I’m sorry. I was wrong. I misled you last week. As we follow the lectionary through the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, I thought that last week we read all we were going to read from the Book of Job: but no! Here it is again, a passage from towards the end of the book. All that I said last week stands – if you weren’t here you can look up our sermons on the church website (click on the drop down ‘More’ at the top of the page and they are there). So, the book Job is a book of philosophy rather than history. It is a ‘thought experiment’ that addresses the question ‘why do good people suffer?’ Job is in a state of total despair. I suggested last week that he is so ‘low’ that he does not want to live any more. And, today, God at last gives him an answer to his question.
Except He doesn’t. You scan down the few verses that we have been given and nowhere do you find the Almighty explaining anything about why Job has been brought so low. In fact, God seems out to make Job feel even smaller in His sight: ‘Who do you think you are?’ is the tenor of God’s word to Job.
4‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? 5Who determined its measurements – surely you know! 34‘Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? 35Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, “Here we are”? 39‘Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, 40when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert?
Job is out of his depth and God isn’t going to answer to him. It feels hard hearted, this answer. I wonder though whether we are meant to hear it this way? After 38 chapters of intellectual struggle, I wonder whether God’s answer here is actually meant to be heard as providing us readers with some form of insight or perception: a breakthrough in understanding. It takes a whole book for the author of Job to get to this point: the prophet Isaiah put it in a couple of verses:
Seek the Lord while He may be found… For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Well, the heavens are an awful lot higher than the earth so where that brings us this morning is to a point where our reading invites us to question what we can truly know about God. Here I am, stood in the pulpit with you expectantly sat in front of me waiting for me to tell you something about the Almighty. And here we are, sat in church, reading confidently from our orders of service statements about God and yet, for all our faith and understanding how much of Him do we really know? What can we confidently say about God?
I was ordained 35 years ago by the Archbishop of York, John Habgood. There were just three candidates for ordination and on the evening before the ordination (which was at Michaelmas – the end of September) we met at Bishopthorpe Palace to sign the oaths and so on…and we said evening prayer. The reading was for the feast of St Michael and All Angels: Jacob’s ladder with angels ‘ascending and descending’ to and from heaven. The Archbishop gave a short talk and He mentioned the philosopher Wittgenstein and his most famous words about language: ‘Whereof one cannot speak one must keep silent’ and he followed this by saying that he, the archbishop, found himself believing more and more about less and less; a strange sermon for those about to be sent out to preach the word.
That has clearly stuck with me down the years and I wonder whether John Habgood’s experience is your experience too? Perhaps we’re not brave enough to say it to one another? Maybe we think that, as the years pass, we should become ever more confident and assured in our faith and that if we don’t feel this way we are letting the side down. But I don’t think that’s what going on.
Job’s experience and the experience of the Christian journey that liturgically (at least) we make every year through Lent is that faith is found in letting go, not in accruing stuff (even if that ‘stuff’ is belief). Things that are unnecessary must be stripped away from us. One of those things that we have to let go of is our concept of God Himself. Now hear me correctly: I’m not saying we let go of God, rather, we must let go of our ‘concept of God’: how we think of Him.
There is a way of doing theology that tries to do this. It is called apophatic theology. Instead of trying to say what God is, apophatic theology starts from the premise that we cannot say anything about Him other than what he is not. (Remember, ‘your ways are not my ways’). Thinking about this, I came across a few thoughts from the great exponent of apophatic theology ‘St John of the Cross’. St John and St Terese of Avila worked together to renew the Carmelite Order in Spain in the 16th century. For his pains, St John was imprisoned: he knew first hand, spiritual darkness. What I read about him earlier this week is that his word for God in his writings is the Spanish word ‘nada’. What does Nada mean? It means ‘nothing’. Or rather, in St John’s writing, it means that God is no-thing. What makes God ‘God’ is that He is utterly unlike any other ‘thing’ in His creation so He cannot be understood or spoken of in the same way as we understand or speak of the rest of His creation. St John’s writing is not so much about suffering as about the desire to love God, and to love Him above any ‘thing’. We know God more with our hearts than with our minds.
Where does that leave us? It leaves us in the same place as Job in our reading. It leaves us, it leaves the Church, needing to pull its neck in and adopt a posture of humility in how we speak of God. As Christendom collapses, the last of the Sunday School generation enter their 70s, and the Christian voice in society becomes just one amongst many there can be no special pleading: we can only offer the mustard seed of faith we have with humility. That doesn’t mean that I will never preach again or pray at someone’s bedside but it does mean that I should not, (cannot) do so from a position of power. But you will have noticed that much of the church is heading in a different direction. For some Christians (here and abroad) the way ahead is to speak ever louder and with ever greater stridency of our faith. And the way to go is to help the people in the pews to know their bibles, to rehearse their testimonies, to practice speaking of faith so that, should their neighbour ever ask they might have something to say. For some Christians the answers that Job and those like him seek are obvious: this or that bible verse should solve all your problems! You just have to strain ever more to believe. To me, this route speaks of desperation rather than faithfulness. It is of a piece with the desire across society for life to give black and white answers. It reveals a failure in our ability to understand that sometimes things are hard and complicated and cannot be reduced to slogans. The bible may well say this, that or the other but our neighbours’ response (and sometimes our own) is ‘So what?’ As the United States is finding, shouting ever louder at your neighbour is not a sign of strength, instead it is a sign of weakness.
So where is the good news? The Good news rests not in our knowing God but in Him knowing us. I think of Psalm 139.
O LORD, you have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
3 You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it.
In the ‘cloud of unknowing’ (to quote another saint) we might not see God, sense Him, understand Him but He sees and knows us.
The Good News is that God doesn’t just meet people in the light, He is present in the darkness too. He meets with Abram under the night sky, he reveals Himself to Jacob and to Joseph as they sleep. He leads His people by a pillar of fire by night in the desert. He hides Himself in the cloud of Sinai and the cloud that descends at the Transfiguration as the disciples bleary-eyed wonder what is happening. Most especially, he lies in the darkness of the tomb on Holy Saturday.
‘The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light’, says Isaiah – but this light can only be seen when it is dark. So, if, as the years pass and the confidence of your Sunday School faith has been left far behind you, do not be afraid. You don’t have to understand His ways to continue to have faith, to live in hope and to love. Your love is enough even if the Divine Lover seems absent: for (remember?) the greatest of these is love, and those ‘who live in love live in God.’