The Mystery of Love

“The Mystery of Love”

Matthew 27:15-23

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

February 24, 2008

Lent 3

Even though most of us, if asked if we think that life is fair, would say no, most of us nevertheless are taken aback by our answer. From the time when as children our brother or sister got a bigger piece of the cake for dessert and we cried “no fair” to our adult outrage that bad people seem to prosper while good folks struggle along with all kinds of obstacles, we yet remain incredulous that fairness is not the oxygen of the universe. Ogden Nash put it this way, “It is bad enough that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, but it really is galling that the unjust have all the umbrellas.”

Perhaps our concept of fairness is really about control. We like to be in charge of our lives; we want to know what we have to do to be happy and secure; we yearn for life to be predictable. If life was fair, we could control our destinies. Doing good would result in a good life; doing bad would result in a bad life. That would be fair. But Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan doesn’t mince words when he says that “expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian.” One of the low points of my ministry was the day a young woman insisted that I was wrong about the universality of God’s grace and told me that “she needed to know that bad people go to hell and that good people go to heaven, or else why should she bother trying to be good?” Bad theology aside, the self-confidence and self-righteousness of people who are zealous after such a system of rewards and punishments fairly administered never fails to astonish me.

The Book of Job is neck-deep in this question of whether or not life is fair. You remember the story. Job is a blameless and upright man who loves God, lives justly, and for whom life is very good. But, the story employs a, the Hebrew word is “ha satan” – a kind of devil’s advocate - who tells God that Job is faithful and devoted only because his life is rich and prosperous. All his needs are supplied; he has a wonderful family; he is greatly contented. Take it away, the ha satan says, and Job’s devotion to God will slip away as well.

Remember that the Book of Job is a story, not history. So, in the story, God agrees to the ha satan’s challenge, granting him power over Job’s possessions and circumstances, but not over Job’s actual, physical life. A series of catastrophes commences at the behest of the ha satan. Job’s servants, his crops, his buildings and barns, and, finally, even his children, are destroyed.

Three of Job’s friends arrive and find Job sitting on an ash heap and they join him there, though, the story says, “no one spoke a word to Job, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” Let me insert a pastoral aside here. Sitting in silence with a suffering friend is much to be preferred to rushing in with inane and ill-advised consolations like, “It is God’s will.” Or “there is a reason for what has happened.” Or “it will be all right.” There are some things that never will be all right and some things that, if God wills them, makes God an ogre and a monster.

The problem is that Job’s friends can only sit mute for a minute time before they try to fix Job’s situation by fixing Job. They obviously believed that life is fair because they told Job that he had it coming, his run of disasters. Eliphaz croons that Job has done something wrong and therefore his suffering is justified. Bildad asserts that Job needs to repent - to clean up his act, to straighten up and fly right - and then everything will get better. Zophar piles on and tells Job that his suffering stems from his duplicity and that he needs to recover a heart that is pure and focused and zealous for God.

It is easy for us from our vantage point to roll our eyes at Job’s friends but they represent a great multitude of people who need to believe that there is an answer for every question, a reason for every circumstance, an explanation for every event, and a meaning in all suffering. They want to believe that life essentially is fair because it is only if life is fair that life can be controlled and managed, thus allowing them to take refuge in the illusion of security.

But life is not fair and not every question under the sun has an answer and not every tragedy has meaning behind it. Job, for instance, could find no meaning or life lesson commensurate with or worth the death of his children.

Here is a Lenten discipline I want to commend to you. Lenten tradition through the years often has asked us to give something up. So, let us give up the temptation to latch on too early to answers that lessen our struggle with the big questions of life. Let us give up the temptation to cling too readily to answers that will simply anesthetize us against our pain. Let us give up the temptation to latch on too early to answers that will keep us in the same intellectual box we’ve always been in because that box will become a spiritual coffin. I love what Karl Barth, one of the last century’s greatest theologians, once said. Barth was a prolific writer. His series of volumes called Church Dogmatics span the width of this pulpit. And yet, he said, “We are always beginners with God.”

Real religion, honest religion is not about answers but about the dignity of the struggle that we know this life to be, the permission to ask and live our questions, and the faith that entrusts our lives to the God in whom we live and move and have our being - no matter what. That is what Job was doing when he said, “And though this body be destroyed, yet I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.” It is what Jesus was doing when he said from the cross on which he unfairly hung, as even Pilate in our scripture today concurred, “To you, O God, do I commit my spirit.”

I want to tell you of my own “Job” and “Jesus” experience. It was in the fall of 2001 and Katy was hospitalized in Vermont . I left home early on a Friday morning to go and spend an overnight with her, this young woman who had known hardly a day of fairness in her whole life. It also was in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Towers when so many innocent lives had ended so unfairly. On Saturday evening, as I was thinking about all of this, about how unfair life often is, as I turned off of Route 60 to wend my way home through the back roads toward Jamestown, there it was right before my eyes…the earth in its full autumnal glory. One of my favorite writers (Robert Farrar Capon) likens autumn to heaven and it was so this particular evening with all of the colored trees, the sun shining slant across the fields as it started to set, a flock of Canada geese honking overhead. I pulled to the side of the road, got out of my car, walked a little way into the field, looked around again at all the beauty, and exclaimed, “My God! My God!” I think it was the deepest prayer I ever prayed and though it did not make the pain of all the unfairness all right, I knew that the Reality on which I was touching was somehow larger than all the unfairness, and for the first time in a long, long time, I could breathe again.

Life is not fair because we do not have a God who pulls our strings or directs our lives or intervenes in them to make it so. Life is not fair because God has made it with something far greater in mind, something far more satisfying, something far more profound and divine and eternal. All I know to call it is “the Mystery of Love” and it is enough. It is more than enough.

Amen.

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