Preached at the 852th Gathering of Baltimore Presbytery
Second Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD, 10th May 2012
Somewhere along the way I wish scribes had etched in the text of Job, right here at the start of chapter 42, in big, bold letters: STOP: SILENCE. The mystics tell us that all wisdom flows from silence and leads to silence. We have to be quiet long enough for wisdom to appear – which is challenging for Presbyterians since we’re a wordy bunch. The book of Job is all about wisdom; which means silence can’t be far away. Silence would be helpful here; instead we find a seamless transition from chapter 41 to these extraordinary verses of 42.
What’s in 41? The culmination of Yahweh’s wild sermons out
of the whirlwind, Yahweh’s answer to Job’s unyielding demand for an explanation
regarding his suffering. Earlier, Yahweh
says to Job: “Who is this that darkens
counsel by words without knowledge? Gird
up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to
me. Where were you when I laid the
foundation of the earth? Tell me if you
have understanding” (Job 28: 2-4).
Yahweh cross-examines Job with question after question. The Voice graciously shakes Job’s foundation,
shatters everything he assumed – regarding himself, his neighbors, his
precarious hold on reality, his place in the universe, even his image of the
God he thought he knew. On and on Yahweh
graciously assaults his sensibilities and reason, questions everything Job
thought he knew about everything. And
then Yahweh stops at the end of 41. It’s
here in this liminal space before 42, that we need silence: hold your tongue, listen, behold. I can imagine Job speechless, breathless,
gasping for air, in shock. Before him
out of the whirlwind is the Voice of the Unameable One, the Holy of Holies,
this mysterium tremendum et fascinans,
this mystery that fascinates even as it overwhelms.[1] What do you say
in such moments? What would you say?
What is there to say?
Then…out of the silence, with
humbled conviction born of experience, Job begins to speak. Here’s the theological nerve center of the
entire book; it’s wild and electric like the voice of God. Job says, “I know you can do all things and
nothing you wish is impossible.” Then
recalling Yahweh’s earlier question from the whirlwind, Job asks himself, “Who
is this whose ignorant words cover my design with darkness?” Who, indeed?
Wrestling with the truth unfolding before him, Job says, “I have spoken
of the unspeakable and tried to grasp the infinite.” Another word from Yahweh comes to mind,
“Listen and I will speak: I will
question you, please, instruct me.” And
then Job finally gets it and says: “I had heard of you with my ears; but now my
eyes have seen you. Therefore, I will be
quiet, comforted that I am dust.”[2] From silence to
silence.
It’s easy to miss the significance of
Job’s confession here. Many turn to Job
searching for reasons why the innocent suffer. We come away never fully satisfied
with the response. But there’s another
way to view Job. Centuries ago, it was William Blake (1757-1827) who offered a
different perspective that’s worth considering.
Blake spent a lot of time with Job’s story, eventually producing those
marvelous engravings of scenes from the story.
For Blake, the text is less about the suffering question than it is
about transformation.[3] It’s about the change, the metanoia that occurs when we come to the
limits of our knowing and find ourselves confronted by the face of the living
God.
You see, prior to the whirlwind, Job’s
moral universe was clearly intact, with clear definitions of right and wrong;
individuals received either reward or punishment for their actions with God as
judge. “Job’s [initial] case against
God assumes not that the system is wrong …but that God has failed to govern the
created order justly.” Job questions God’s justice.[4] Job, however, is questioned by God and
discovers the system is not what he thought it was, there’s more going on
around him than meets the eye.
Exhausted, desperate, Job hits a
theological wall. He discovers that the
religious view of his community, his friends, his tradition – all the things he
learned in “Sabbath school” – are not equal to the existential challenge facing
him. His faith perspective is insufficient and cannot speak to the complexity
of his experience, this man who has been to hell and back, who has seen into
the face of the void, losing family, friends, the flesh on his bones, full of
sores and grieving in ashes asking, Why?
Why? Why? His trauma calls into question
everything. He arrives at a point where
his understanding of God can no longer yield meaning in the face of such
tragedy. While Job never gives up on
God, although his wife said, just curse God and die (Job 2:9) and his friends
weren’t much help either, in the end he had to give up his old understanding of
God and God’s justice, in order to experience something new. He couldn’t do that alone.
At one point or many we all hit that
theological wall when we realize that our perspectives are far too narrow and
limited and we’re called (or forced) to yield to a wider frame of knowing. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) said
poetry “purg[es] the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of
our being.”[5] Something of the same is occurring when we “see”
God. The “film of familiarity” is wiped
away; we see something new. Job faces
the inadequacy of his former ways of seeing the world. His experience of God
then yields a wider, more comprehensive view of reality, of justice, of
God. It’s the gracious reframing of his world,
his self, even the God he thought he knew for something far more profound and
expansive. The vision changes everything.
