Job 1:1, 2:1-10, Psalm 26, Hebrews 1:1-4,2:5-12, Mark 10:2-16
For my last two years of college I had a work-study job as a campus security guard. Half of my job was writing parking tickets on the campus roadways. I was diligent. I was strict. I was merciless. I was righteous. If you parked wrong I would get you. The wife of one famous professor would constantly park illegally, and I was indignant. “How can they do this!”
I loved feeling offended, and being able to write that ticket. I loved feeling angry, and being able to act on my anger. This is all true. Eighteen years ago I did not reveal this to the search committee.
The director of campus security was a retired Grand Rapids cop named Harry Faber. I liked him a lot. I knew that Mr Faber forgave some of my tickets, but I admired him and I accepted that as his weakness. One week we had some big festival coming up, with lots of visitors expected, and Mr Faber said to me, “Write some tickets, Dan, we’ve got to keep the roads cleared.” I was stunned. It hit me that Mr Faber had a functional view of parking rules. They were a means to an end. It wasn’t about morality. It wasn’t about right and wrong. That was a big moment in my education.
You can regard the laws of a nation as the regulations designed to achieve a positive society. Or you could regard the laws of a nation as the rules of a game that are enforced by those in power to their own benefit. Then you might be an anarchist. Or you could regard the laws of a nation as moral applications derived from the laws of nature or the laws of God, and you’d be a classic conservative. I suppose it’s some combination of all three within a capitalist democracy.
As a preacher in the Reformed Church I do not regard myself as either competent or authorized to address the specific laws and policies of the government. But I am supposed to speak to the morality of our laws whenever the scripture lessons are relevant. In this morning’s gospel lesson, once again the Lord Jesus takes in his hands the little children, and that’s relevant to the treatment of refugees and aliens on our borders.
Many have regarded the forceful separation of young children from their parents and confining them in cages as the very debasement of American society and the indictment against our American mythology of moral superiority among the nations. Was this not a symptom of a general contamination of our whole American system, even of things that we allow as morally defensible depending on your political philosophy? If this is the fruit, then what is the root?
Our government defended this policy on functional grounds—that it was designed to discourage refugees: if they didn’t want to lose their children they shouldn’t have come here in the first place. But then both the Attorney General and the Press Secretary appealed to the Bible to defend defending the law. But they did not appeal to any of the laws in the Torah that actually address the moral treatment of aliens and strangers in the land.
The Bible does have a positive respect for law. The Bible is founded on the law of Moses, the Torah. The Psalms are full of praises of the law and of those who keep the law. God is a law-giver, so it is not just all functional. Or perhaps we should say that it is functional in the prerogative of God, that God has designed the laws of nature in order to achieve a good creation and the laws of morality to achieve a positive society. And then we should say that we are responsible to make our laws in honor of God’s designs. So then what are God’s designs? What does God want?
The Bible is full of conventional religious morality, and that is good. If you obey God’s laws, you will live a good life. If you honor your father and your mother, you will live long in the land God gave you. If you keep the covenant the land will yield its increase; and you will prosper if you walk in the precepts of the Lord. The opposite is true as well: the wicked will pay in the end.
It all makes sense, it does work out, it’s almost cause and effect, and the word of God is behind it. Except that the Bible is a conversation, and there is another voice, a voice in contention, saying maybe not; it’s not so simple as cause and effect. The righteous suffer too!
That, of course, it the message of the Book of Job. Our first lessons will be from Job the next few weeks. Unfortunately we will not get to hear the speeches of Job’s three friends. They all tell Job that he must have done something wrong to earn his suffering. If he would repent of his sin, then God would restore him.
But Job steadfastly affirms his innocence, and he has nothing to repent of. The Book of Job is the Bible’s witness against its own conventional morality. There is no simple cause and effect between obedience and success or righteousness and reward.
We have no record of the Lord Jesus ever discussing the Book of Job. But he certainly lived it, he embodied it, he too suffered even though he was innocent. Indeed, it was precisely because he was so uniquely righteous that he suffered and was killed. The Epistle to the Hebrews runs with this idea. It says that the Lord Jesus was made perfect in his sufferings. This should be surprising.
Our conventional theology is that Jesus was morally perfect from his sinlessness in daily life, that he was thoroughly obedient to the law. This is on good Biblical grounds. But the Epistle to the Hebrews dares to teach that his perfection was not perfected until his suffering, his suffering precisely because he was obedient, which reverses the cause and effect of conventional religious morality.
It further teaches that having made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, and became the pioneer of our salvation. By salvation I don’t mean just at the end of your life. I mean salvation from your present disappointment, from your present discouragement, and from your present failure.
In my first parish there was a woman named Esther whom everybody loved. She was nominated for deacon, but she told me that she couldn’t serve, because she was divorced. She felt she was guilty of what the Lord Jesus was teaching in our Gospel today. I told her that Jesus was calling adultery only remarriage after divorce, and even then, what he meant by adultery was not a life-time state of continuing in sin, but a one-time act that was forgivable. Esther was not convinced.
Worse, Esther considered herself a failure in her marriage. Well, yes, but the guy she had married was a selfish creep. Her failure had been to marry him. For which she now was being penalized. And that is the flaw in the law. The grinding consequence of past mistakes. The shackles of cause and effect. Salvation is to free you from this burden every day, and that salvation is what the Lord Jesus accomplished when he was perfected by his suffering and took his seat at the right hand of God.
I notice that after the Lord Jesus said these challenging things about marriage and divorce, the disciples were trying to be righteous and keep the parents of the children from having Jesus touch them like some dispenser of magic. We have standards here! I think the Lord Jesus surprised them by his indignation, especially after having said these challenging things about divorce. They thought that Jesus would approve of their strictness.
But his greater challenge is that to receive the Kingdom of God is not to receive it as a righteous man or a virtuous woman. It’s not to receive it because you are law-abiding or obedient. “Truly I tell you, who does not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” What?
As a little child. All need. No power. No rights. All need. You bring nothing to this but your need for it. You offer me nothing but your need for me. How’s this for a comparison: “Whoever does not receive the United States of America as a little child will never enter it.” An immigration policy based not on what you can bring to this country but precisely on what you need from this country. That’s the immigration policy of the Kingdom of God.
You are never turned back at the border unless you take it as your right to enter it. You rather enter from your need to enter it. You enter it for safety, not reward. You enter as a loser, a failure, an adulterer, a wanderer, a refugee, a victim of the sin of others and a victim of your own sin. Because the indignation of Jesus is from unconditional love, and the deepest righteousness of God is love, the love for you that is embodied in Jesus Christ.
Copyright © 2018, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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