Article
- Date:
- Sunday 23rd June 2024
Year B, The Forth Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- St Peter's, Woodmancote
- Service:
- Matins
- Readings:
- Job 38.1-11
Mark 4.35-41
After 35 lengthy and knotty Chapters of dialogue between Job and his supposed friends about what God can and will do and not do, you can understand why God sounds a bit irritated when He speaks out of the whirlwind; He is not a rational, argumentative philosopher, He is God and He can do what he thinks fit. This omnipotence, this refusal to become entangled in human logic, is presented in a more gentle form in Mark's Gospel when Jesus calms the storm.
It seems to me that this pair of well-matched Readings raises a critical issue about what it means to be God. In our contemporary frame of reference we tend to begin our prayers "Loving god" but it will not have escaped your notice that almost all the prayers in the BCP begin "Almighty god", a phrase well suited to a time when human beings felt much less in control of their lives than we do now. The 16th Century, in spite of the major developments of the Renaissance, was still a place of terrible plagues not susceptible to medicine; it was a place of flimsy sea-going ships with dodgy maps, no way of measuring longitude and no weather forecasts; and the scientific area where least progress had been made but where most was needed was in agriculture where crop failure was not infrequent and always disastrous.
200 years after the 1662 version of the BCP, the European so-called 'Enlightenment' had given human beings unwonted self-confidence so that God did not seem anything like so "almighty" as He once was such that rationalists began to ask questions about why God acted or acts as He did or does, or fails to act.
Here is the classic question which we must face squarely: Why does God 'allow' bad stuff to happen? There are five points to begin with which all in their different ways relate to the exercise of free will:
- First, we were made to love God and each other but the exercise of love is impossible without free will; there is no love outside free will
- Secondly, the operation of free will can only take place in an ecology of imperfection; if everything were perfect, there could be no exercise of free will; thus, because God created us to love He created us as imperfect, for which, as Julian of Norwich noted, we cannot be held responsible but through God’s grace we can strive to make decisions in favour of love and against selfishness
- Thirdly, most of the bad things that happen, including, for example, climate change, happen because of our individual but even more so our collective misuse of free will
- Fourthly, human imperfection is not only necessary for love, it is also necessary for challenge and creativity; whereas we have choices and challenges, angels do not
- Fifthly, one of our challenges is the ecological lottery of volcanos and diseases but that is simply part of the planet we inhabit which enables our kind of life to flourish.
To sum up, it is a mistake, technically called a category error, to expect God to behave as we would wish to behave but do not. God cannot be expected to behave like a human being.
And here is a clue: critics always expect God to behave like we should not like we do which makes God some kind of perfect human being but that is not good enough to make such an entity God.
Carrying on from this, a God who was only a perfect human being would lack the capacity for infinite resources, mostly applied to our case, for infinite mercy to form a component of infinite love. God is above even the best of our mercy and justice, so far above that God in the Incarnate Christ saved us from the mortal consequence of our imperfection. In a nutshell, then, the grand mystery of humankind is why God made us imperfect creatures of free will and then saved us from the mortal consequence of its misuse, to which the answer is that the love was can generate is worth more than the consequences of our misuse. To be enabled to love is an incalculable privilege which we should honour and treasure.
So, back to the whirlwind. When all is said and done, and, too often, too much is said and too little done, the point of the passage from Job and of the calming of the storm in Mark is to draw the line we must respect between what is of God and what is of humanity. Our challenge, through the use of our brains, the power of prayer and attentiveness to the Holy Spirit is to build what bridges we may between ourselves as created and God as our Creator. This is our constructive defence against the pride of expecting God to behave in our image instead of us behaving in His image.
That, you may be relieved to hear, is the end of the theology, so let me finish with three simple points:
- If my way of understanding our created purpose to love of our own free will is correct, then it is natural to love and it is natural to be happy. For those in authority over us to keep on calling us sinners is a ruthless power play which distorts our created purpose. We will misuse free will, we will be sorry for doing so, we will hopefully learn from our mistakes, we will think more, pray more and heed the Spirit more and, in the end, we will hopefully learn more and behave better; we will be virtuous by practising virtue.
- Secondly, in everything we do, the whole will be more than the sum of its parts and not a worthless thing for being imperfect; as there is no love without free will, there is no art without imperfection
- And, finally, feeling guilty for what we are is corrosive; the only sin worse than the self-indulgence of guilt is the arrogance of pride.
We need to be much clearer about the difference between God and us: He calms the storm, we struggle to plough our way through it.