Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, November 6th, 2022

November 6th, 2022

In the name of the One, Holy, and Undivided Trinity. Anyone who followed Jesus around for any

length of time would have learned from him that ultimately life has the final word rather than death.

In fact, many of Jesus’ most repeated themes have to do with making choices where we arrange our

lives around the strong currents of love and life rather than let fear and death twist and distort all that

we hold dear. He famously proclaimed, “I am resurrection and I am life” (John 11:25). In the gospel

reading we just read together, a group of people confront Jesus openly mocking what he was saying

as irrational and stupid. They do so by presenting him with something of puzzle meant to expose

how absurd this resurrection thing is. Citing the law of Moses mandating the care of widows, they

challenge Jesus to explain what would happen if a woman’s husband died and she remained

childless, so she was taken in by his brother, but he died, and then by the third brother who also died,

then a fourth, then a fifth, a sixth, and a seventh–all dead. Then she dies too. What does all of Jesus’

talk about everlasting life have to say about such a horrible series of events? How does it explain

such evils? You can hear their mocking tone in their question about whose wife this longsuffering

woman turns out to be. Their imagined story of horror is a story with death as the central, driving

force, if I have ever heard one.

There always seems to be people engaging in the rhetoric of death and using any tragedy

they come upon for their purposes. Oh, you have heard it! It goes something like this, “You know

that precious good thing you want to have happen in the world, yes that one, it is not going happen,

ever, because, you know [fill in the blank “bad things”]. And even if it does happen, it won’t make

a difference, it won’t even dent the status quo. In fact, the thing you want may not even be the good

thing you think it is because there may well be unintended consequences and you’ll likely just

make things worse.” Ever hear that voice? The rhetoric of death too easily suffocates hope with

despair and cynicism in the name of reason. They say, “Jesus, in this so-called resurrection, whose

wife would she even be? Which man would she even belong to? Explain Jesus!”

How would Jesus wiggle free from the tight logic of death? How would he free others to do

the same? He did so by likely thinking of another biblical story, the first passage we read this

morning, one not so far off from the tragic story Jesus was challenged to explain. The book of Job

is a long puzzling Old Testament book about a good and righteous man who has done everything

right and yet horrible things suddenly happen to him which he in no way deserves. We are told that

on one, no good, really, really bad day his territory was raided by the neighboring Sabeans and they

made off with all his oxen and donkeys and killed the servants watching them.

Fire then apparently came from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants watching them.

Then the Chaldean raiders came and stole his camels and killed the servants watching them.

Meanwhile, his seven sons and three daughters were gathered together at their eldest brother’s

house when a strong wind came out of the desert and loosened the foundation of the house such

that it collapsed and they all died. As if all that were not bad enough, next loathsome sores spread

across Job’s whole body. And this is just the bad things that we know about.

I wonder when Job first figured out this was going to be a bad day for the ages? Sheep

mysteriously catching fire would have been a good clue. Job loses everything and nearly everyone

he cares about and sits down in the ashes of what is left his life. He picked up a broken shard of

pottery and scratched his soars while feeling angry and sad. He sat there for a whole week (2:13).

As he sat there, as if nothing could make thinks worse, his wife said to him, “After all this, how can

you still cling to your integrity? Curse God, and die” (2:9).

Most of the book of Job, however, is about Job’s friends. We might imagine that they were

at a loss for words about what to say to a man who has lost so much, his possessions, his family,

and his health, all so suddenly. We would be wrong about. Their words take up a full 35 chapters

of the book. Each of his friends offers Job some explanation about why this happened to him. A

running theme of these chapters is that each of Job’s friends judge him in some way as they explain

that bad things don’t just happen randomly. They can be understood and explained rationally as

part of some chain of cause and effect and are likely somehow Job’s fault.

Notice how in our passage today, as Job was clobbered and crushed by life, he screams out,

“O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen

and with lead they were engraved on a rock for ever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that

at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh

I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another” (19:23-

27). Job wants his pain seen and redeemed, not explained. And he wants a record to show that he

worships a God that is good and powerful, yet one that he does not understand and is far less

explainable than the god of his well-intentioned friends. Although Job’s friends think they are

showing care for him by trying to assign some meaning to Job’s pain, they aren’t. At best, they are

assuring themselves that they are somehow so different from him that such random horrible things

can’t happen to them. After all, they haven’t sinned as horribly as Job or his children must have.

In the name of comforting, they search for their own rational explanation of his suffering. Job’s

comforters engage in the rhetoric of death.

Instead of expecting us somehow to explain evil in the sort of ways that Job’s comforters

do, what the Bible wants us to know is that Job is correct in refusing all answers to this question.

The reason is that in explaining evil, we inadvertently grant it a place in the universe. We make it

rationally necessary, we justify it, and this is the true mistake. The rhetoric of death demands an

explanation that is has no right to. We are better off sticking with Job’s howl of human protest and

rejecting such superficial and ultimately false comfort. When something is that wrong, when it is

what should not be, it deserves no explanation!

Like Job, Jesus declares in the face of death’s taunting, “God is not the God of the dead, but

of the living, for to him all … are alive.” In other words, your story of horror only seems

reasonable to you because your mind is so captive to death, so far in its shadow, that you can’t

even think in terms of life. Jesus knew that the real need here isn’t for an explanation on death’s

terms, but for something else that is strong enough to withstand tragedy and its accompanying

questioning. We want a redeemer. Redemption does not make the bad good or good bad. It does

not undo what happened. But redemption is an experience that somehow bleeds back in time,

contains the tragedy, remakes our feelings, and gives them new bearings and meanings. It feels like

baptism. It heals our hearts and minds in a way that, when experienced, is always mysterious and

unexpected and more powerful than what can be communicated with mere words. Christianity does

not save us from things happening to us, it speaks to us over and over again about redemption, even

when everything seems lost. If there is a problem with the truth of Jesus about the primacy of love

and life in our world, it is that it is too wonderful to be easily believed. It softens our judgment and

calls us to wonder. Rather than a kind of reasoning that makes us smaller and our world smaller,

the life of Jesus makes us larger and expands our reasoning about the world we live. It reminds us

that there are some things that we will never understand, yet it is that very realization that makes it

possible to revel in the reality of being one of God’s finite creatures that were created for joy. In

the end, Jesus says that the made-up woman in the made-up horror story belongs to no man, child

of the resurrection that she is.

May we be fully persuaded by Jesus and arrange our lives around the strong currents of

love and life, having a faith and imagination that never becomes captive to death’s dark reasoning,

but presses forward to true satisfactions, knowing that whatever may come our way, it too can be

redeemed and enfolded into a divine glory without end by the One who made us. Amen.