21^st December 2009

FOUR PRAYERS (In the Last Sunday after Trinity, 25 October 2009)

Rev Clive Skewes, Assistant Minister, at St John's UCA Mt Waverley, Victoria Australia

Lessons -- Job 42:1-17; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46b-52

In our lectionary readings we have four prayers and they are all very different.

Some scholars claim the ending of the book of Job is a later addition because some in our gloomy culture think it spoils the story to have Job so splendidly restored. That's strange because we usually like a story to have a happy ending. Yet here we are suspicious when it does.
But at least one scholar, Martin Copenhaver, (Christian Century, 12 October 1994, 'Risking a Happy Ending') thinks the happy ending is entirely appropriate for the story of Job. [Much that follows draws on Copenhaver.] He points out God's reasons for his lavish gift of good things to Job are as unexplained as the reasons why they were earlier taken away. God does not explain suffering. But he does not explain blessing either. So there is not just one mystery in the Book of Job:
there are twin mysteries. The sources of each are hidden from our view.
They are beyond our understanding.

Instead of fastening exclusively on the question, 'Why do bad things happen?' shouldn't we also ask, 'Why do good things happen?' Imagine if at the beginning of the story, Job, the greatest and wealthiest man of his day, had demanded to know why he had so much?
God could equally have responded with the unanswerable questions of chapters 38 to 41. From Job's final speech we learn of Job's hard- won repentance and humility before the majesty of God, but only from the epilogue do we learn how Job's new attitude is lived out.
He reunites with his wife. He has many children and revives his cattle business.

After all Job has been through, the happy ending begins to look like an extraordinary act of faith. He is rather like a patient on the medical program, The Gift, who has struggled with failing health for years with no hope of cure. He gets the diagnosis that he has only days or hours to live, but then at the last moment he is able to receive a donor organ which can lead to a successful transplant. When later we meet the patient on discharge from hospital he is usually not only full of gratitude, relief and a sense of debt, but also a heightened sense of life's grace: 'Why should I receive this amazing gift?' he usually asks. At the same time he has a deeper sense of life's fragility, expressed in sorrow for the tragedy that overtook the donor and made the organ donation possible. But the sense of fragility is expressed also in the knowledge the newly healthy patient has, based on what he has been through, that he could later lose all.

For the transplant recipient, as for Job, to resume life as it was before is also to risk it all. To have twice as much, in the case of Job, is to have twice the risk. So for Job to embrace his wife is to embrace life, despite potential suffering and unanswered questions. To have many children and no answers or assurances can be, in itself, a profound expression of humility and trust.

Tom Wright points out God's restoration of Job's fortunes is the strange working of God's justice. But that justice is not a strange impersonal force out beyond Job and his friends. God's justice works as a strange presence that invites them in their own relationships to taste the humility and the new power which this presence brings to those who cast themselves upon it. Prayer indeed depends on God's reliability and justice. (Think the frequently recited words of assurance from 1 John in the Absolution: 'If we confess our sins he is faithful and just {not merciful and kind} to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.'
'Faithful and just' reminds us that if the Father did not forgive us he would be breaking contract with his Son. Confession and forgiveness have a much more reliable foundation than our own contrition and repentance. They are grounded in God's covenant.) If God were capricious (like the pagan gods) it were better to remain silent. If God were merely loving and not also just he would be indulgent and we would still be in our sins. But because God is just we, are forgiven. Because God is just, Job intercedes for his friends with confidence. Job's prayer no doubt embodied not only his own forgiveness of his friends, but also his new, humble trust in God's reliability.

Actually prayer has already played a central role in this book.
Job's speeches are rife with lamentation. This appals his friends for Job's lament speaks directly to God and expresses the reality of his suffering. So most of Job is a prayer of lament; something alien to many today but not to the Psalms and prophets or to Jesus.
Think of the latter's shouting and tears in the Garden of Gethsemane in which Jesus not merely mirrors Job, but becomes Job.

Job, like our Lord Jesus, refused to overlook the depth of his suffering. He refused to protect God from despair. He refused to believe God wasn't alive in the world. Most importantly, he continued to speak directly to God, praying for justice, relief and comfort. True prayer, true speech to and about God, never uses platitudes to deny the reality of the world.

Luther explains, 'God comes to us incarnate and open to suffering.
We meet God in the world in all its complexity. We come to God not by denying the truth of our experience in the world {not by parking all our problems outside the door of the church before we come in} but by embracing it fully. When our theology is rooted in the bloody reality of the cross, we call things what they are. We find God and God's truth in places we least expect. The power of lament is that we come to God boldly, directly, defences stripped away, with nothing standing between us and the Almighty. Standing thus we can do nothing but speak the truth from our depth. God in Christ meets us there.'

Job's lament kept him in touch with the Lord who sustained him spiritually -- and it equipped him for his intercession for his friends. Job's friends are wrong but they are worth praying for.
Virginia Woolf wrote to her friend Lady Robert Cecil in 1922, 'I read the book of Job last night. I don't think God comes well out of it.' God is angry but God can be persuaded to check his anger if someone like Job prays. God too, it seems, is worth praying for.

The Letter to the Hebrews sees intercession as our Lord's continuing and central task. His sufferings prepared him for his intercession. His central task, acted out physically on Calvary and embodied thereafter in his role as our representative before the Father, is to come before the Father with his sinful people on his heart. This sometimes gets falsely represented in some Eastern iconography as a matter of the Son plaintively presenting his own suffering before an otherwise stern and unyielding Father. But the good news of the Gospel, tragically missed in the latter scenario, is that the Father himself appointed the Son for this purpose out of love for us, so that we would have complete assurance of salvation. We need never have any doubt of the Father's eternal, unchanging and all-powerful love for us. (Wright)

The same saving love is embodied in Jesus setting his face towards the cross; in Jesus who stands by the gate of Jericho as blind Bartimaeus shouts for mercy and refuses to be silenced. Bartimaeus'
intercession is for himself -- simple, direct and full of faith:
'Teacher, I want to see again.' The cry, 'Have mercy on me,' from a roadside beggar would normally mean cash. But Jesus' question reveals that his request was altogether different. (Wright)

From the complexities of Job, through the ministry of Christ himself, to the simplicity of Bartimaeus: coming before God in prayer is the central God-given human task. It's one by which, whether spectacularly or quietly, everything is transformed.

How should we intercede for our friends? Augustine gives sound
counsel: 'Pray for me that I may not waste my days through want of self-control, and that I may bear my nights with patience; pray that, though I walk in the midst of the shadow of death, the Lord may so be with me that I shall fear no evil.'