13 October 2024 Pentecost 21

Job 23.1-9; 23.16-17    Psalm 22.1-15    Hebrews 4.12-16    Mark 10.17-31

All of our readings this morning confront a belief we take for granted, and then turns it on its head.  Each wrestles with the old, inadequate gods, those of convention, of convenience, of common sense, and breaks through to a truer and richer concept of the divine.

Job is sitting in an ash heap, surrounded by his clueless friends who are lecturing him and now it is his turn to respond.  But he is indignant, each word raging within him.  Job desperately wants to confront God ‘face to face’.  And yet he is desperate to leave God’s sight.  Job is not a tame man seeking a tame God.  He is a God-haunted man running after the passion of his life, only to crash again, and again, and again into the limits of his experience and knowledge.  The God he thought he knew is no longer adequate.  The formula around which his life was organised has failed.  So now either he must step into change and mystery or lose his faith altogether.  This is a journey toward the Presence that is Absence; the Safety that is Terror; the Knowing that is always an Unknowing.  But if we are hoping to find clarity in this reading, we will be disappointed.  The religious tradition Job knows says that prosperity is a sign of divine blessing, deprivation signifies withdrawal of that blessing.  In other words, to suffer is to experience God’s displeasure.  And it is this tradition that Job must struggle with as his life falls apart.  And, interestingly, it is because Job will not give up on God, that he eventually does get that audience with God.

The Psalm also gives us reasons to pause and reexamine our certainties about the Divine.  At the center of this lament is the poet’s struggle to reconcile conflicting notions of who God is.  For David, the battle is between the famed God of family lore and the absent God who eludes him in real life.  Like David, we trace our faith histories back a long way.  And it is appropriate for us to draw strength and inspiration from our spiritual histories.  However, somewhere along the way, we might find that the God who was – the God whose stories we know; the God we have learned to trust through tradition, ancestral history, or community lore; the God whose faithfulness we assume will look identical from year to year, generation to generation – does not ‘fit’ with the life we find ourselves in.  And then, we might just discover that it is one thing to know God in the abstract, and an entirely different thing to know God personally.  David’s cry is a plea for relevance.  He knows the God of his ancestors but who is God right here? Right now? For me?

And the writer of the letter to the Hebrews describes the Word of God as active, sharp, and piercing – a two-edged sword dividing soul from spirit, joint from marrow.  The Word sees all, exposes all, judges all.  And yet this Word is also a merciful and gracious high priest – the Son of God who knows our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the One whose throne we can approach with honest and full confidence.  And if we are wondering how can he be both, how can the Son of God be judging and sympathetic;, how can the Word cut and also heal.  As Jesus tells the disciples, with God the impossible is possible.

And then, in our Gospel, we find a rich man kneeling at Jesus feet, begging for the answer to a question which is plaguing his life – what more does he need to do to inherit eternal life.  And in the modern context this would be a minister’s dream.  How easy would it have been for Jesus to respond with pleasant, feel good, niceties like – well, you are already following the commandments, you called me good so you clearly know who I am because only God is good, so, yeah, great, you’re in.  Or maybe he could have done it in stages, ‘how about you send a small bag of coins to ‘xxx’ mission, not too much mind, just as enough to ‘meet their needs’, you know a token charity gift.

But that is now how it went.  Jesus looked at him, and loved him.  Jesus loved him.  And because he loved him, he told him the whole truth, the hard, unpalatable thing that he knew would cause the man to ‘turn and run’.  Sell everything you own and give it to the poor.  Follow me.  The man was shocked, he thought about all he owned, all his symbols of not just his worldly accomplishments, but of God’s favour.  He was stunned at the thought that his best credential could be his biggest burden and liability.  He was shocked to encounter a God who is so scandalously honest – a God who strips us of our entitlements and freely hands us reasons to walk away.

This man asks the right question.  But his story comes to a bad end.  This ‘young man’ who appears in all of the gospels, appears and disappears in the space of a few lines.  Whoever his was, all the gospel writers thought the story was important enough for them to put it in their gospels.  We do not know what happened to him.  We might like to think that, at some point later on, having ‘chewed over’ Jesus’ challenge to him, he decides he really can do it, and then joins Jesus, but maybe that is the pipedream we use to placate our own consciences.  Because, in reality, this challenge is played out many times over in our own lives.  Maybe not in such a grand way as ‘give it all away’ but how often have you walked past someone in the street asking ‘for a dollar for a cuppa’ or someone clearly ‘down on their luck’ with a bowl next to them asking for help, and we just keep walking.  We convince ourselves that ‘we can’t give to all of them’ so we end up not giving to any of them.  And one of the things that stops us from responding to ‘all of them’ is the community around us, the powerful and prestigious cultural forces that tell us ‘what is ours is ours and we have worked hard for it’.

The question this gospel passage asks us today is, what is it in my life that is so sacrosanct I couldn’t possibly let it go.  What is it that is preventing me from a full expression of faith.  What in my life is ‘untouchable’.  What do I consider a potential obstacle in my relationship with God.  What is it that is at the core of who I am/you are and what is it that keeps us from being the follower, the disciple, the believer, the witness God is calling me/you to be.  What is the ‘one thing’ I lack, the one thing that might cause me to walk away if God points it out to me and says ‘let it go’.  And I know this is an incredibly hard question to answer.

 When we read these four texts together, they defamiliarize God.  They challenge us to lifetimes of change.  They invite us to encounter God ‘anew’ again and again, separated from tradition, memory, theology, and abstraction.  And if we are still willing to engage with the tensions in these readings, they can offer us surprising clues about who God is and what God cherishes.  We will find a God who dismisses the pious to answer a loudmouth on an ash heap.  We will find a God who loves us enough to let us walk away.  A God who will not allow us to rest on our histories.  A God whose grace cuts deeper than a sword.

Let us dare to wrestle past the gods we have known, the gods who keep us safe by cannot save us.  Let us approach with boldness the untamed God who insists on change for the sake of our salvation.