“Divine Mysteries”,
Cassopolis/ White Pigeon, Oct. 18, 2015
Text: Psalm 104:1-24a; Job 38; Mark 10:34-45; Hebrews 5:1-10
Our first two readings today, Psalm 104 and Job 38, share subject matter—they are both
concerned with the creation—the being of our world and God’s action in bringing that being to life and
keeping it alive. But while they share that subject, they are vastly different. “”Bless the LORD, O my
soul” begins the psalm, an opening shout of joy which also begins the previous psalm, 103, a partner
with it. These psalms seem to belong together, and together they lift a song of praise for all God has
done in, around, and for us. Psalm 103 seems to focus on what God has done for people specifically—
God “forgives our iniquity, heals our diseases, redeems our lives, from the Pit—from death.” Psalm 104
then widens out the arena of praise to include the entire created world. Not only humankind, but all
kind—all the “manifold” creatures God has made owe Him joyful praise—and all for the same reason—
God has provided.
“God—You are very great!” the psalmist continues in Psalm 104 after the opening blessing. And
the way God has shown that greatness is by what He has done to care for the needs of earth’s various
inhabitants, the multitudinous creatures of God’s hand. From the very start when God “set the earth on
its foundations” and limited the waters so that “they might not again cover the earth,” God has been
making a home for us—all of the “us” of created life, human and animal. God has caused “grass to grow
for cattle, and plants for people to us,” has given the humans and the birds, the goats, the rock badgers or
coneys, all their own places for rest, and all their own times or work, nighttime for the lions and other
animals, daytime for the humans. Al of this has come to all from the LORD. As one commentator has
written of this psalm, “Psalm 104 does not acclaim creation, but Yahweh the Creator. [But] Yahweh
appears not primarily as all-powerful, but as all-merciful. Yahweh creates a happy world where even the
lion’s roar becomes a prayer.”
And indeed this is true—in Psalm 104 we hear about the greatness of God in terms of wonder—
wonder at God’s caring and God’s mercy. But it is a little different in Job 38. There we also hear about
God’s greatness shown in creation, but the words have another tone. In Job 38, the reader is not led as
much to consider God’s care and love. Although these are not denied, neither are they the focus. Rather
in Job 38 we hear about God’s power and God’s command and control—how the divine creation is kept
in motion by God’s authority. And as we read—as Job hears—what grows in us is not so much as sense
of wonder at God’s love as one of awe—awe at the great mystery of creation, a mystery well beyond our
understanding, and comprehensible only to God alone who made it.
It is indeed a challenge to hear and understand—or at least try to—that opens our reading from
Job. “Brace yourself like a man—I will question you and you shall answer me!” God calls out from a
whirlwind. And from there God launches into a whirlwind-like description of the creation, not as we
might see it, but as God sees it, a confusion of images which the human mind has not the speed, scope,
or power to decipher. The psalmist talks about creation on its surface—in Job, God plunges below the
surface to the places humans are not privileged to go, but in which all the wheels of creation are
constantly turning.
Like the psalmist, God in Job 38 begins His account with the world’s foundation, but again the
tone is very different. The psalmist merely states what he takes as fact—God laid those foundations. In
Job, God throws out a question in which is lodged a challenge—“Where were you when I made the
world? Who ran the measuring line across the universe for Me, and who among you helped Me set its
cornerstone in place?” I can look at a building and admire it. But I have no ability to build it—I don’t
have the skill to take an empty plot of ground and create in it a great work of architecture. So it is with
us and God—we can admire the universe—we can appreciate its grandeur. But can only stare in awe
when we try to begin to fathom its understructures—the way it has arisen without our participation and
without our understanding.
God proceeds from there to take Job and the reader on a walking—or whirling—tour of reality.
One after another the images and questions come—“Where were you when…? Do you know where…?
Can you command or control the …?” And to every question our answer must be ultimately “No.” The
universe—the reality of creation is a divine mystery beyond our mastery and our understanding.
But here the twenty–first century reader may well protest—“Wait a minute! That all might have
been true in the fourth century BC or the first century AD—maybe even in the first five or six centuries
AD. But it isn’t now. Our science has come a long way. We do understand a great deal about the
universe—we can travel through it, and clone life, and heal disease. We know a lot about our world.”