I believe it’s still possible for us to
have visions – even Presbyterians – a moment or many moments over a lifetime of
extraordinary insight, numinous, religious experiences of significant power and
terror and even beauty, when the Holy helps us see what we could not see
before, giving us new “spectacles,” as Calvin (1509-1564) would have said,
which allow us to see more clearly in the “theatre” of God’s glory.[6]
To see; that’s the
critical point. “I had heard of you with
my ears, but now my eyes see you.” More
than hearing about God, Job sees God for himself. He discovered the inadequacy
of a faith that comes only by hearsay, passed on, received passively. It’s been said, “The person who hungers and
thirsts after justice is not satisfied with a menu. It is not enough for [one] to hope or believe
or know that there is absolute justice in the universe: [one] must taste and
see it.”[7] Surely, Job heard all about God, about what
God was like, he lived assured in that world until everything fell apart. What he graciously received in the end was
not the inherited faith of family or tradition or the pious platitudes of
well-meaning friends, but something that came through his own existential
encounter with the Living God, a journey that only he could take, yielding a
wisdom learned not from a distance, but from, through, and within his gut, his
heart. It was something of God that
couldn’t be taught, it had to be evoked, encountered, experienced.
In the Reformed tradition, talk about
personal experience makes us uneasy. We have this ongoing tension between the
authority of revelation – that is,
God’s truth, wisdom, and grace that comes “down” from above as it were – and
the authority of human experience.
The Reformed tradition privileges revelation over experience; maybe because
it’s safer. Experience can be messy, making us feel “out of order” – and we all
know how much we love to feel out of
order! Now, I know this is tricky,
complicated theological ground. We are
right to be skeptical of anything that smacks of individualism or subjectivism. Yet, I fear we’re losing touch with the
individual, the personal. Every
experience is not of God. Every voice we hear is not of God. Several years ago I received in the mail a
seven-page, single-space letter from someone claiming to be, “The ONLY True
Prophet of God,” writing to tell me the “Truth about Muslims, Jews, Catholics,
Homosexuals, and Dinosaurs.” Yet, there are people in and outside the church who
are not sure they can trust their experience. There are folks in the church who
have had profound religious experiences, but never say a word about them. There are people who want to share what they
are learning, like Job, through their encounters with God and want to be
faithful to it.
I’m particularly sensitive around this
issue. In my Middler year at Princeton Seminary, I took a class on Calvin. I
wrote my final paper on the opening sentence of the Institutes (1559), “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to
say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.
(I.1.1)” Calvin goes on to say, determining “which precedes and brings forth
the other is not easy to discern. (I.1.1.)”
Knowledge, meaning existential apprehension, of ourselves leads to a
knowledge of God and from knowledge of God we turn to a true knowledge of
ourselves.[8] Well, I was in a state of existential shock
when I opened the envelope with my final in it and saw the red-penciled
grade: D-. I had pretty good grades at seminary, but was
struggling in this class (along with others, I might add), with a C+ going into
the final. So, yes, this means I have a
D+ on my transcript from Princeton Seminary in Calvin. What presbytery would
ever ordain me? – I thought my life as a
Presbyterian was over! What doctoral
program would ever admit me? The
professor said I didn’t place sufficient emphasis on revelation in the
knowledge of God. Personal knowledge
alone is incapable of knowing God. (It
wasn’t a D paper; I decided not to fight it.)
It was humbling, to say the least. Revelation now plays a significant role in my
theology! But after twenty-two years,
I’m still not convinced it’s that simple.
My own journey has brought me back to this again and again. How we
apprehend anything in this mysterious universe is far more complicated than Calvin
ever could have imagined. Stacy Johnson
in his book on Calvin, says, “knowledge of God and knowledge of self are
intimately linked.”[9] A true
knowledge of ourselves means being clear about who we are and aren’t, what we
can and cannot know. But our experience
still has to count for something — doesn’t
it? — all that our hearts know, what we know deep in our souls, all of our
losses, our traumas, our sufferings, our relationships, our gifts, our
personalities, all get caught up in the mix in what we know of God and how we
know God. Augustine (354-430) asserted, “To know myself is to know you,” O God.[10] Yes, theology isn’t biography, but we can’t
disconnect them, we can’t discount the value of human experience. For what else do we have except our
experience, limited as it is?
