Ohhhhhhhhhhhh
Scripture: Job 38:1–11 & Mark 4:35–41
For many reasons, I would have made a lousy disciple, one of which is that I’m not fond of being in the water. When Jesus said, “Hey, let’s cross this lake that is hundreds of feet below sea level and thus subject to downdrafts and sudden storms,” I would not have been an enthusiastic participant. I probably would have tried to proactively skip the boat ride by giving voice to what the disciples might have been thinking. “Are we sure it’s worth your time to visit the gentiles? They’ve not exactly been receptive to God’s message in the past. How about we stay on this side of the lake?”
That was not part of the plan, however, and the disciples soon found themselves in a storm so severe that even the fishermen among them became concerned. They awoke Jesus, asking “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
In response, Jesus first addresses the wind and sea, and the weather calms as a result. Then he turns his attention to the disciples. “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” This is not a direct response to their question. They were focused on the incident at hand; Jesus had the long view in mind. Yes, he was perhaps short with them, but that probably stemmed from disappointment. Hadn’t these same disciples seen him cast out demons and heal people of diseases? Hadn’t they heard his teachings about the Kingdom of God?
Regardless, they were left in awe, recognizing that even the wind and sea obeyed Jesus. And at some point, they also came to recognize that extending the message of Jesus to the undesirables across the lake was part of God’s plan. As biblical scholar Raquel Lettsome writes, “Mark shows his readers that this ministerial direction is by divine proclamation and under divine protection.”
Jesus-followers are called to trust, to take the long view, to not be fearful. I don’t know about you, but I’m not always good at those things. In my heart I know God has plans to prosper us in a hopeful future, but it’s easy to be distracted from that. Bad news and despair are often around the corner, as our always-on culture is quick to remind us. Our televisions, radios, smartphones, and computer screens are filled with sources of anxiety, fear, and anger. They present us with false dichotomies in an effort to sort us into us’s and them’s, oversimplifying complex issues and encouraging quick identification and demonization of the them’s.
They’re also quick to remind us of the version of prosperity that will help alleviate the distress caused by anxiety, fear, and anger. Those things often just happen to be sold by the sponsors of the feeds that caused our distress in the first place! As a result, our culture is at risk of becoming a self-licking ice cream cone.
When I think about the prosperity that God promises, I don’t think it’s the prosperity often held up as the ideal in our culture. I think of the latter as “Disney prosperity.” Now, I’m not here to slam Disney. I grew up immersed in Star Wars and Marvel comics, and many of the Pixar movies are among my daughter’s favorites. We’ve even been to Disney World together a couple times, and seeing the evening light displays at Epcot or Animal Kingdom can be a magical experience.
But think about what all goes into making a Disney trip happen. There’s the plane flight or long drive to Orlando. There’s the transportation to your overpriced, cramped lodging. The food. The logistics. The park tickets. The lines. The planning to get to the right place at the right time to ensure your children have happy memories of your visit.
Then there are the hours worked to be able to afford all of the aforementioned.
Toward the end of our last trip to the Magic Kingdom, we had just seen the fireworks over the castle, and we were exiting the park shoulder-to-shoulder with multitudes of other parkgoers. As we navigated that stormy sea of exhausted parents and strung-out children, I looked over at my friend and fellow father Mike and said, “You know what I like? The woods.”
At that moment in my mind, the prosperity of the woods — a gift freely given, in which the intricacy, majesty, and diversity of God’s creation is on display — stood in sharp contrast to the contrived facades of Main Street USA and its high cost of entry. Plus, it’s much less crowded.
I don’t mean to create a false dichotomy of my own here. You can spend meaningful time on a hiking trail and enjoy some escapism with Disney+ on the same day. My point is that it’s easy to be sucked into the pursuit of Disney prosperity at the expense of enjoying a simpler form of prosperity found in rest, relationships, and nature. An always-on, high-urgency pace might help us find answers to our most immediate questions, but wisdom that leads to trust in God often develops more slowly. And with that, we’ll move from the fast-paced book of Mark to the story of Job.
Despite our best efforts to withdraw from negative influences and to follow Jesus faithfully, there will always be things that extinguish our hope and deny our anticipated futures. That’s what’s happened to our faith ancestor Job, who has some valid questions for his creator despite the well-intended explanations provided by his friends.
And, as with Jesus in the passage from Mark, we see God respond to Job and his friends with questions. “Where were you when I created the earth? Who decided its measurements and set its capstone? Who harnessed the unstoppable force of the sea?” Many other questions follow, with God seeking feedback from Job on the laws of nature and how they might be improved. Ultimately, just as God did not provide direct answers to Job’s questions, Job had no direct answers in response to God’s questions.
Sometimes, questions are better responses than answers. God’s responses to Job demonstrate that God is God and we are not. We are no more capable of understanding the laws of nature than we are of creating a planet from nothing or controlling the seas.
