Rev Barbara Peddie

Living pictures.

A sermon on Job 1:1 2:1-10, and Mark 10:2-16. October 2024.

What’s your picture – your image – of God? What is it that underpins and sustains your faith? What keeps you here, in this community? Is it a shared vision, or a shared hope, or perhaps a confidence that we’re on the same path even if the images of God that we carry are wildly different? I suspect that those images are indeed different. I suspect that for most of us, the way we think about God has changed throughout our lives, and is still changing.

When I was small, I had a book of Bible stories and God was a venerable and benignant gentleman in sweeping robes. The problem with that was, that for years afterwards, somewhere in my head there sat a picture of God with a familiar shape – God with skin – just like us. There’s a lot to be said for the Jewish and Islamic prohibition on making images of God – those early pictures can take a lot of dislodging.

In the lectionary readings for today we’ve got several pictures of God, and I have to say that I don’t like all of them! But maybe you do. All of us will get something a little different from these readings. All of us will even get something subtly different each time we read them – or hear them. Because whenever we engage with something, a sort of relationship is set up, and the way it works will depend on where we are at that moment.

Take the Book of Job. It’s often said that Job is a book for the hard times. We throw the phrase ‘the patience of Job’ around, as though that’s the main message we can get from this book. We often explore that theme when looking at Job – and it may well surface over the next few weeks of readings. But I want to use a different lens this morning. The first two chapters set the scene for all that’s to follow. Job’s life comes apart in a truly horrendous way. He loses his property, his children, his health – and his wife suggests that his faith should go out of the window in the same way.

What picture of God does this offer? God and Satan (the accuser) are making bets – playing with Job. You know the sort of thing. I’ll put my shirt on this man – I’ll bet that he’ll be my loyal follower. It’s like two opponents moving pieces around on a chessboard, except that the pieces here are human lives and the moves are degrees of destruction. God as manipulator – God using people to prove a point and score off a rival for power. That’s not my picture of God.

The forgotten person here is Job’s nameless wife. She’s only there as a pawn. Some label her unsympathetic, and leave it there, as if it’s the only thing that needs to be said. She’s a woman on the margin – like many women in patriarchal societies – but in this book, she’s the one who sees, way before Job does, what’s at stake here. She’s the one who asks the sharp questions about the suffering of the innocent – they were her children as well as Job’s after all. She’s the one who lays out the conflict between innocence and integrity on the one hand, and an affirmation of the goodness of God on the other. And I rather think that as far as she is concerned, the innocent were the children – not Job.

Job wasn’t ready to engage with that question. The text goes on to tell us that for the next seven days he said nothing at all while his friends harangued him, and gave him loads of advice. And when he did, finally, open his mouth, his words echoed those of his wife. He cursed the day of his birth. He didn’t go quite so far as to curse God – but he came close to it!

It’s Job’s original picture of God we’re looking at here – God the manipulator. Job had bought into the idea that God was on the side of the righteous – he thought that the way it worked was that God would naturally reward those who kept the covenant law. Pile up the brownie points and you’ll be all right. No wonder he fell apart when this God failed him so comprehensively.

It’s an all too familiar cry – why me? Why my children, my partner, my people? Most of us have probably had that reaction at times, even if not for long. There are several ways to move from here. One way is to do what Job did at first, and go under – and decide that God has it in for you – you must have deserved it somehow. That way still surfaces whenever people try to tie disaster – all disaster – directly to sin. I don’t want the picture of God the merciless judge – not even God the impartial judge.

Another way is to decide that all this disaster means that there is no God – only an empty dream. The problem of the suffering of the innocent has driven many people out of the church, and for very honest reasons. Some of the most compassionate people have taken this path. We’ve lived through so many cataclysmic horrors in the last century that sometimes there seems to be no other way but to say, there is no God. If we’re talking about a God who plays games, and makes bargains, then I think they’re right! If that’s your image of God, then you’re right to leave the church.

We need the gospel to put in the brushstrokes and the vibrant colours. The reading is headed ‘the teaching on divorce’ but, like most of the teaching of Jesus, there’s more here than meets the eye. It’s doesn’t simply say divorce isn’t on. We need to remember that the context of marriage in first century Palestine was that it often wasn’t a good space for women. Jewish men could dump wives on the slightest of pretexts, and still be within the letter of the law. Women were property – they had no rights, and no financial security. Jesus required a mutuality of relationship. For him women and men both had rights in the partnership of marriage – and neither could act without regard to the other. Both bring themselves into the relationship and both are of equal value within it. Jesus makes it  very plain that children also have rights of relationship.

How does this change the picture of God? It changes mine. I can’t relate to the ‘omniGod’ – omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnisufficient –always there, beyond all imagining, never-changing I can’t be doing with a static God! What the God of the gospels offers us is the God of relationships.

The God who is creator and co-creator, who suffers with people, who holds all creatures in loving concern. The God who hurts when a sparrow falls, and plays with the dolphins, the God who walks on the margins and continually moves towards us. The God who laughs as well as cries, and dances with the circling stars. The generous God. The alluring God. I don’t want to lose the wonder and mystery -– but I want to hold to the God of relationships.

Relationship means change. If God is intimately connected with God’s creation, then God will suffer when creation suffers, and God will be changed. We’re all changed by everything that happens to us. Our relationships change, and change again as we move through life. Part of living in God’s kingdom is learning to be open to the changes, and to grow through them.

At the beginning of Job’s story, Job wasn’t prepared to be open. He shut down. It wasn’t until he let himself be angry, and let himself be open, that he could move into the dialogue with God – hurl all the questions at God and entered into a relationship with God.

Our most amazing image of God is the incarnation. For all time, God is intimately in relationship with creation. And with each one of us. I do believe that God does not desire me to fall into darkness and oblivion. I do believe that God loves me. I do believe that God holds all created beings in this strong love. It’s not always easy to hold onto that, and I go through times when I want to shut down – but I try. I also believe that my images of God will go on changing.

The pictures will go on changing – what’s your picture?