And so we do. While much of the truth of reality is still mysterious to us, we have made remarkable
headway in understanding and controlling it. And even that, says God in Job, is a mystery. Why is it that
we have the talent—the ability—to learn—to think—to discover? “Who endowed the heart with
wisdom?” God asks—“Who gave understanding to the mind?” Even in what we have been able to come
to know about the creation, there is mystery—how do we know—how do we fathom?
But perhaps the bigger part of that mysterious question is not so much how, but why? Why do
we strive to learn? Why do we try so hard, desire so much, to know and to master the mysteries of our
world? And the answer—biblically, at least—is because that’s what God wants us to do—what God
made us to do. From the book of Genesis—“Let us make human kind in our image, according to our
likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air—over the cattle and
the wild animals of the earth—over all that has been made.” So it is that God tells Job, “Brace yourself
and stand up like a man and prepare to listen,” not to drive Job into the ground, but to ready him—to
prepare to be what God had made him to be—an active participant in the divine mystery of creation, not
a bystander, striving to know it better, to understand it better, and by so doing to get to know its Creator
better. God wrestles with Job here much as God wrestled with Jacob in Genesis, challenging him. And
so does God continue to wrestle with all of us, all of humanity, not to diminish us, but to make us
grow—to mature more into the mysterious divine image and responsibility we were made from the start
to wear. But this leads us to a second mystery, one exemplified in our reading from Mark today—if
humans have always been made to wear a divine image, why do we so often fail to do so?
This is the mystery of human failure—of sin—of, as Calvin would later put it, human depravity.
Humans were made to be like God. The disciples were called to be like Jesus So why is it in the gospel
stories that they seem so often to miss what Jesus says to them—an example for all of us and a question
that often baffles—how can we know, in our heart of hearts, in our deepest being, what is right—what is
good—and then ignore it.
In Mark, Jesus has just finished, for a third time, telling His followers what will happen to Him
in Jerusalem—“the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will
condemn Him to death. They will hand Him over to the Gentiles who will mock Him and spit upon Him
and flog Him and kill Him. And after three days, He will rise again.” If James and John, two brothers in
Jesus’ cohort, hear any of this, it is apparently only the last few words. For only that can explain why
they come to Jesus asking what they do—and the audacious way they ask it—“Jesus, we want You to
give us whatever we ask.” I can only imagine Jesus’ facial expression when he hears this bold demand.
But He mildly answers them, “And what may that be that you want me to do for you?” And they tell
Him—“When You come in Your glory—when You take over the world—we want to have the positions
of honor sitting at Your right and left hand up on the stage.” Probably wondering how much of what He
has just said they had managed to miss, Jesus asks them if they feel ready to do what is necessary to sit
in those seats—to “drink His cup and undergo His baptism”—to take on His suffering and sacrifice. And
having no idea what He’s talking about, they answer “Sure we are.” But Jesus still has to disappoint
them. “Sorry guys,” He answers, “but that seating place isn’t Mine to grant—that privilege belongs to
the Father.”
But even though James and John are denied the assurance that they will get the best seats in the
house, the other disciples get quite irritated to hear what John and James have requested, no doubt
because it was so inappropriate to request such a thing, right? No—probably that is not the others’ gripe.
More likely the other ten get mad because they all wanted the same thing, the same place of honor, and
James and John just beat them to the punch. Just like the two brothers, all of Jesus’ followers had missed
out on the meaning in His words—have failed to get His purpose—to give Himself or the good of
others—to give up His rights and privileges for the good of the world. So Jesus takes another moment to
try and bring them up to speed. “The great ones among the Gentiles sit on top of other people,” He says.
“They play the king, the tyrant, the one in control. But if you want to be great like Me—if you want to
be like Me, looking the image of God, then you have to be ready to give yourself. Whoever wants to be
great among you must be slave of all and whoever wants to be first among you must be ready to take last
place. For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give Himself as a ransom for
many.”
And here we come face to face with a baffler—a mystery for humanity. How can we possibly
come to want this—to think that this is a good thing? It sounds like a prediction of death, not a recipe for
abundant life. We want to be in control—we want to be on top—and why shouldn’t we be—just because
Jesus says so? And yet we know, somehow, that this is where the good of the world lies—we know,
somehow, as much as it goes against our grain, that this is where our good lies as well—indeed, our
best. And yet, we fight it. So how do we come to point of accepting it for our selves, with minds and
hearts that rebel against such humility? Like Paul as he writes in Romans, we would have to agree, “In
my mind, I want to do what is right—what I know is good. I can will what is good—but I cannot do it! I
cannot do the good I want, but end up doing the evil things that disgust me. Wretched man that I am—
who will save me from this body of death?”
