Job 38:1-11, 16-18
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
2 “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
3 Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone
7 when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
9 when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
10 when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?
16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
17 Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.
Mark 10:35-45
35 James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” 36 And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” 37 And they said to him, “Appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” 38 But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” 39 They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized you will be baptized, 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to appoint, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42 So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43 But it is not so among you; instead, whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.”
It’s often the case that one of my children wants something, and I - being the generous father I am - tend to grant their wishes, My boys do not lack for much. But there are those times, especially when we’re at the store, when they impulsively decide that they want something, that they simply must have it, and I say No. And then they protest and get upset about, “why can’t we have it? - we’re the only people in the whole world who don’t have it” - and then I respond that it costs money, which is a finite resource, and that we have a lot of things but we can’t have everything, and that they don’t need or really even want the object in question anyway. And then when they keep on insisting just how important it is to posses this thing, I sometimes say something like, “well then get yourself a job and you can buy it yourself.”
The point is to shut down the conversation, to remind them that I am the authority, the provider, and they are dependents. It is only by my generosity that they have anything all - or that they even exist. I want to make clear that they’re in no position to make such demands, and that I am under no obligation to meet them.
When God answers Job it seems to me he’s doing something similar. God has heard all of Job’s desires and demands, and now finally God responds to say, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” Who are you Job, to complain to me? Later he will even taunt Job (here I paraphrase a bit) - “Hey Job, look at this: I made a hippopotamus. Have you ever made a hippopotamus? No you haven’t.” God wants to make clear that he and Job are not playing on the same field, that he can’t just show up with his finite perspective and question God.
One of the obvious takeaways from the story is that God is God and we are not, and we should be mindful of that fairly significant fact. But instead we tend to make little gods of ourselves, ordering right and wrong according to our own selfish interests. Sometimes we need to be put in our place. So we might take the moral of the story to be that God do whatever God wants and we have no basis for complaint. We might be tempted to elevate God’s sovereignty above all else, to equate God with brute power, emphasizing that God is not bound by anything - including any conception of the good or what God ought to be like. We might be like children who see their parent’s actions as capricious but unquestionable.
The danger here is that if we emphasize God’s absolute freedom to do whatever God wants then we easily lose the ability to distinguish between good and evil, between the work of God and God’s enemies. There is no right or wrong, just power. One of the troubling aspects of Job is that, as we’ll read next week, at the end of the story, when his fortunes are restored, his friends came and, “showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him.” Does Job indeed present to us a God worth fearing but not worth loving? Does it, in fact, teach us not question God and God’s ways?
Well, it does seem to teach that, but the lesson here is rather more complicated. Throughout the book’s 42 chapters Job continues to insist, despite what his friends told him, that his suffering was a great injustice, without reason or warrant. He never resigned himself to the idea that God could do whatever God wanted; instead he demanded that God justify himself. Job never attempted to convince himself that his suffering was for some greater good. And what’s really interesting is that God, despite the whole show where he seems to put Job in his place, declares that Job - unlike his friends - has spoken well of God; God does not correct Job, but vindicates him. While God does remind Job that God and God’s ways are far beyond Job’s comprehension, God nevertheless also upholds the validity of Job’s complaint, of his longing for justice, his moral intuition that this wrong needed to be made right, that God - if God was really worth loving and trusting - was indeed bound to respond.
The lesson here is that, while we do not understand God, we’re well within our right to have expectations of God, even to make demands of God, within the confines of our limited understanding. We are something like children who don’t understand their parent’s actions but demand to be loved nonetheless. I might not give my kids everything they want, but they’re right to look to me to provide what is good for them. And if I am not good to them, they should say so, and I don’t get to respond that because I have power over them that I can do whatever I want. We would never tolerate that kind of behavior from an earthly father, and yet we often imagine our heavenly Father to act in just this kind of way, doing whatever he wants just because he’s God. We fashion a God who places greater moral demands on his subjects than he does on himself, the difference simply being that he has more power, as if might makes right.
The basis on which we question God is simply that we are made in God’s image. However broken or obscured that image of God might be, however much suffering might distort or oppress it, we nevertheless maintain that fundamental orientation toward, or desire for the good, for God. Our fundamental problem - and this really is the power of sin in our lives - is simply that we misapprehend our good, and thus misapprehend the nature of God. We can’t truly know God and reject God.
The really essential question for us, is what is God’s nature, God’s character? In the passage we read God presents to Job the wonders of the creation God has made. There is within the Christian tradition a strand - the same strand which emphasizes God’s absolute sovereignty - which understands creation itself primarily as a demonstration of God’s absolute power. Questions of why God would create and just who is the audience for this demonstration are typically ignored. God’s power is certainly evident in creation, but what should really impress us is that creation reveals not just that God is all-powerful but that God is good, that creation itself is an act of self-giving generosity.
In the passage from Mark, the two sons of Zebedee seem to misunderstand as well. They come to Jesus requesting that they be given the places of honor in the kingdom, that their status be elevated, that they might enjoy proximity to and even a kind of equality with Jesus himself. What they really want is the power and the glory, the same kind of power and glory that laid the earth’s foundations and made the stars sing out. They assume that Jesus is really out for this kind of power and glory too, that he’s interested in self-exaltation, so they try to insure their exalted place before anyone jumps the queue.
But Jesus responds that, if they really want to be great, then rather than seeking to exalt themselves, they must become the servant of all. But he’s not just trying to put them in their place, he’s telling them that this is what greatness actually looks like. This is the path to God. Indeed, the Son himself did not come to be served but to serve, to give his life as a ransom for many. True power is exercised not from above but from below, not by pushing others down but by lifting them up.
Consider the possibility that this is not some kind of limited truth that applies only in certain situations, but that it is actually capital T truth, the truth that expressed itself in creation and which is baked into the very nature of creation, that is really the way things work. Consider that you are never more powerful - never more aligned with power of God - than when you serve others rather than when you manage to get them to serve you. Consider that, whatever other ideas we might have in our head, that this really is the true nature of God revealed in Jesus.
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