• Job 1:1; 2:1-10

[This Sunday begins a five week sequential reading of the Book of Job as the first option in the RCL.]

Although there are more ancient versions from neighboring cultures of a story like this story about  Job, the canonical version clearly reflects the Hebrew wisdom tradition.  The story begins by establishing that Job was a person “blameless and upright,” a loyalist to the Lord.  The story opens with God hosting a general audience when suddenly Satan appears unexpectedly.  God asks Satan, “Where have you come form?”  Satan reports his whereabouts; he has visited every corner of the earth, “to and fro,” “up and down.”  In his travels, Satan reports he has met a man named Job, “there is no one like him on earth….”  Satan wagers that even Job could be made to “curse you to your face,” given the human weakness to do whatever it takes to save his own skin.  Test him, God replies.  Satan begins by inflicting painful and hideous boils “from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.”  Job’s wife taunts him, See what your integrity and loyalty have gotten you!  But Job responds to Satan’s first test sagaciously: If we accept the good from God we have to accept the bad as well.  Job passes the first test, but there are six more to come.

• Psalm 26

The psalmist expresses confidence that she can withstand the Lord’s tests because she has “walked” in the Lord’s ways and not “stumbled.”  Whatever travails come her way, her foot “sands on level ground.”

OR

• Genesis 2:18-24

With obvious parallels to Babylonian creation stories, this version emphasizes the Lord God who brings order out of chaos.  In this excerpt, God says that “it is not good that man should be alone.”  So God forms “every animal of the field and every bird of the air” for companionship.  But none is an adequate “partner.”  God takes a rib from “the man,” creates “a woman” and, when he awakes, God presents her.  Because she is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” he calls her “woman.”  This explains why “a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”

• Psalm 8

The psalmist addresses the Lord as Creator, “whose splendor was told over the heavens,” and who endowed humankind a unique place within it.  At the beginning of this psalm, there is a saying– “from the mouths of babes and sucklings/You found strength”– whose meaning, according to Robert Alter, is not obvious.   Alter speculates, “Perhaps the innocence of infants is imagined as a source of strength.” (The Book of Psalms, p. 22)

• Hebrews 1:1-4;2:5-12

[Today  seven Sunday sequential readings from “the Letter to to Hebrews” commence.]

Although titled a “letter,” the lyrical power of this text might better be regarded as a hymn.  It opens with gratitude that, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways,” and then quickly names the object of this veneration, “a Son,” who is “the reflection of God’s glory and exact imprint of God’s very being….”  After his crucifixion and resurrection, “when he made purification for sin, he took his rightful place “at the right hand of the majesty on high….”  Peculiarly, the writer quotes Psalm 8, but only attributes it to “someone once said,” that humankind has “control” over “all things.”  Even Jesus submitted to this “control” for a little while, “so that he, too, “might taste death for everyone.”  It is fitting, therefore, that God’s “children” are now regarded by Jesus as his “brothers and sisters.”

• Mark 10:2-16

The status of husbands and wives varied significantly within the Judaism of Mark’s/Jesus’ time and even more within  the larger context of the customs and laws of the Greeco-Roman world.  The most conservative Jewish position was that a wife had no rights.  The Jewish position to which Jesus seems to allude in Mark’s gospel  is that a husband could divorce his wife.  Under Roman law, a wife could initiate divorce against her husband or vice verse. Mark writes that Jesus said that divorce and remarriage are “adultery” no matter who initiates it.  From this specific contemporary topic of apparent great interest, Mark abruptly returns to the larger theme of most of Jesus’ teaching, “the Kingdom of God.”  Some in the ever-present crowds around Jesus bring children “that he might touch them.”  As usual, Mark presents the disciples as out of touch with the significance of the occasion when they rebuffed the adults and children.  When Jesus hears and sees what is happening, “he was indignant and says to them, ‘Let the little children come to me’….”  He then adds a puzzling statement, “It is to such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs.”  Then he adds one of those thresholds to enter the “kingdom” that seems virtually impossible to cross, “whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  In one concluding sentence, Mark paints an unforgettable picture: “And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them and blessed them.”

These readings, psalms and today’s gospel seem to be considering two unrelated themes– humankind’s “control” over life on earth and “innocence” as known only in a child.

The psalmist places humankind in a unique position in creation; one creation story gives to “man” the naming rights for all other creatures; the writer to “the Hebrews” assumes that humankind has “control” over things on earth, to which even Jesus submitted for God’s larger purposes; Job passes the first of several tests with a piece of venerable wisdom that can only come from the advantage of experience and age.  These biblical passages take for granted humankind’s capacity to dominate creation, to understand its order and manipulate it; they honor the accumulated knowledge and insight that come with experience.  But two sayings disturb these seemingly settled assumptions.  Out of nowhere, the psalmist plops down an odd saying: “Out of the mouths of infants and children/your majesty is praised above the heavens.”  Then Mark’s gospel presents a saying by Jesus that seems completely out of context from what comes before and after and defies any obvious interpretation: Unless we become “as a little child” we will “never enter” into God’s reign; for “to such belong” God’s reign.  And then to dramatize the saying, Jesus personally takes up  children and places his hand on them in blessing!