This was a mystery for Paul, and it still is for us—that even when we know what is right—even
when we know what is good—what Jesus would do—we so often end up doing something else. It was a
mystery for Calvin who noted in his writing that all of our best intentions are tainted—even the good we
try to do is touched and deformed by sin, and pride, and self-interest, and we seem not to be able to do
anything about it, crying out with Paul, “Who can save us from doing what we do not want to do?” And
this leads us to the greatest of all divine mysteries, the one in which all other find their answer—the
mystery of the Incarnation—that God came in the flesh.
Humans have always had the problem and mystery of sin to plague them, as well as the
correlated problem of separation from God that sin brings about. And from the earliest times God has
provided ways to repair the breach that sins cause. For ancient Israel, that meant the sacrificial system
administered by the priests at the Temple. When a man or woman had gone against God’s will by the
weakness inherent in human temperament, a sacrifice of a bull or cow or lamb or bird was offered up,
representing the desire and willingness of the person to repent and re-give themselves to God’s way . So
it was for the whole nation of Israel. One day a year the High Priest, the chief representative of God to
Israel, would be permitted to the enter the Holy of Holies, the center core of the tabernacle or Temple,
and there offer up a sacrifice for all the people together.
This system enabled the people, individually and collectively, to have the divine relationship
mended when their actions had broken it. But it had its limitations. It had to be done over again and
again, for people sinned over and over and each time, a new sacrifice had to be made. Even the high
priest himself sinned so that before he could make any sacrifice for the nation’s sin, he had to make it
for himself. But then finally in what the New Testament writers call the fullness of God’s time, God
made a move that was the most mysterious He or anyone else had ever made—the divine being entered
into all of the mess of human life.
Human life is messy—that is an understatement—human life, despite its joy and its promise, can
also be tragic and painful and hurtful and dreadfully chaotic. This was, however, a human problem—one
thing was very clear to everybody—divinity was above all that. God could not be hurt—God could not
be humiliated or limited and God could certainly not be killed. And yet, in that fullness of time, God
decided to do all of that—to bring the unthinkable into existence. In Jesus the Christ God the Son, the
very being of God, entered the human whirlwind and there He suffered. There He came under imitation
and experienced humiliation—there He died. And in so doing, says the writer of Hebrews, He became
perfect—not perfect as divinity—He was already that. But He became through all of that perfect for us
as humanity—a perfect prefect sacrifice, a perfect model, a perfect Intercessor, and one—the only
One—perfectly able to carry us with Him, despite our sin, to what was our best and most abundant
end—He became the “source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him,” believing, against all logic, that
in Jesus Christ God has acted to make the old creation a new one—to make us new creations.
This is a mystery—the most glorious mystery of all in a faith full of them. It is, as twentieth
century theologian, Paul Tillich called it, a paradox in a faith full of paradoxes, things which, though
they should not logically be, still exist and determine existence. It is a paradox that all things came to
being out of nothing, and equally a paradox that creation was entrusted into human hands, even when we
did not fully understand what that meant. It is a paradox that while God made us to serve Him and be
with Him, He also made us with the freedom to turn our backs on Him if we were that foolish. And it is
a paradox that we were that foolish, willing to throw away the glory of being made in the image of God,
co-workers with God, accepting instead the futility of trying to live on our own as frail gods. And it is a
paradox that even when we know this to be true, we still sin.
But the ultimate paradox according to Tillich—the most amazing mystery—is that to save us
from that futility, to save all of creation from a futility we brought upon it, God came to us in human
flesh. What was immortal became mortal—what was all-powerful came became limited and
vulnerable—what could not die suffered death. But on suffering death, He defeated death. And so came
to be another paradox—that we could become more than we were born as—we who were children of
death could instead become true children of God, immortality rising out of tragically limited mortality.
This is a mystery that should awe us—it is a mystery that might indeed sometimes confuse us. And yet it
is a mystery that shows us all of God’s full love and care. It is a divine mystery that makes, and remakes, and re-makes us again—and will finally save us, and not just us, but everything. +++