Perfect Through Sufferings

Sermon for Proper 22 B (RCL), Offered by Nathan Ferrell at HS, Bellmawr & St. Luke’s, Westville

Texts: Job 1:1,2:1-10; Psalm 26; Hebrews 1:1-4,2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16

“It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Hebrews 2:10).

Dear friends in Christ: this morning, we need to take some time this morning to wrestle with this question: Why? Why is it fitting, as the Letter to the Hebrews states, that God should make our Lord Jesus perfect through sufferings? Why was his cross and passion necessary? Could not the work of our salvation have been accomplished in another way?

It would be a great mistake to think that this question did not haunt the minds of the earliest disciples, to think that they did not struggle to understand the sufferings of the Lord. In fact, they searched through the Hebrew scriptures and they prayed and talked together to try and understand how the Lord’s suffering fit into the entirety of God’s plan for the world.

We can actually see this tension in the text of Hebrews itself. The text that we heard this morning says this: “we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” But many other of the ancient manuscripts wrote that last phrase to say this: “so that apart from God he might taste death for everyone.”

You can see right here how the early church struggled with this question: did Jesus taste death by the grace of God, that is as an intentional part of God’s will, or did he taste death apart from God, that is in violation of God’s will? Or to put it simply: whas Jesus supposed to be crucified, or was this a victory by the forces of evil which God overcame in the resurrection?

The question has never been fully answered. These two ways of viewing the crucifixion remain in the church to this very day. Did God plan the crucifixion, or did God allow the crucifixion?

The reason for this tension ought to be rather clear to all of us. It is perfectly natural for us to assume that God is always victorious; that in a conflict with human beings, God naturally will always win! Right! After all, God is the Creator of all things! God cannot be beaten or conquered by human strength. This was the thinking of the Hebrew people, of course. They all believed that God was to send the Messiah to destroy the evil forces among humanity and to free God’s people from tyranny. This Messiah could not be defeated, of course. After conquering, the Messiah would continue to reign for ever.

Did you know that the Koran teaches the same kind of thinking? You can see how Mohammed used this same natural kind of thinking as he developed the Koran. Among the Arab peoples, the concept of honor been prominent in shaping their relationships. Of course, in this way of thinking, true prophets are always honored by God and therefore they cannot be defeated by sinful human beings. This is what Mohammed believed, and so this is why the Koran refutes the idea that Jesus died on the cross. To Mohammed, Jesus was a true prophet, and so God must honor him and guard him from sinners. Mohammed suggested that it was someone else who was crucified instead, because God would never allow such a calamity!

Can you see it? This is the normal, the natural way of thinking. It is a very simple worldview, a black and white way of seeing reality. God is right; sinful humanity is wrong. Justice prevails; lawbreakers are punished. God wins; evil loses.

The problem is, however, that reality is not quite that simple, is it? It’s just not that easy to put into a simple little box like that.

This is where the story of Job comes in. The entire story of Job is an attempt to understand the dynamic at work between a good and loving and all-powerful God and the forces of evil which seem in general to have their way on the earth.

(Quick note to all of you: if you have never sat down and read straight through the book of Job, you really should! It’s a great read: a wee bit long-winded in the middle, but the poetry there is beautiful and it truly is a compelling story! Anyway…)

Unfortunately, the reading that we have here for today from Job is torn horribly out of context. Job is stricken in every conceivable way: his children are killed, his wealth and property is all destroyed, and finally his body is afflicted. At first, as we see here, Job “persists in his integrity”. He accepts everything as part of God’s plan. And yet, throughout the book, as he talks with his wife and his friends about his unfortunate situation, Job grows more and more despondent. His friends speak with the normal wisdom, the natural view of life that we just discussed. That is, Job must be suffering as a punishment for his sins. God is just and serves justice to the sinner. But Job insists on his innocence with vehemence and rejects their simple thinking. Finally, Job brings everything that God has done into question and declares that it would be better if he had never been born. He ends up filled with bitterness until God speaks directly to him out of a great storm.

God speaks and puts Job back in his place. “Where were you,” God asks, “when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4). And the final result is this: God is God, and we human beings are not. We are nothing but dust and ashes, mere specks in the life of the universe.

And yet…and yet, God loves each of us and cares for each one of us.

Suffering is so very difficult to understand. If God is so good and so loving and so wise and so all-powerful, then why does God allow this suffering to continue?
If God truly is more ready to give us blessings than we ever even ask for, then why does God send or allow evil to come to us?

Does God plan for our sufferings, or does God simply allow them? And why?

There are no answers to these questions. Life is not a simple black and white affair. In the end, God is God and we are not. Trust is required, faith is necessary to live through the sufferings of life without becoming bitter and hard-hearted. I believe that Job’s initial question is a good one for all of us to consider: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10).

Remember where we began: It was fitting that God should make the pioneer of our salvation perfect through sufferings (Hebrews 2:10). He is the pioneer, the trailblazer, the trendsetter, the guide for this new life that we are now leading.

And so the question comes right back around to us: if God was to make our Lord perfect through sufferings, then are we ready for the same thing? In some mysterious way that is beyond our understanding, I believe that God uses our suffering to perfect us so that we can be of service in the kingdom of God, shaped and molded into the kind of people that God would have us to be.

It doesn’t make any sense in the normal way of thinking, and it can be quite painful, but God is God, and we are not. And this God, who is faithful and loving and wise – this God we can trust with our lives. Amen.