- Job 38:1-7,[34-41]
The sophisticated arguing among Job’s friends about evil and death in the world vis a vis God has explored many possible answers. Job makes one final plea to God, defending his honor, (chapter 31). [Chapters 32-37 are presumed to be a later interpolation into an earlier narrative.] God finally speaks. God speaks “out of the whirl-wind.” God ignores the questions Job’s friends have been debating, which God describes as “words without knowledge,” as well as Job’s own defense for his vindication. Rather, God overwhelms all human questions by becoming the interrogator! “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” Tell me, Who was the architect who designed it? Who set its cornerstone. Who measures darkness and light and proportions snow and rain? Who watches over the wild creatures– the lion, raven, mountain-goat, ostrich, horse, hawk and eagle, to name a few, in their natural habitat? (Job’s response to this blast from God comes in our reading next Sunday.)
- Psalm 104:1-9, 25-37b
God’s grandeur and glory are celebrated by the psalmist who sees all creation as God’s “cloak/chariot/garment.” God originated and determines the flow of all water, including floods, streams and mountain lakes. God establishes their boundaries. God toys with “Leviathan” for amusement. God provides food in season; God withdraws sustaining “breath/and they perish.” “Bless the Lord. Bless the Lord, O my soul.”
OR
- Isaiah 53:4-12
The canonical Book of Isaiah envisions a “righteous one,” whom God calls “my servant.” This extraordinary person has the privilege, but will pay a terrible cost, for extending God’s role as healer in human affairs. “…By his bruises we are healed….” This privilege is the pinnacle of human aspiration: “Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge.” He “shall make many righteous.” “God will allot to him a portion with the great.” “He bore the sin of many, and made intercessions for their transgressions” But the cost for this role will nearly overwhelm him. He will be “plagued with diseases,” wounded, crushed, oppressed, afflicted, the victim of a “perversion of justice,” alienated from his own people. It will even be “the will of the Lord to crush him again.”
- Psalm 91:9-16
The psalmist makes a bold, uncompromising statement of her trust in God, who is her “refuge,” a place of safety and protection. When traveling a wild, rocky path, strewn with boulders and inhabited by lions and vipers, she is lifted up by God’s “messenger” who will “guard” her. God promises to answer, deliver, and grant her safety and long life.
- Hebrews 5:1-10
The author of this “letter” addressed to “the Hebrews” takes up and creatively elaborates on the role of great significance to any Jew, the role of the “high priest.” One called to this role “offers gifts and sacrifices for sins.” He deals with others “gently” because of his own “weakness.” When he offers “sacrifice,” it is for his own sins as well as for others. One does not “take” this “honor,” but is “called by God,” just as Aaron was. Now the writer casts Jesus into the cosmic role of servant and savior. Christ did not “glorify himself in becoming a high priest.” He was “appointed” by God. While “in the flesh,” Jesus offered up prayers and supplications for those he loved with anguish and tears and with “reverent submission.” “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered….” Because of what he endured, “he became the source of eternal salvation.”
- Mark 10:35-45
Jesus has just made the third prediction of his death in Mark’s narrative when human ambition emerges yet again. This time, Mark exposes ambition in James and John, who want to know if they can “sit on your right and one on your left, in your glory.” Jesus tells them they do not know what they are talking about. Can you “drink the cup I [will] drink” and “go through the baptism with which I am baptized,” he asks? “We are able,” they reply. Jesus then predicts that James and John will in fact know a fate similar to his. But he demurs about any future status; “it is not mine to grant.” The other ten disciples turn on James and John, but Jesus moves on to another important teaching about God’s reign. Jesus raises the ways of doing things for those who have some authority, who “lord” over others, even becoming “tyrants.” In God’s reign, the opposite is true: “greatness” is found in the role of a “servant.” This way of conducting human affairs is exemplified by Jesus himself: “For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve….” Which, finally will cause him to “give his life as a ransom for many.”
As Job’s encounter with God makes clear, God does not answer humankind’s questions; God makes declarations that go beyond human understanding, even exceeding human imagination. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth.” A writer in the Book of Isaiah presents a figure whose voluntary suffering somehow– there is never any attempt made to ‘explain’ how– will erase human sin. In Mark’s narrative, Jesus turns human assumptions about what really matters on its head; “greatness” is measured in God’s reign by “service.” God makes no attempt to explain or justify; God simply issues declarations and offers puzzling sayings that challenge and dislodge our most basic and valued assumptions. God, who knows what matters most because God set everything in motion, declares that service to others somehow fulfills God’s will and, at the same time, fulfills the highest aspirations for our humanity. For Christians, this was the message of Jesus, which he also embodied.
Jean-Luc Marion regards the work of Emmanuel Levinas as a nothing less than a “Copernican revolution” in Western thinking, because Levinas places ethics as the starting point for all human endeavors and places the “ego” in “second place” to the other. (The Visible and the Revealed, p. 67) In one of his most significant writings, Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes:
The “epiphany consists in soliciting us by the destitution in the face of the Stranger, the widow, and the orphan.” “The work of justice– the uprightness of the face to face– is necessary in order that the breach that leads to God be produced– and ‘vision’ here coincides with this work of justice.” “There can be no ‘knowledge’ of God separated from the relationship with men (sic).” “The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely his [or her] face… is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed.” “The establishing of this primacy of the ethical, that is the relation of man to man… a primacy of an irreducible structure upon which all other structures rest….” (pp 78-79)
Levinas calls this ethical work done in face to face dealings with others a special kind of “obedience,” which is also “the forever primitive form of religion.” (p. 79)
Levinas was scrupulous in keeping his philosophical work separated from any of the revealed, historic religions, but his insights can reify our understanding of biblical narratives by his radial insistence on going back to the foundation.
After reading the bracing exhortations of Levinas, we return to this Sunday’s readings and gospel with refreshed and clearer imaginations and hearts. Jesus insists that his work will not be fulfilled until he empties himself in total obedience. As vivid as his words are, the memories of his actions are even more dazzling– obedience to God is fulfilled in the service to others, which is, of course, the exact opposite of the aspirations of James and John in today’s gospel. He tells us plainly that if we chose to follow him, we, too, will follow his life of service. There will be some cost involved, but this is the actual way to the highest fulfillment of our humanity, just as it was the only way to Easter morning for him. That all this flies directly in the face of our instincts and assumptions is inevitable. God makes no effort to ‘explain’ how or why; as the “architect,” God simply declares this is the way it is! It confounds our most sophisticated reasoning, reducing human explanations to “words without meaning.” But it has one redeeming feature– it truly works, it is ultimately what matters most in life, we are promised.