19th Sunday after Pentecost
Sermon 10.11.09
Scripture:
Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Mark 10:17-31
Robert Wright has written a book entitled, The Evolution of God, which Paul Bloom reviewed
for the New York Times a few weeks ago in an article entitled, “No Smiting.” In this book,
according to the review, Mr. Wright tells the story of how God grew up, how God mellowed. To
paraphrase his journey, he starts with the deities of hunter-gatherer tribes and moves to those of
chiefdoms and nations. His next stop is the polytheism of the early Israelites and the monotheism
that followed. Then he examines the New Testament and the Koran, before finishing off with the
modern multinational Gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His overriding conclusion is that the
increasing goodness of God reflects the increasing goodness of our species.
God still has some growing up to do, according to Mr. Wright. In his discussion of
contemporary religious hatred, he argues that “much of the problem isn’t with religious texts or
teachings themselves, but with social conditions—the ‘facts on the ground’—that shape the sort of
God we create. ‘When people see themselves in zero-sum relationship with other people—see their
fortunes as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people, see the dynamic as win-lose—they
tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance or belligerence.’ The recipe for salvation, then, is to
arrange the world so that its people find themselves (and think of themselves as) interconnected:
‘When they see the relationship as non-zero-sum—see their fortunes as positively correlated, see the
potential for a win-win outcome—they’re more likely to find the tolerant and understanding side of
their scriptures.’ Change the world, and you change God.”
I’m not troubled by the idea that God has evolved. In fact, the readings this morning lend
themselves to this conclusion. The book of Job is one of the earliest stories in the Bible, historically
speaking. As you may know, it features Job, a righteous man who’s blessed with a loyal wife and
many children, healthy livestock and a healthy livelihood. What’s more, he’s righteous, offering even
burnt offerings and sin offerings on behalf of his children after they’ve had one of their frequent
feasts just in case any one of them sinned. Unfortunately, it’s this righteousness that attracts Satan’s
attention—Satan who was then considered a member of God’s court, whose name signifyed his
purpose, hasatan, meaning “accuser” or “adversary.” It was his job to test people for God’s sake, to
see whether a person’s righteousness was circumstantial or integral, to see whether a person’s faith
was fair-weather or steadfast. So, Satan noticed the righteous Job and asked God permission to put
him to the test—to see how much hardship it would take to make Job either betray himself and
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confess to sin that wasn’t his, or curse God and renounce the one who’d allowed him to suffer. And
so, God granted permission to Satan, asking only that he preserve Job’s life.
To be sure, this is an unsettling story. The poetry that expands on the prologue in which
God allows Job to lose everything and the epilogue in which God replaces all Job lost, including
replacement children following the deaths of his first seven, does little to mitigate the injustice that is
undeniably God’s doing. Even God’s own defense, though phrased in some of humankind’s most
beautiful poetry, is unsatisfying—it basically coming down to this: who are you to presume to take
issue with me? I who laid the foundation of the world, I who determined its measurements and who
shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, I who made the clouds its garment and
thick darkness its swaddling band and prescribed bounds for it and set bars and doors and said,
“Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped…” So God
demands of Job, “Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn
to know its place, so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out
of it?” It’s an unsettling story, moreover perhaps because it was a widespread one in the Ancient
Near East. With parallels from Mesopotamia dating back to the 1200 BCE and from Egypt’s 12th
dynasty which spanned the years 1900-1785, it’s possible this story is 4,000 years old. By contrast,
Genesis, though the first book in the Bible and concerning, among other things, the beginning of
time, dates to the 6th century, making Job 600-1300 years older than other early books.
And so we meet an early version of God in this book—the sort that Mr. Wright met in his
research. What’s different, however, from the description Mr. Wright lays out concerning this early
God, Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, as one who “had strong moral views,” the God of Job has no
justification for allowing Job to be so afflicted. The early God Mr. Wright meets is the one we find
in the prophetic text set aside for today—from Amos who warned the people Israel of the 8th
century BCE, “Seek the LORD and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire,
and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it. Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and
bring righteousness to the ground! …Because you trample on the poor and take from them levies
of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted
pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine.” But Job wasn’t so lucky as to have given
God cause for such dire consequence. Quite the contrary! And what’s worse still is that he is the
only one, including himself, his wife, his three friends, and his God, who insists on his innocence
even as he holds fast to his faith that God the powerful is also just.
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So, considering Mr. Wright’s thesis, Job is about 2,000 years ahead of his time. Remarkably,
his is a voice that speaks up out of the context of the book that’s supposed to contain it and
proclaims in one of the most awesome—for its being so anachronistic—confessions of faith: “I
know that my redeemer lives; and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has
been thus destroyed, then in flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall
behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!” God as revealed in the story has given him
little reason so to believe, and yet he does. Remarkable.
Jesus, I think, picks up where Job left off—holding fast to God, yet not as one whose justice
condemns but as one whose justice redeems. His interaction with this man who had many
possessions might be as unsettling to our hearing as Job’s situation with God. Jesus’ observation
that it’s so hard for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God might unsettle us. The
stated fact that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to
enter the kingdom of heaven might well scare us. We are, after all, seekers of the kingdom of
heaven, else why would we be here? Yet we also to varying degrees wealthy—wealthy people in the
wealthiest culture ever to inhabit the earth. We are rich—with treasure stored up on earth. To our
defense, this we have been taught is right; this we’ve been encouraged to do. Responsible people
earn and save; responsible people put something away for a rainy day. And now, this—that treasure
stored up on earth might be exclusive of treasure stored up in heaven. Here we’ve been adhering to
the Protestant work ethic inherited from ancestors. And now, this—that because of one
inheritance, we might be excluded from another, the inheritance that is the kingdom of heaven.
But Jesus isn’t so straightforward as that. I don’t say this to justify the wealth of our culture.
I certainly don’t say this to justify our collective tendency to consume far more than our fair share of
the earth’s resources, and often for mere comfort and convenience. Really, this cannot be justified;
nor can it be sustained. Yet, it’s also neither here nor there in this particular story. What is of
central importance is Jesus’ nuanced take on both the blunt request of the rich young man and of
the disciples a few moments later in his resistance to confining God to such a punishment-andreward way of relating with us. It isn’t as simple as our doing good and God giving us a prize, or
our doing bad and God withholding something good from us. It isn’t as simple as our obeying a
few commandments and so getting a reward at the end of it all, or our failing to obey these from our
youth and so getting cast out. And, really, this we already know. “Why do the wicked prosper?”
asks one of the oldest unanswered questions there is, recorded in the prophetic book of Jeremiah.
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“Why do those who are treacherous thrive?” So, we already know it isn’t as simple as each of us
getting our just desserts. Surprisingly, it’s simpler than this.
Nowhere else in the gospel narratives is Jesus remembered to have loved someone. “Yes,
Jesus loves me,” we sometimes sing in this enduring Sunday school song. “Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes,
Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.” But, you know, this isn’t true. The Bible says no such thing.
We might well imply it from the general gospel, and I happen to think it’s true that Jesus loves us.
But as for what the Bible says, Jesus loves this man in particular. Looking at this man, Jesus loved
him, and then said, “You lack one thing. Go, sell what you own, give the money to the poor, and
you will have treasure in heaven. Then, come and follow me.”
This love, I think, Jesus was looking to be mutual. His love for this man, followed as it was
by an invitation that the man love Jesus back, was something Jesus was apparently hoping would be
mutual. But it wasn’t. Instead, the man seems to have wished that his following the
commandments would be enough, that he could go on obeying God and loving his possessions, all
to the end of inheriting still one more treasure. But it doesn’t work that way. We can’t content
ourselves with merely obeying God; we are to love God, too. It’s true that this is a
commandment—that we love the Lord our God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind
and all our strength. But it’s also true that loving God has intrinsic worth: it is its own reward. To
love God is to love the things that abide which are the things of God—as Paul named them, faith,
hope and love. To love God is to love love and to live the life that truly is life. In sum, to love God
is to enter into the kingdom of heaven. To follow Christ, unencumbered by the things of this world,
is to enter the kingdom of heaven. And while it may be something of a comfort to hear that it
wasn’t this man’s many possessions per se that prevented him from entering heaven, it’s no less a
challenge to us to recognize that they did in his love of them keep him out. I think of a time after
prayer and before sleep when Tobias asked me, “If I pray to God for a new toy, will I get one?” I
said, “No. God doesn’t deal in toys.” “He gives love?” Toby asked. “Yes,” I said, hoping he
recognizes that, more than he wants a new toy, he wants love.
The intrinsic worth of the kingdom of heaven being at the heart of this encounter is
something Peter missed, evident in his pointing out, as if for praise and some promise of reward,
“Look, we have left everything and followed you.” This, of course, turns discipleship into one more
accomplishment, one more acquisition in this acquisitive world. But Jesus would once again resist
such expectation, saying as if to placate Peter, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or
brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good
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news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers
and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But,” he added with
typical—not to say aggravating—defiance of all expectations, “many who are first will be last, and
the last will be first.”
I don’t think we have anything to be ashamed of in that we worship a God who’s not so into
smiting. I don’t think there’s any shame in worshipping a God who’s revealed as more smitten with
us that wanting to smite us. Fair-weather faith, old hasatan might have called it: to believe in a God
who is just and merciful, who is love and life; to worship a God in whom there is no violence at all
and who desires our desire instead of our fear, all of which is to call us to such being as well. But,
then again hasatan is no longer considered one of God’s court. This adversarial spirit has fallen far in
the millennia that also saw God grow up. This spirit of accusation has been put in its place as
destructive of so much that God holds dear. These are still unsettled questions, to be sure, as well as
unsettling ones: was Satan doing God’s will when he tested Christ in the wilderness? was Judas
acting in God’s interest when he set Jesus up to be crucified? My answer to both these is no, that
neither were God’s good will nor God’s good intent, but that both were well within God’s wise
figuring would happen. And this itself is a new interpretation, which might come as no surprise. As
I said, I’m not troubled by the idea that God has evolved, though I don’t really agree with this.
What I believe is that we have evolved, pressed on by our story of crucifixion and resurrection by
which humanity’s violence was met with God’s peace. We have evolved in our ability to receive
revelation about this God whose goodness truly knows no bounds, impelled by a history that ever
pushes us to the horizons of the known world. We have evolved in our capacity to envision a God
whose power to redeem is without condition. Advancing in our understanding that nothing in the
creation can be separated out from the whole without doing violence to the whole, we have evolved
in our hope to live as children of a God whose life is unfettered by death, whose wisdom and love
are as wide as this universe that we’re only beginning to fathom, and in whose realm all are
reconciled to be made one.
Thanks be to God.
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