If you continue reading God’s responses to Job and his friends, you’ll find that God’s concerns extend beyond humanity. God asks if Job has entered the storehouses of the snow or arranged the stars, but also mentions lions and ravens. So not only are we not God, we as a species are also not the center of the universe.
But! We have covenants with the God who created that universe. We know God hears our prayers, and that the creation we inhabit is good. We also know, thanks to Proverbs 8, that Wisdom was brought about at the beginning of God’s work, even before the earth was created. God found her delightful, and she rejoiced in the inhabited world and the human race.
One of the many requirements the Presbyterian church has for those seeking ordination is passing a written exam on Reformed Theology. When I took that exam, I was expecting questions dealing with topics like salvation, scriptural authority, and infant baptism. Those are all topics on which there is a reasonable consensus among those from the Reformed tradition. Indeed two of the questions were along those lines; however, the one that caught off-guard those who sat for the exam was this: “Write an essay discussing a Reformed understanding of wisdom.” This was a very difficult question to answer in 1,200 words on a timed exam, in part because it’s a very broad concept and in part because there is no Reformed consensus on what wisdom is.
Along with Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon, Job is one of the books of wisdom. These aren’t books in which you find direct or even consistent answers to life’s big questions, but they do serve a purpose. As biblical scholar Alissa Jones Nelson writes, “Wisdom literature teaches that readers can . . . confront God in the world around them. In Wisdom literature, knowledge is a function of relationship and trust; hence Job’s relationship with YHWH takes primacy over his ability to answer the questions YHWH poses in these speeches.” Our minds might not be able to fully conceive of our purpose individually or as a species, but we can take comfort that we have one, and that the Mother of Wisdom rejoices in us.
Sometimes our boats are struck by storms that proceed uncalmed. I was witness to some of those during my work as a chaplain, where I spent time with many facing pain, tragedy, and loss. One of challenges I encountered in my work was exercising restraint in offering reassurance. Simplistic lines like “Everything happens for a reason” only add to the pain of those who are suffering, and could serve as a summary of everything Job’s friends said in chapters 4 through 25.
Indeed, before Job’s fortunes are restored, God chews out Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar for their shoddy explanations for Job’s predicament. But I think there’s something to be learned from those three. When they found out about Job’s troubles, they met at his home to console and comfort him. They wept, they tore their robes, they sat with him for seven days and nights . . . and no one spoke a word to him. It wasn’t until they began explaining things that God’s wrath was kindled against them.
Job’s story also serves as a counter to the prosperity gospel that you’ll find shared on some television programs and big box store shelves in the “Religion” section. The prosperity gospel suggests that if we live a good life, we’ll be rewarded with an earthly or — as I put it earlier — a Disney prosperity. Money will find its way to us, affording us larger houses, fancier cars, more exotic vacations, and extra FastPasses. On the contrary, I know too many faithful Jesus-followers whose children died young to give those ideas consideration. The promotion of such flawed theology serves only to enrich those who preach it, and ignores the lessons of not only Job, but the gospel of Jesus Christ as well.
God the Creator set the oceans in place and reminds us of the rhythm of nature with the daily tides. Jesus, who along with the Mother of Wisdom was there when the earth was set on its axis, spoke order to the stormy seas. Those are not things we can do, but wisdom tells us we should trust our God, who can. What we can do is recognize that being a part of the Kingdom of God is its own reward and a foretaste of what’s to come.
Speaking of that, it seems to me that we Jesus followers spend too little time discussing what it will be like when we follow Christ into God’s new creation. To fill that vacuum, culture often depicts heaven as being inhabited by winged angels with harps dancing on clouds, which to me looks kind of boring. There are some clues about the afterlife in scripture, including the teachings of Jesus about the kin-dom of God. I like to imagine what the reconciliation God promises will be like, and I look forward to again seeing my loved ones who have gone before.
Along with that, I think God will make clear to us the answers our little human brains are not capable of conceiving during this life. And when that happens, when all the challenging questions we’ve accumulated during our lifetimes are finally answered, I think each of us will have the same reaction:
Ohhhhhhhhhhhh.
I look forward to seeing you all there. Thanks be to God.
Amen.
References
Berlin, Adele and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds. The Jewish Study Bible: Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible: Third Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018, Kindle.
Lettsome, Raquel S. “Mark,” in Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha. Edited by Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page, Jr., and Matthew J. M. Coomber. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014, Kindle.
Nelson, Alissa Jones. “Job,” in Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha. Edited by Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page, Jr., and Matthew J. M. Coomber. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014, Kindle.
Newsom, Carol A. “Job,” in New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume III. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015.
Perkins, Pheme. “Mark,” in New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume VII. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015.
Pulpit Fiction, “Proper 7B (OT 12),” https://www.pulpitfiction.com/notes/proper7b.
