• Job 23:1-9,16-17

Job’s trials had brought him to near death.  He had argued with his friends, who were convinced Job’s plight was due to some unconfessed sins.  Now Job realizes that all past assumptions about God by him and others were no longer adequate.  This God can be unavailable at just the time we most want clarity and presence.  “Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might even come to his dwelling!”  “…I cannot see him.”

• Psalm 22:1-15

The psalmist feels “forsaken” by God.  His ancestors trusted God, who freed them, but he regards himself as a “worm and no man.”  He calls upon the Lord, who “drew me out of the womb.”  He pleads, “Do not be far from me….”

OR

• Amos 5:6-7,10-15

In a rare interval of peace and prosperity, Amos emerges to remind God’s people of their continuing failure to establish justice.  They will not “trample on the poor” with impunity, he warns.

• Psalm 90:12-17

The psalmist reflects on her finite years contrasted with the timelessness of God and asks for God’s “kindness” so that we can “be glad” in whatever time we have.  May the times we are “afflicted” and we suffer “adversity” be endured with the memory of “Your works” to us and to our children.  May God bless us.

• Hebrews 4:12-16

The lyricist of the “Letter to the Hebrews” marvels at the fact that God speaks to humankind and the impact of God’s speaking.  God’s speaking is “living and active,” it cuts to the bone, “right to the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”  Like a steady, intense, search- light, “No creature can hide; all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the One to whom we must render an account.”  Suitably harrowed, we are now ready to hear the good news.  We have a “high priest” who knows what our lives are like and, therefore, sympathizes with us.  “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we many receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of needs.”

• Mark 10: 17-31

Most biblical narratives in general and Mark’s in particular are not refined, polished or systematic; they are bold, idiosyncratic, full of exaggeration and chocked with surprises.  Taken for their actual worth, even twenty centuries (and more) of theologizing, moralizing, sentimentalizing and sermonizing should not decrease their impact.

Mark’s story of the wealthy, pious man who goes away dejected and Jesus’ uncompromising saying retain their sting.  A man approaches Jesus with a sincere religious question.  But when he addresses Jesus as “good,” Jesus reminds him that only God is good.  (Is Jesus testing the man’s belief about Jesus or is Jesus planting a question in the man’s  memory?) Jesus replies to the man’s question with an impressionistic summary of the Decalogue.  The seeker replies that he has “kept all these since my youth.”  Now the narrative begins its surprising twists and turns.  Mark pointedly writes that Jesus looked at the man and “loved him.”  “You lack one thing,” Jesus tells the man who moved Jesus so deeply, “go and sell all that you have and give the money to the poor….”  Then, and only then, you will finally find what you are seeking.  Emotions rise.  The man is “shocked.”  He walks away “grieving.”  Mark now tells us that the man was not only devout, he was also wealthy– “he had many possessions.”  Now Jesus turns to the disciples and upsets them as well.  After saying that the wealthy will find it difficult to “enter the kingdom of God,” he offers an image that implies it is actually impossible to enter!  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who has  “many possessions” to participate in God’s reign!  Mark writes they were “astounded.”  Struggling with the meaning of this absolute assertion, they begin to wonder if their following Jesus is futile; they ask, “then who can be saved?”  Here Jesus utters the coup de main: “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God: for God all things are possible.”  Peter seems not to have heard this astonishing statement because he keeps pressing his point to Jesus about the loyalty of the disciples; “we have left everything to follow you.”  Jesus promises that they will receive a “hundredfold” of all they left behind.  This emotionally rocky episode filed with shock, astonishment, love, dejection and puzzlement concludes with an aphorism that embeds itself in the imagination: “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”  In this story, so remarkably told by Mark, Jesus goes to extremes.  He begins by maintaining traditional teachings regarding our obligations to God and to neighbor, he then elevates it to an absolute ideal which no human human can attain; in the same breath, he asserts that with God, however, “nothing is impossible.”

Emmanuel Levinas was a student of Husserl at the end of Husserl’s teaching career and of Heidegger at the beginning of his.  He played the crucial task of introducing  of introducing to French intellectuals the work of his mentors with translation into French.  After this pivotal contribution, he made his own original and unique contributions.  Over a lifetime of writing, Levinas developed the notion that for us God always remains more than “other,” God is “other than other.”  That is, we have no experience that makes God familiar to us.  (Is it not unlike the realization that Job reached when he said, “I cannot see God,” which is echoed by the psalmist when she feels alienated from the very God who “drew me out of the womb.”  And, the God who Jesus insists is the only one worthy to be called “good?”)  Therefore, Levinas wrote, our experience of God can only be a “trace,” but even this “trace” still disrupts, challenges us and makes demands on us.  It “separates” us from ordinary human conventions and relationships, Levinas insisted.  (Is this akin to Jesus’ insistence that we must leave all behind if we are to enter God’s reign?)  However, Levinas wrote, the trace of the “wholly other” God shows up to us explicitly and concretely in one specific place– the “other,” the friend, the neighbor, the stranger, whom we encounter daily, whose ethical requirements impinge on me. Levinas insisted that the needs of the “other”  demand that I justify my existence.  If I eat, someone else has less to eat or nothing to eat.  (Is this the kind of absolute understanding of justice akin to Jesus’ insistence that entry into God’s reign requires jettisoning “everything” and giving it to the poor?) 

God is unavailable to us fully on our terms: “I cannot see God,” Job regrets.  Jesus elevates traditional moral teachings about love of God and others to an absolute we will never attain.  It is a redress we can never fulfill.  However, somehow, it is in this life-long, never-achievable struggle to achieve God’s impossibly perfect justice that we discover our humanity.  It makes impossible demands for impossible sacrifice of “everything,” but then makes the promise that we will gain a “hundredfold.”  This is the entrance to God’s reign:  “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”  This impossible goal is a struggle we undertake with this promise: “let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace….”  Attempting this “impossible” goal or even occasionally coming close enough to know it– this is what makes us human.