Job 42: 8,10; Mark 10: 46-48

When words fail

In our Parkview sermon format we have three moments and dimensions: encounter with the text, connecting with life and finding new meaning. These are all important moments so it may be good that we space them out. During my two weeks of study leave/vacations I attended part or most of three conferences. One was a pastor’s conference at Zephyr Point that was about encountering the text. The second was about interpretation, not just of language, but of the context in which we live. One thing we heard at that conference was “we don’t interpret words, but we interpret meaning.” Words by themselves mean nothing after all. It’s like when we hear a foreign word and don’t know the meaning, it has no significance. Also, words only have meaning in context. For instance, to us “cool” means more than “not warm.” “Bad” can mean “good” among a certain part of the population. Some words have no real translation. Many Asian languages have different words for people with a different status in society. When we talk about connecting with life in our worship service, we are interpreting the text in to our life, into our contemporary context, trying to find stories, events, experiences that give us clue into how the text we just re-acquainted ourselves has to do with us. So it serves as a kind of bridge. The third conference was the Congress of the International Council of Pastoral Care and Counselors. Many of those people were chaplains and chaplain educators. There was a widowed woman from Burma who is developing chaplaincy training all on her own in her country. There were also 5 chaplains on oil rigs off Norway. The overriding concern of people there was how pastoral care people can come in contact with suffering people and have empathy. Then there is third part of our sermon: finding new meaning. If it turns out well, we will find together or be reminded together a kind of empathy and compassion for human beings and perhaps for ourselves also. So my point is that from these three conferences I learned something different each time for the work that I do here.
That being said, how can it help us get a clue about Job and the blind beggar that came up to Jesus? I think Mark gets it right and Job’s author gets it wrong. Mark talks about the blind beggar and how he shouts out:” have mercy on me.” It is a cry of despair that he has to time just right. This may be the only moment he has. This Jesus may be his only hope. But he says:” have mercy.” That strikes us as odd perhaps. We would expect: “have pity on us.” But after two thousand years we don’t know the exact meaning that word had in its context, other than that the society would have seen the blind man’s suffering as a punishment perhaps. It’s almost like a kind of karma. But it is possible Jesus Himself was a bit taken aback and He asks:”What is it that you want me to do for me.” It is as if words fail the beggar and maybe that is just right. His suffering is inexpressible and his sorrow unexplainable.
Job’s story is the most sorrowful of stories: forty-two chapters of intense suffering and loss and wondering why. But after finishing it contemporary readers will walk away shaking their head. Job’s story becomes the story of a patched-up life. Oh, yes there is new cattle and new offspring. “That’ll make him feel better and he gets to grow older than almost anyone ever.” The problem the narrator has is that he wants to solve problems and explain why Job suffers so much. It’s almost as if he wants to explain it all away. He takes a clinical, scientific approach. And we leave the story uneasy. And that is too bad, because there are many people who can relate to Job’s suffering and outcry. We would not want to take Job out of the Bible. The truth is though that suffering can never be clinically explained. Words are always going to fail. Explanations are often only going to deepen the despair.
This leads me to the story of Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen, a Harvard professor who left the glory of Ivy League teaching behind to go live with developmentally disabled people in Toronto. He said it taught him to understand with the heart, not the mind and that there is powerful wisdom of the heart. Nouwen is known for talking about faith and hinting that it is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be entered into it. One of his quotes (Brainy quote) is “when we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us we often find that it is those who instead of giving advice, solutions and cures have rather chosen to share our pain and touch our wound with a warm and tender hand.” While the narrator of Job’s story is full of empathy throughout the book, he is tempted into delivering a tidy little package. Instead perhaps he should have had words fail and enter the mystery of human life where words fail all the time. With so many people in the media blaring in our ears, perhaps that is not such a bad thing. May God give strength. Amen.