Jean-Luis Chretien did not write about these particular passages, but he did write an insightful  essay which might help unscramble these seeming contradictions.  In The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, Chretien differentiates between the settled and the unsettled, mastery and awe, memory and what we have forgotten.  On the one hand, the power of what we believe is settled, mastered, “controlled,” remembered  is significant.Indeed ir is vital to our survival.  It requires the development of life-long skills that enable us to predict and have some sense of order about life.  Communally, it leads to the disciplines of history, philosophy, the maths, and the sciences.  All of these skills are derived from our capacity for memory.  Chretien writes: “Memory reminds us of past satisfactions and thus permits us to desire; it is the principle of repetition.” (p.86)

But for most of his essay, Chretien turns to the other side of this story.  He notes these powers derived from the human capacity for memory also give us an “illusion,” (his word), the “illusion” that we have mastered something.  But, “When everything is preserved without lack, something is nonetheless lacking.” (p.50)  Furthermore, human memory– in all its capacities– is not perfect, objective, disembodied.  Secondly, this memory is necessarily selective; we can only remember some things because we have forgotten other things.  “Forgetting is the power that archives memories, conserves them, protects them and preserves them.” (p.56)  However, we are so dazzled by the powers derived from human memory/control that we loose “memory” of what Chretien calls  the “immemorial.”  Beyond what we can remember, master, “control”,  settle, there is an awareness, no matter how marginal in our daily busyness, of something larger, more lasting than ourselves.  Quoting Husserl, Chretien continues:

“I am now, and this now belongs to a horizon of the past that can be unfolded to infinity.  And that in itself means: I was eternally.  To this past without end corresponds a future without end.” (p.65)

And what is the source of this awareness of infinity stretching out before we were and after we are?  For Chretien it is God, the God of scripture, which is “the only possible memorial of what is radically accessible to our memory.” (p.87)  God, the biblical God specifically, disrupts our “illusion” of “control and leaves us with a “wound.”  Chretien continues:

“The ceaseless coming of God to memory, by which he (sic) is unforgettable, does not signify that we hold absolute within ourselves, nor does it mean that we could enjoy it in withdrawing into an interior fortress.  God comes to memory in order to strike it with a wound of love that eternity itself could not close again.  And this influx that tears us open shows us that he has set his heart on us in creating us in  his image” (p.86)

Citing passages from St. Augustine’s Confessions and The Trinity, Chretien describes this disruptive/wounding action of God this way:

“…far from being a central object, God is eminently radiant for our memory, for what makes us present to ourselves; God is present to us only in comprehending us and exceeding us on every side.”  This “unforgettable is not what we personally grasp and what can withdraw from memory, but what does not cease to grasp us and from which we cannot withdraw.” (p.90)

Human “memory” in all it splendid capacities, give us the “illusion” of “control.”  But God, as revealed in scripture, causes us to “remember” what we had “forgotten” — “God comes to us in order to strike us  with a wound of love…”  “and this influx tears us open” and “shows us that he has set his heart on us in creating us in his image.” 

Chretien cites two specific traits that return to us when we “remember” what we had “forgotten”– hope and and receptivity to the sudden appearance of what we cannot anticipate, (due to the “illusion” of “control.”)  We hope again against what experience has taught us is impractical, if not impossible. 

“Hoping goes out to meet what it exceed it by nature (and only hoping can do so, since it is purified).”  “Its light precedes us, it already passes though us, for the very act of hoping for the unhoped for, and thus for hoping otherwise and wholly other than most people hope; that act is already hoped for.”  “When it merges, the unhoped for necessarily has a sudden and discontinuous character.  It surprises, since it has not been foreseen, anticipated, contained in  advance by our thoughts,  It strikes like lightning, all at once.” (p.106)  “What is seized, in  a single blink of an eye, no amount of searching could enable them to expect.  The instant of the gift brings together the unforgettable and the unhoped for in the gratuity of excess.  To find without seeking is to let oneself find without having held the initiative.  And letting oneself find is needless when it is God who does the finding.” (p.113)

Experience teaches us.  It gives us skills, mastery, the capacity to predict and bring some semblance of order and at least a workable predictability.  It takes many years to accumulate and we honor as “wisdom.”  But it also slowly closes out openness to the “impossible,” the “unexpected,” which are God’s specialties!  Like cataracts, which also come with age sometimes, we no longer see God’s world in its wonder, possibility, glory, play, hopefulness as God sees it, according to scripture.  Like a child, wonder never ceases.

Seeing the world the way God sees it, anything is possible again. Is this close to what Jesus wanted us to get when he said that “Whoever does not receive he Kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  For to such “belongs” the reign of God. This is a wisdom beyond wisdom, seeing beyond sight; it is a return to wonder after knowledge.