on the issue of abortion. In contrast, the diverse voices heard in the Scriptures are resoundingly loud and clear on issues of women’s and children’s welfare. They are similarly loud and clear about the obligation to welcome and protect the stranger. But the latter point is worthy of its own sermon.

As a case on point – Jesus’ teaching in Mark 10 should make us all wriggle with discomfort. How can we continue to claim to know the mind of God on contemporary reproductive issues about which Scripture remains consistently silent while ignoring the clearly articulated mind of God on the nature of the human relationship within marriage?

If Scripture is silent on contemporary issues of reproductive rights – justifying male control of female bodies – a general attitude nevertheless can be discerned hidden within Jesus’ debate with the Pharisees and his teaching to his disciples on divorce in Mark 10.

It’s not surprising that the debate about divorce centers on female adultery. Female adultery represents an attack on male control over female reproduction – because a wife’s adultery muddies the waters of legitimacy. A man needs to know that the children his wife bears are his and not someone else’s. Anxiety about legitimacy is code for the legal protection of intergenerational transmission of property rights – a cornerstone of patriarchal order.

Confronting this very male anxiety, Jesus messages in Mark 10 that adultery cuts both ways. It’s not just the wife’s adultery that counts for divorce, but the husband’s does as well. This is shocking news for both his Pharisee interlocutors and his faithful disciples. This is not what they want to hear.

Of interest to us is Jesus’ thoughts on the Mosaic writ of divorce as an accommodation for the hardness of the human heart. What does he mean by this? One reading of the writ is to see it as a recognition that men have a right to do what men want to do concerning their wives and children. But I think a better reading of what Jesus is getting at here is to recognize the Mosaic writ less as a permission for male bad behavior but as a protection for a woman by requiring her husband to publicly demonstrate the grounds for divorcing her. The writ protects what little rights a Hebrew wife might claim in the face of an unscrupulous husband’s attempt to cast her aside.

Mark is always in a hurry – he thinks nothing of abrupt and unexpected jumps in the narrative. One moment Jesus is addressing the question of divorce and then suddenly he’s talking about the welcome and protection of children. Although we note a rather abrupt and unskillful transition – Mark is showing his readers that the point to which Jesus is driving his argument firstly with the Pharisees and then with his disciples – is towards the recognition in a society where women and children had few rights and were easily the subjects of male abuse – that the protection and care for women and children is one of God’s primary concerns.

In his teaching on divorce, Jesus asserts the relationship between husband and wife is one of equals. Reflecting God’s covenant with humanity, Jesus asserts that marriage as a relationship of equals was God’s original intention for men and women in creation. When Jesus says: what God has joined together let no one separate, he is saying that God’s intention and the practice of divorce conflict. The Pharisees go away muttering to themselves, the disciples are rendered speechless, and Christians have squirmed on the hook of this teaching for nearly 2000 years.

Jesus understands the difference between divine intention and human experience. He is fully aware that God’s original intention for creation is continually frustrated by human failure. In this light, he sees the Mosaic writ of divorce as a pastoral and compassionate response to the reality of human failure. What he is not prepared to accept is the ossification of the Mosaic writ into a cruel legalism that favored husbands over wives – and was indeed an expression of hardness of heart. Jesus moves the conversation away from the legalistic debate among men concerning the justifiable grounds for divorcing their wives, into a different conversation – one that recognizes the tension between human fallibility and God’s intention for marriage as a partnership of equals – a reflection of God’s love for us in creation which as in all other areas of human response is found wanting.

So today, in the Episcopal Church, where do we find our theology of marriage and divorce? After a long debate in the 20^th century, Anglican theology groped towards a position that seeks to hold in tension the original divine intention for marriage and the reality of human failure. In our tradition, the solution we arrived at after much soul searching is to reserve a right to remarriage in church after civil divorce to the bishop’s prerogative. In nearly all cases the decision of the bishop depends on the advice of the priest preparing the couple for remarriage.

In marriage preparation, Linda+ and I invite the divorced person (s) seeking remarriage to share their perception of the failure of a previous marriage. In their story, we listen for the echoes of sorrow. We hope to hear in their story a sense of loss – a loss of innocence – to hear the echo of the pain and disillusionment at finding failure where they had hoped for fulfillment and joy. It seems to me that no one who has been through a divorce emerges unscathed by the loss of their once innocent belief that when you make sacred promises everything should work out, and people should live happily thereafter.

Our question to the divorced person or persons is – in this process how has this experience of loss of innocence deepened your self-awareness to better equip you to have a more mature expectation of yourself to sustain your hopes for this new marriage relationship? This is a pastoral inquiry and on the strength of the response we request episcopal permission to remarry the couple into a new beginning. When the religious tradition prohibits divorce denying it as a potentially life-giving opportunity for new beginnings -the Church continues a legalistic-pharisaic hardness of heart that perpetuates trauma in family life – with historically speaking, women and children – the primary causalities.

As Anglican Christians in the Episcopal Church, we live in the tension where a fixed interpretation of Scripture and Tradition meets the changing reality of the lives we are actually living. This place of tension is where we expect to encounter God, meeting us not only in our successes but particularly in our failures. Into this tension – God comes looking for us.