A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

October 26, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Demanding Goodness from God

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 34:1–8
Job 42:1–6, 10
Mark 10:46–52

“Then Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ The blind man said to him, ‘My teacher, let me see again.’”

Mark 10:51 (NRSV)

We praise you, O Lord, for the joy of this Sunday morning,
for the happiness of seeing these beloved faces gathered for a few moments before you.
We praise you for the grace of your love and
for your sovereign care of us throughout all our lives.
We dare to pray now that as your word is read and proclaimed
that we might see afresh the kind of lives you would have us live,
the kind of world you would have us build,
to your glory and for the sake of Christ. Amen.

In 1981, a book was published that people have been talking about ever since. It was entitled When Bad Things Happen to Good People, authored by a rabbi named Harold Kushner. Rabbi Kushner and his wife had watched helplessly as their young son gradually wasted away and then died from a cruel degenerative disease. Though the rabbi had for years served as a comforting pastor and religious leader, he found himself questioning how such suffering and loss could have happened to him and his family. He had spent his entire ministerial life trying to help other people believe. But as tragedy struck close to home, he found himself rethinking everything he had assumed about God.(1)

Rabbi Kushner turned to the Bible and studied again the book of Job. Job was a righteous man who had believed all his life in an all-wise, all-powerful, all-knowing God. Job had assumed that people were rewarded for living a good life and were punished through calamity for their wrongdoing. But that approach to reality failed to hold water when Job’s entire life fell apart. This honorable man was visited by an unimaginable string of sufferings and affliction. He lost his property, his family, his standing in the community—even his capacity for hope was taken from him. He raged and complained to God. He demanded an explanation, but none was forthcoming. What he received instead was a voice, speaking out of a whirlwind, asking Job a question: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Have you an arm like mine, and can you thunder with a voice like mine?” (Job 38:2, 4; 40:9).

On and on the voice from the whirlwind speaks, until finally Job comes to the point at which he recognizes that only God is God and that he, a mere mortal, can never finally and fully understand all of the ways of God.

In the passage that Dr. Buchanan read this morning, Job kneels in humility and awe before the Creative Force that lies at the heart of the universe and offers a prayer before the Lord:

I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. . . . I have uttered things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know but now my eyes see.

And in the end, he admits his mistake in challenging Almighty God: “Now I see that only you, O God, are holy.”

Nikos Kazantzakis has written that “the highest point a human being can attain is not knowledge, understanding, virtue, goodness, or victory, but something greater, even more heroic than all of those: sacred awe.”(2) It is the capacity to experience sacred awe that makes us most human and that lifts us to the highest pinnacle of human existence. Do you sense the irony here? When we are reverent before the greatness of the one sovereign and holy God, we are at the highest place a human being can be.

On Reformation Sunday, we celebrate the particular theological heritage that is ours as Presbyterians. At the center of this theological heritage is the idea of divine sovereignty, the conviction that nothing ultimately can thwart God’s gracious will or quench the creative power of divine love that lies at the heart of everything. The Reformed tradition has always insisted that “the glory of God should be our first and last concern.”(3) This is a complete reversal of the conventional wisdom of modern theology: that God exists to please us and that our questions of God are more important than God’s questions of us. Our heritage reminds us that God is not answerable to us but that we are answerable to God.

Our heritage reminds us that there is a meaning that permeates human existence that is so profound that even the most ridiculous tragedies and injustices cannot finally rob life of meaning. We serve a God whose compassion for creation was so great that God’s own Son came to dwell with us, revealing the healing and the mercy that lie at the very being of God. It is God’s own Son who finally suffers and dies a senseless, ridiculous death for the sake of this broken world, ensuring that there will never be a darkness, a deprivation, or suffering that we will have to endure alone or that is, finally, irredeemable.

There is, without doubt, an inherent arbitrariness about life in this world. That is an indisputable and unavoidable fact of life. God made the world free. The Bible is clear about that. The Bible also tells the realistic story that as a consequence of the misuse of freedom, in all kinds of ways, our world is fallen and broken. But would you really want it any other way? Would you want life to be set, preset like a program on a computer? Would you want human history to be like a book that has already been written? Would you want to live your life as if you had no choices, as if you were just a puppet being controlled by strings in God’s hands?

Human life is a complicated thing, though, isn’t it? The ambiguities of it are baffling. The character Nickels in Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play J.B., based on the story of Job, has this to say:

If God is God, he is not good.
If God is good, he is not God.
Take the even, take the odd;
I would not stay here if I could
except for the little green leaves in the wood
and the wind on the water.(4)

So many inscrutable questions.

The fire on October 17 in the Loop high-rise here in Chicago raised so many of those unanswerable questions. Some were trapped by the fire, in danger of losing their lives, but then finally were able to find an unlocked door in the stairwell and escape. But six beautiful people lost their lives. Why those six and not the others? Why did this family lose its father? Why did this mother lose her daughter? I don’t know. If you know, please tell me. What I do know is that even in the midst of that terrible tragedy, no life, no loss, was without meaning. What I do know is that God, the author and giver of all of life, does not cease being God, even when the terrible has happened.

I take some comfort in the thought that life is itself an undeserved gift, bestowed upon us from the free grace of God, and that if any of us get to have one breath of life, it’s a blessing, a blessing for which we ought to give thanks.

About fourteen years ago, I walked through a very dark valley with a wonderful Presbyterian woman who, in one terrible, violent afternoon tragedy, lost her son and husband. The mother and wife’s heart was as broken as any heart I have ever seen. I stopped by the house on the day of the funeral. The family that was left was gathering for a bite of lunch. They asked me to join them, and I sat. A little granddaughter was at the table. “Say the blessing, please,” the granddaughter was asked. We bowed our heads, and the child began to pray: “God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for our food.” When the blessing was over, the grieving grandmother looked at me and said through her tears, “At least that’s still the same.” Even though everything else has changed, God is still great. God is still good.

I do not believe that we are going to get very far if we demand answers from God. But I believe that it is perfectly legitimate to demand goodness from God, I trust that God hears our prayer. I trust that in God’s heart there is a will for healing and wholeness and life, rather than death and hurt and pain. I believe that the energy that lies at the heart of the universe is love. I believe that now and then that divine energy is accessible to us.

The story of blind Bartimaeus is a case in point. He is a man who has lost his sight, which is perhaps an even more poignant situation than never having had it, never having seen the little green leaves of the wood and the wind rustling on the water. But he once had seen, and now he is unable to see. Even though the man is blind, he senses that there is in Jesus Christ a power that is not of this world but is operable in this world.

As Jesus passes him, Bartimaeus cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” The people nearby, clearly convinced that he was wasting his breath and that he would be a blind beggar forever, sternly rebuked him for crying out in desperate hope to Jesus. Bartimaeus was not to be deterred. He cried out even more loudly, “Have mercy on me.” Talk about demanding goodness from God!

This time, Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” This time, the people said, “Maybe you ought to take heart. Now he is calling you.” And so throwing off his cloak, Bartimaeus sprang up and came to Jesus. “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked.

Remember James and John, who wanted to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand when he came into his glory? How blind they were to the meaning of Jesus’ ministry and the nature of his power. But blind Bartimaeus understands: “Let me see again.”

Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Bartimaeus is cured, but the physical cure is only the half of it. The story goes on to say that after Bartimaeus regained his sight, he followed Jesus on the way. His life had a new direction and meaning that he hadn’t even asked for. God’s capacity to bless with healing mercy is not limited by the scope of our asking. Our dreams and hopes and prayers are often too modest for God.

You can spend the rest of Sunday afternoon, if you would like, wondering why this one man in Jericho was healed and why all the other blind and hearing-impaired and disabled persons in that town didn’t get healed. But if you do that, you are stopping at the first, most superficial question. You are going to miss the miracle of the transformation that did take place in one man’s life. You are going to miss the message of this and all the miracle stories: that the power of Almighty God was uniquely present in the person of Christ. It is still present among those who gather in his name and offer healing and wholeness in his name. The message is that the reign of God is not something for which we have to wait another 10,000 years; the kingdom of God is among us. That is not to say that life will be easy or that people will never go blind or die in fires or be tormented by the demons of mental illness. It is to say that all those destructive forces will not have the last word. There is another player on the field, whose name is God, and God will carry the day in the end.

“Now I see,” Job said. And with the healing of Bartimaeus, you and I can begin to see not what the answers are, but that there is more going on than meets the eye. Do you remember how in the Wizard of Oz there is a moment when the screen ceases being all black and white and becomes Technicolor? That’s the kind of vision God wants to give us today. That kind of miraculous healing, so that we stop seeing just on the surface and come to understand healing in terms of spiritual as well as physical restoration; so that we come to see that there is deeper meaning, that beyond what we expect are the great things that God can do.

I think of the ministry of this church and how we are called to do what we can in the name and through the power of Jesus Christ, the Great Physician. We who follow his way, if we do anything, will want to offer his healing power, want to position ourselves so that God’s love can flow afresh through us and through the city and into the world.

I think about how we might look at ourselves and begin to wonder, how am I living my life? Am I living in a way that glorifies God and blesses other people? We start praying as the Scottish poet Robert Burns taught us, “O wad some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us!”

I read about a man who studied the story of the healing of the blind man in the Gospel, and the more he studied it, the more he began to catch an uncomfortable glimpse of his own blindness, of how he was neglecting his wife and his children because he had his eye on getting ahead and making a lot of money. And so like Bartimaeus, he prayed for the power of Christ to cure his blindness and to illumine his path to a more balanced and whole life.5 “Let me see again,” he prayed, and miraculously God answered his prayer.

And so the final question is not why bad things happen, but why, in our often heartless and cruel world, so many great and beautiful things happen.6 And why it is that even in the midst of the terrible, there is always enough strength to get us through. There is an answer to that question. It is the answer our faith tradition has offered for thousands of years. And I can sum it up in a single word: God,

who from our mother’s arms
has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love
and still is ours today.”

Amen.

Notes
1. Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Avon Books, 1981).
2. Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek.
3. Randall Zachman, “The Promise and Challenge of Reformed Theology,” The Bulletin of the Institute for Reformed Theology, Spring/Summer 2001.
4. Archibald MacLeish, J.B. (Houghton Mifflin, 1956) p. 11.
5. James J. Bacik, “Reflection,” June 2003.
6. As noted by William H. Willimon in Pulpit Resource, vol. 31, no. 4,
October–December 2003.