Sometimes
experience of God is prior to dogmatic formulation, experience grounds
conviction. In one of her letters, Flannery O'Connor
(1925-1964) wisely wrote, "Conviction without experience makes for
harshness."[11] We run the risk
of becoming exceptionally harsh in emphasizing conviction and ignoring, if not
silencing the experience of many sisters and brothers who want to tell us
something of Christ's love and what the Spirit is doing in their lives. I’ve
found that far too many people fail to honor their experience. I have,
regrettably, far too many times discounted the value of mine. Instead, maybe, just maybe we’re called to
value our experience, anticipate an
experience of God and refuse to fit it unquestioningly into traditional
teaching about God, called to be “open to new possibilities and surprises even
in the sphere of their core convictions, [people] who above all cry out with
integrity before God and resist all attempts to misinterpret, marginalize, or
stifle that cry.”[12]
All this was true for the depth
psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).
Jung came from a long line of Reformed pastors. His father was a Swiss Reformed pastor near
Basel, but he did not find any life in his father’s faith. Jung was told his First Communion would be a
great experience. Instead — nothing. “For me it was an absence of God
and no religion,” he said. “Church was a place to which I no longer could
go. There was no life there, but
death.” Yet, early in his life he had
profound encounters of the Holy that forever changed the course of his life;
even though they overwhelmed and scared him, he knew there was power to heal in
them, they offered hope, and he spent the rest of his life trying to be
faithful to those experiences – despite considerable resistance. He said they were moments of an immediate,
“direct living God…,” the God that his father lacked and could not give him. As Jung put it, “God alone was real – annihilating
fire and an indescribable grace.”[13] Annihilating
fire; indescribable grace. I love that.
Job’s story says: this is what it’s like
to encounter the living God, to know God, not know about God. Not someone
else’s encounter, not someone else’s story, not someone else’s experience, not
a dead tradition, but a living faith. It
looks something like this: a life-changing, frame-bending experience of earth
shattering significance, radical insight, insight of cosmic proportion that
comes over, around, in, through, and to us and opens our eyes – our eyes, not
someone’s else’s eyes – and allows us to see reality transfigured and
transformed;[14] to see a new
world which despite all the pain and suffering and sorrow of our lives still
has the capacity to yield meaning; an experience of the Living God that grounds
all of our theological claims and creeds, that sets our hearts on fire and
fires our imaginations, that sends us down new roads, wherever the Lord wants
to take us, following him, like Bartimaeus (Mark 10: 52), with eyes that now
can see.
Prayer: Holy One, give us more to see; give us ever
more to see. Through Jesus Christ our
Lord. Amen.
Image: William Blake, "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind," Plate XIII, "Illustrations of the Book of Job" [1823].
[1]This is Rudolph Otto’s (1869-1937) well-known characteristic of the Holy, in The Idea of the Holy, trans. John H. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 13-30.
[1]This is Rudolph Otto’s (1869-1937) well-known characteristic of the Holy, in The Idea of the Holy, trans. John H. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 13-30.
[2]Stephen
Mitchell’s translation, The Book of Job,
trans. and with an introduction by Stephen Mitchell (HarperPerennial, 1992),
88.
[3] See Mitchell’s
helpful essay on the meaning of Job, xxix.
[4] David C.
Hester, Job (Louisville: Westminster
John Knox Press, 2005), A Defense of
Poetry (182), cited in Paul Bishop, Jung’s
Answer to Job: An Answer (Brunner-Routledge, 2002), 50.
[5]A Defense of Poetry (182), cited in
Paul Bishop, Jung’s Answer to Job: An
Answer (Brunner-Routledge, 2002), 50.
[6]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
(1.6.1; 1.14.1); Commentary on Psalm 104:31, cited by William J. Bouswma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait
(New York: Oxford University Press,
1988), 135.
[7]Mitchell, xxvii.
[8]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion,
ed. John T. McNeill; trans. by Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 1n., 36. On this seeming ambiguity in the relation
between divine knowledge and self-knowledge, see Serene Jones, “An Apology for
Divine Wisdom,” in Calvin and the
Rhetoric of Piety (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 87-120.
[9] William Stacy
Johnson, John Calvin: Reformer for the 21st Century
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2009), 51.
[10] Viderim me, viderim te, quoted by St.
Teresa of Ávila [1515-1582], The Interior
Castle, The Complete Works of St. Teresa, vol.2, trans. and ed. E. Ellison
Peers (London: Sheed & Ward, 1957).
[11] Flannery
O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, Selected
and Edited by Sally Fitzgerald (New York:
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1995), 97.
[12] These are the
words of Cambridge theologian, David Ford, Christian
Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 129.
[13] C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffé;
trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973), 57, 73. C.
G. Jung, The Red Book (Liber Novus), ed. Sonu Shamdasani,
preface by Ulrich Hoerni, trans. by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, Sonu
Shamdasani. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2009). See Shamdasani’s Introduction, 194.
[14] These thoughts
are inspired by the writings of James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment, second edition (Colorado Springs, CO:
Helmers & Howard, 1989). See also Kenneth E. Kovacs, The Relational Theology of James E. Loder: Encounter & Conviction (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
