Opening our hearts

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 22, October 6, 2024: Job 1:1; 2:1-10;
Psalm 26; Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16

There are weeks when I wonder what the people who organized our lectionary were thinking, and this is certainly one of them. We start with Job, who will be our companion for the rest of October. This is the beginning of the story, a fable: Once a upon a time, there was a man in the land of Uz. In the section we skipped, we learn that Job was a wealthy man. He had seven sons and three daughters, and “seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and very many servants”. One day the “heavenly beings” presented themselves to God, and with them was one called the “Accuser”, also called Satan. His exchange with God is similar to the one we read today: God touts how faithful Job is, the Accuser says, well, sure, he hasn’t suffered, it’s easy to be faithful when things go well. So God gives the Accuser power, but says he can’t physically touch Job.

So suddenly one day, a string of disasters lead to the death of all Job’s livestock, and the death of all his children. Job’s response is to tear his robe, shave his head, and fall on the ground, saying, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

And then comes the passage we have here. The Accuser suggests to God that Job can still pray because he hasn’t physically suffered, so we get the sores all over his body. And still he does not curse God.

Job is the story we use to talk about the problem of undeserved suffering, if any suffering is ever deserved. Why, in the words of Rabbi Harold Kushner, do “bad things happen to good people”? Kushner points out that we have two choices: we can think of God as a master manipulator who decides who suffers and who doesn’t, or we can think of God as an observer who will accompany us. I can’t imagine a God who spends their time micromanaging the world, so like most Episcopalians, I choose to think of God as one who observes and accompanies us.

This week I read an interview with Munther Isaac, the pastor of a Lutheran church in Bethlehem.* While the West Bank has seen less violence than Gaza, attacks on Palestinians there have grown. When he was asked about hope, he said he didn’t think about hope right now: “We are just trying to survive and live day by day”. And then he said this: “We pray for deliverance, but the Bible doesn’t promise deliverance. It promises that God will be with us.” It is good to remember the difference..

If Job draws our attention to the problem of suffering, Mark draws our attention to the challenges of faithfulness. Here we have Jesus on divorce, in a passage that has often been weaponized against people, whether those who are divorced, or gay and lesbian Christians. If Job is about suffering, this passage has caused suffering.

But it helps to see it in context: the Pharisees set Jesus up with a question: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife”. They want to trip him, to show that he is not faithful to the law. Jesus does his usual thing, of asking them a question in response: What did Moses say? Moses allowed men to get a certificate of divorce and divorce their wives. Jesus then says, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.” Instead, he suggests the spirit of the law is different. He then speaks of the way marriage joins two people together, becoming one, and says “what God has joined together let no one separate”. These are the words we use in the wedding service, words that affirm marriage as a sacred institution.

That’s all well and good, but then Jesus suggests that those who remarry after divorce are committing adultery. This is the logical consequence of his teaching on marriage. And yet, I don’t think we should read it literally. On a certain level, a second marriage is a betrayal of the promises made in the first. But Jesus recognizes that humans sometimes suffer from “hardness of heart”. Divorce represents a failure of the hope and promises which people bring into a marriage. That is true, and we should not pretend otherwise, however right in other ways a divorce might be. We are, Jesus said, people of hard hearts. Yet this is not meant to exclude or punish those who divorce and remarry: we have hope, after all, that our hearts can open. At the center of Jesus’ ministry is a message of love and radical inclusion. We can acknowledge failure and move forward in hope.

And Jesus follows this with an opening, welcoming the children who have pressed around him. He invites the people around him to come to God not as sophisticated adults, but as children, with open hearts. Children approach the world with wonder and excitement. We can try to do so too.

Somehow, covered with sores, Job still praises God. Like a child, his heart is open. Following Jesus requires us to try to soften our hearts, to open them to the love around us. And to remember that while we may not be spared suffering, God is with us.

* “Palestinian and Christian in a Violent Time“, Interview by Elizabeth Palmer. The Christian Century, October 2024, 48-53.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *