“Will We Love God for Nothing?”

Terry Quinn 06/10/2024

Readings - The book of Job

Earlier this week after a first coffee of the day and as I settled down for a morning prayer, the first thing I read as an introduction to the psalm before me were the words:

Surrender to God and he will do everything for you.

One could turn this statement around and ask:

Will we love God for nothing?

You must know, dear friends, what a gift you give me when you ask me to occasionally lead your Weekly Worship Service. I was in a crowded suburban train once crossing the Sydney Harbour bridge, I was standing inside the closed doors next to a young mother holding a small crying child, a little upset by the crowd around us. We were both looking down onto the harbour beneath us as a beautiful ocean liner was passing. Trying to distract the child, the mother pointed to the liner asking the child to see it. All the child did was to look at the glass window on the train door, and cry.

When I come here to take a service I want to point to someting important about faith (and hope and love). The lectionary readings are always my starting point. I want to point to Christ. Simone Weil say if we want to see Christ we must be looking in the right direction.

I begin to think and pray about what I’m going to say to you weeks beforehand and I wait to discover what I want to say. Before I am with you again I want to receive the ‘gift of speech’. And I want to get out of the way, to ‘underwhelm’ you. I have come to see the biblical writings, full of more questions than answers, as an endless Exodus through the wilderness, from unthinking servitude and the cultural confinements we breathe in every day, towards ... what? Escape? Exodus? Through wilderness? Yes, I think so, desert country is not far from our Perth. But towards what? Albert Einstein said,

‘Don’t listen to those who have answers, listen to those who have questions.’

I think I get the point but is that not a question?

And so I see my presence with you as a working out of our faith together. There’s always a proces for this and it originates through some sort of hope or prayer and pretty certainly through pain and loss. The process seems to include coming to believe something, accepting it, embracing it and finally living it out. Jesus said, ‘My Father has never ceased working and I too must be at work’ (Jn 5 17).

So we can say that even God started with axioms and bedrock ideas, because, even before creating the billions of galaxies, God chose us out in Christ. Consider Ephesians 1: 4 for example,

‘Long before God laid down earth’s foundations, God had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love’.

If God has his own set of starting points like this and continues to work on them, so we too could be fruitfully at work. Maybe we could accept that the grace of God is built on our shakey nature and come to realise that much is up to us as well to what we make of the world, to what we make of ourselves.

The first reading today is from the Book of Job. I’d like to consider a few things about this book. In 1981 Henry Reynolds who profoundly changed the way we understand Australian, told the story of Richard Windeyer who in 1842 participated in a long debate about Aboriginal people in the Australian colonies. Windeyer spoke for the negative side: blacks had no right to land, no rights even to the kangaroos. And yet, in the midst of this denunciation he questioned himself,

‘How is it that our minds are not satisfied? What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts? (p.21 1998 This whispering in Our Hearts. 1998, p 21.)

There’s a little caption which says, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience and shouts to us in our pain.

Now permit me to speak of Job. Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian theologian, one of the founders of Liberation Theology has said that the West does not have a theology of the evil of misfortune, the evil suffered by the innocent. And therein lies, he said, the basic importance of the theology of liberation because it takes into account the widespread evil that entails no fault to the sufferer.

The suffering of the innocent provokes them to ask, where is peace, security, justice, joy and life? The suffering of the innocent is the centre of the world at this time - October 7 2023 and its fruits. And I dont think it’s a coincidence to recognise in our Christian faith that that is precisely where the crucified Jesus dwells - at the centre of the world.

The innocence that Job fiercely claims for himself helps us to take-in the innocence of people in a situation of crushing suffering and death - all forced upon them. In these circumstance how are we to think of God? How are we to talk to God? The Book of Job stares down in confrontation at impossible themes: evil, misery, bitterness, retribution, friendship and the transcendence of God. There are no facile answers here. Job’s friends sit down with him among the ashes. ‘No one spoke a word to him ‘for they saw that his suffering was very great’ (Job 2.13). After seven days they argue the standard, orthodox ‘wisdom’ answers. Here is where the poetry in the Book of Job commences and goes on for forty chapters. As Rainer Maria Rilke has said, ‘We are all poets living in the twilight’. We all get lyrical with pain. Look at the pop songs, Country and Westerns, the Blues.

Eliphaz says that the fault for human suffering is with the people themselves. Bildad says the fault is not with God. Zophar sees Job as kind of guilty but he gets more punishment than he deserves. As Job dismisses these arguments and declares his innocence, his friends become more critical of Job. His suffering must be rooted in guilt. There is a fourth figure, named Eliahu, who enters and blames both Job and his friends. The final arguments in the book criticises the friends and favours Job. God enters the argument and says, after 42 chapters,

‘You have not spoken of me what is right, as Job has’ (Job 42.7).

Job’s friends do not speak to God. Their relation to God is through conventional wisdom. But Job speaks to God and he is tough with him. After all he is innocent even before God. The book comes to the conclusion that humanity and God can stand before each other. The lesson is that language does not make all things clear. There is misery in life and mystery too. Job’s adherence to this ‘God of mystery’ is not dependent on his success or good fortune or even his health.

The book draws to an end with Job and God in dialogue. Maybe not a dialogue but a dialectic. It’s not just an exchange of opinions but a deliberation on the truth of opinions. Job finally listens to a long talking-to by God, Ch 38,1ff.

‘Then from the midst of the whirlwind God gave Job his answer’ ... ‘God you challenged, God you must refute’ (Job 39.32).

And Job says,

‘So vain a pleader, I have no suit to make, finger on lip I will listen’ ... ‘once again I have spoken the word I would unsay, more I dare not’ (Ch 39,33-35).

Here is Job’s growth in insight and perception in the light of all before. Here is one of the most deeply human and appealing encounter between a human being and the uncreated mystery of a personal God. What has job perceived? What has actually lifted him out of clinging to bitterness? We might have knowledge of the experts. Knowledge and even justice does not have the final say as to how we are to speak with God. God’s love is not transactional, it doesn’t operate in a world of cause and effect. God comes to us out of divine freedom and gratuity. We live by faith, we live by constant divine ‘god-sends’. Gutierrez says that to speak like this is ‘the prophetic way of speaking’, namely to situate God’s justice in the framework of God’s gratuitous love. No one has ever seen God says John’s Gospel, and yet the human experience of God is the only answer that remains standing, the only answer that lasts, the only ultimate answer for the suffering of human life.