Sermons

Second Sunday after Trinity
Sunday 25th June at 10am

Simon Cowling
Readings: Job 38. 1-11; Mark 4. 35-41

We know virtually nothing about the circumstances that gave rise to the Book of Job - who wrote it, or where and when it was written. Together with the books Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, as well as some of the Psalms, Job falls into the category of 'wisdom' literature. These 'wisdom' writings are unlike any other books in the Old Testament, in that they show little interest in the great themes of Israel's faith that are found elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures: Israel's covenant with God, the Jewish Law, the Jerusalem Temple, prophecy or the hoped-for Messiah. Wisdom literature, by contrast, focuses often on the human condition, on an individual's struggle to live a righteous life and to be in a right relationship with a God whose purposes seem often to be obscure or even hidden. The book of Job, for instance, is the story of the struggle of one man, the upright and God-fearing Job from the land of Uz, to come to terms with the God's judgement following the loss of his family and his property. Over the first 37 chapters of the book, Job works through his struggle in the company of his three so-called 'comforters', Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, until out of the storm, God finally answers Job. This is where our reading this morning begins, in chapter 38.

God's first words to Job are a challenge: "Who are you to question my wisdom with your ignorant, empty words?" God then goes on to speak of his power over the created order and, in particular, of his control over the sea waters: "I marked a boundary for the sea and kept it behind bolted gates." In the ancient world the sea waters were associated with disorder and chaos and so God is, in part, defined by his ability to control the sea and thus bring about order and a sense of safety. Remember how, in the first creation story in Genesis, God is described as causing the waters to come together in one place so that dry land can emerge. Remember how, in the story of the exodus, God opens a path through the waters over which the fleeing Israelites can pass to safety. It is this same God who now reminds Job that, without his upholding power, the whole cosmos would return to the chaos from which he caused it to emerge at the dawn of creation. Here, in Job chapter 38, we have what one writer has called "an overwhelming reminder that the first religious obligation of the creature is to acknowledge and glorify the Creator".

These reflections might help to give some clues as to the way we should read the Gospel account of the stilling of the storm in Mark chapter 4. Jesus and the disciples set out to cross Lake Galilee in the evening. The lake was, and is, susceptible to sudden storms, one of which erupts as the boat is crossing the lake. The disciples are terrified, even to the point of thinking they will die. Jesus, in contrast, continues to sleep until, awoken by the frantic disciples, he stands and commands the wind and the waves to be still. As he does so, he rebukes the disciples for their lack of faith.

We saw a little earlier how, in the Hebrew scriptures, it is only God who is able to bring a sense of order and safety out of the watery chaos of the sea. Such an awareness would doubtless have been deeply rooted in the religious consciousness of the disciples, and so the significance of Jesus' words to the waves - 'Be still' - are not lost on the them. 'Who is this man?' they ask, a man who can still the waters. The obvious answer is that he is God, and it is an answer that fills them with fear.

Just before we leave this passage there's one other small detail of the story I want to mention. It gives a significant early pointer to the status of Jesus as it emerges in Mark's account. In the translation we use Jesus is described as 'sleeping with his head on a pillow'. This charming but inaccurately over-domestic translation of the Greek obscures a crucial point that Mark is seeking to make. What Jesus almost certainly had his head on was the only seat in the boat, a leather or wooden bench raised from the floor of the boat and on which the rower or helmsman would sit. So even before Jesus quietens the wind and stills the waves, his status is already revealed. He is the helmsman whose knowledge that he is in control of events allows him to sleep - unlike the disciples, who as so often in Mark are blindly ignorant of who they are dealing with in Jesus and who are too fearful to follow Jesus' lead, to put their trust in him.

The Enlightenment, that great intellectual movement that swept Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, brought much that was good, and much that was needed to societies that had too often been in thrall to superstition and ignorance. With the rapid development of human knowledge, for instance, came an understanding of the meteorology of storms, whether on Lake Galilee or elsewhere. In the same way, this development of human knowledge also brought detailed understanding of the pathology of diseases and how they might be cured or their effects alleviated. But the Enlightenment was not all good news. Humans came to believe that they and their concerns lay at the centre of things, that they could - and should - control events, even at the expense of other, less enlightened, human beings. It's no co-incidence that the slave trade and colonialism both flourished in the period of the Enlightenment. And for many during these years, God became abstract, withdrawn from the world and its concerns, rationalised into a celestial siding and shunted into irrelevance.

Yet increased understanding does not mean that we cannot still be in awe of the raw power of a storm, or that we do not fear the consequences of gale-force winds and torrential rain, such as those that devastated New Orleans last year. Increased understanding does not mean that we cease to fear the development of diseases in our own bodies or that we stop reflecting on our own mortality. In our Old Testament reading Job is confronted with the truth of God's overwhelming otherness; in our Gospel passage Jesus' disciples are confronted with the reality of God's presence among them. God transcendent in majesty, God intimately in our midst. The God whom we glimpse in the storm and who, in Jesus, tenderly embraces us in our fear and apprehension if we would only trust him. The God whose majesty and whose intimacy we are called to bear witness to in ways that may seem foolish and irrelevant to a rational world, but which contain within them the mustard seeds of God's mysterious, upside-down kingdom.

Blessed be God, now and for ever, to ages of ages. Amen.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay