Year B 2024

Mark 10:2-16

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Love that Wipes Away Tears

How appropriate it seems that today we read from the book of Job, a story that revolves around innocent human suffering just after experiencing the fury of nature that has caused and is causing us and others around us to suffer innocently. Since the beginning of time there has been no issue more difficult for Judaism and Christianity than to try and understand why good people suffer. We want to know why, the causes and the reasons for it and Job teaches us that it’s okay to ask why. The Hebrew people and their Jewish descendants sought like us to make sense of suffering, and the OT supports a number of different understandings of it.

None of them have been successful in answering the question as why God allows suffering and what purpose there is in suffering. However, the NT does narrow the focus of the question to the justice of God and claims that suffering can bring positive results, such as trust, endurance, and compassion. We have been and are experiencing trust, endurance and compassion after Helene made her appearance. Still, we continue to wrestle with the issue because suffering is hard to understand. We refer to it often as a mystery.

Sometimes we find the reason and see clearly the cause and the effect and other times suffering just comes out of the blue which can make us feel fear and anger at God. The texts for today may not be able to answer all our questions on this issue but we may find some help in that the first two texts, Job and Hebrews speak directly to the problem of suffering, and the Gospel text hints at something essential to our Christian understanding on this issue. All the texts will remind us how the love of God or the love God creates in us makes life better, makes it easier to cope in the tough times because being a person of faith, living a godly life does not ensure that we will never suffer.

Faith does not save us from suffering and this is one of the points that Job’s story points out. The book of Job, of which we will read from for the next three Sundays, does give us hints at an answer to why good people suffer. The date of the writing is unknown but most agree that it was written in the sixth or fifth centuries BCE. The story describes a test for one person, but this magnificent story is also a typical test for the rest of us. Will we remain faithful to what is true and good up until the end, like Job? The Lord God was so confident in Job’s virtue that the Lord accepted Satan’s challenge to Job’s faith.

The author implies that Satan is lurking everywhere, “wandering throughout the earth.” So in the parts of this story that are skipped by today’s passage, we hear of a series of calamities that wipe out Job’s livestock, possessions, and family. In minutes, Job hears that he has lost everything. Even so he says, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job remains faithful even as the drama escalates and he is afflicted physically. He refuses to speak against the Lord, implying that faith means accepting both the good and the bad. Even so, Job’s lot is hard for us to understand because the presence of pain and suffering in our world has challenged us all.

Yet, we are a people for the most part who believe in the goodness of God and are to have faith and trust in God’s goodness. What Job’s story tells us is that we are never abandoned by God—rather God walks with us, as God walked with Job, providing comfort in all things. This understanding will not meet all our needs when there are difficult times; rather, it does call us to look to our faith and to a renewed prayer life with God. In conversation with God, we, like Job, discover God’s presence with us in all situations. God understands what we are enduing and can transform our suffering into good as God did at the cross.

Jesus’ triumph on the cross tells us that God’s work in Christ does not disregard its pain and brokenness. On the contrary, it demonstrates the depth of God’s love for us and drives us back into the world. Hebrews today suggests that if we travel the Way of Jesus, the Way of love, the way of the cross, even if the justice of suffering is not apparent, we know we are not alone. God has suffered and still suffers for us and with us. We might even say Jesus had to become Job, suffering unjustly at the hands of the powers of his day to taste death for everyone. God made Jesus the pioneer of our salvation made perfect through suffering. Jesus did this in order to carry out God’s plan to bring saving grace to us.

And as we see in the gospels, Jesus seeks to alleviate and reverse the suffering of human beings brought about by sickness, poverty, and imprisonment. The teaching today addresses the issue of treatment of woman and treatment of children. Instead of an iron clad law of treatment, Jesus sought rather the compassionate spirit of his teachings-for both men and women-that it might inform whatever we do, so as to bring glory to God. Bad things happen but the love of God, the love God creates in us toward others when we receive the kingdom as a child does, make’s life better. Love for others and seeking God in our lives, makes it easier to cope in the tough times. We learn to live with the mystery of suffering as Job did.

Because we can’t fully answer this mystery on this side of eternity so the questions now are: Will we seek to use the suffering in our lives for something positive? Will we remain faithful to what is true and good up until the end? The kingdom of God which Jesus tells us is coming in and through his ministry, overcomes all suffering. And while we must accept the reality of it now as part of life and must deal with it as best as possible, we know no matter what that God is with us and loves us and we are also know we are to work against all forms of human suffering even though we know it cannot be eliminated until some final day in the future when God “will wipe every tear from their eyes”.