The Necessary Ingredients for Intercessions (and Discipleship Too)

Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity last, October 28, 2012, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Job 42.1-17; Psalm 34.1-8, 19-22; Hebrews 7.23-28; Mark 10.46-52.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

We can all relate to the psalmist in today’s lesson because we all know what it’s like to be in situations that make us afraid. We all have the desire to be rescued from evil and injustice of all kinds, and like the psalmist we often cry out to God for relief. Since intercessory prayer is an integral part of each of our lessons this morning, and since as Christians we regularly engage in the discipline of praying for others and ourselves, I want us to look briefly at what our lessons have to say about intercessory prayer and the necessary ingredients for us to be mindful of as we pray. This, of course, does not imply that there is a magic formula to praying so that we make God beholden to us and our requests. Rather, as we shall see, the same ingredients that are necessary when praying for others and ourselves are necessary for us if we are serious about being a disciple of Jesus and want to take our relationship with him seriously.

In this morning’s OT lesson, we see the conclusion of Job’s unhappy nightmare. You recall that in the first two chapters, God allows Satan to test Job’s righteousness by taking away those people and things that are most precious to Job. Satan’s original challenge was that Job was only righteous because of what God had generously given him, and so God allowed Satan to bring evil on Job, but only within certain limits. Job wasn’t let in on this joke and so he thought that God had turned against him and Job challenged God on this. This, of course, flew in the face of traditional Jewish wisdom regarding why bad things happen to people. Conventional wisdom argued that God brought evil on unrighteous people to punish them. But here we have Job protesting against that notion and claiming he is a righteous man who doesn’t understand why God is punishing him. To make matters worse, Job’s so-called “comforters” have been bombarding him with accusations of unspecified unrighteousness and they have urged Job to repent so that God will relent in punishing him. But Job steadfastly maintains his innocence and demands a hearing before God. And as we saw last week, Job finally got his wish, only to have God take him to task over his presumption that he could argue before God as God’s equal. Now in today’s lesson, Job realizes the folly of his presumption. He acknowledges that God is right and repents. Job acknowledges that he has spoken of things he did not understand or have the ability to know. And then the most curious thing happens. God does not say he forgives Job, but rather tells Job’s “comforters” that they have made him mad because Job has spoken the truth about God but they have not, and it is they who need to repent! What’s going on here?

First, the book of Job reminds us what we all know about life. Things can get very messy and confusing for us so that we draw the wrong conclusions about what God is doing (or not doing) about the problem of evil in his world and our lives. Because they had relied on conventional Jewish wisdom about sin and punishment, Job’s “comforters” had gotten it wrong about how God works, at least with Job, and their own sanctimonious behavior had only served to increase Job’s misery. But through it all, Job maintained his innocence and did not presume to ascribe motive as to why God appeared to be punishing him (remember it was Satan that caused the evil to beset Job, not God). Job’s prayer was simply to have a hearing before God, rather than try to explain how and why God works the way God does. There is great humility in this and we can see further Job’s humility in his acknowledgement that he is not God’s equal and was therefore presumptuous to believe that he could argue his case as such. It is important for us to note that in repenting, Job did not repent of or admit to wrongdoing. The Hebrew text for this sentence is ambiguous and can be rendered in several different ways. But the gist of it is that in repenting, Job acknowledged that he is not God’s equal, that he is only a mortal who would eventually return to dust. Job was effectively telling God that he was content not to be let in on the joke about why God allows evil to operate in his world in the manner it does.

Second, and related to the first point, we notice from God’s interaction with Job and his “comforters” that it is quite all right to complain to God in prayer about the evil we see in our lives and world. Notice that God did not condemn Job for doing so. Instead, God tells Eliphaz that Job had spoken the truth about God. This, combined with the implied notion that Job had persevered in prayer, reminds us that sometimes all we can do is persevere in our prayers as we cry out to God about the evil in our lives. Notice carefully that God never did answer Job’s “why” questions about the evil that had befallen him. But neither did God condemn Job for complaining about his suffering and situation. Neither should we be afraid to take our complaints to God as we persevere in prayer, provided that we do so in great humility as Job did and resist the temptation to ascribe evil motives to God in the midst of our suffering.

Last, we also notice that before God restored Job’s fortune, Job had to pray for his “comforters”. Doing so for Job would have also required a healthy does of humility. It is not easy to pray for friends who turn out to be worse than our enemies! This also required Job to demonstrate his love for both God and people. As we have seen many times before, the biblical definition of love is much more concerned about what we do to help people than how we feel about them. By praying for his friends so that God could provide atonement for them, Job demonstrated to all concerned that he was willing to love both God and neighbor by obeying God’s command for him to intercede for his friends. Likewise for us. We too are called to pray for the needs of others, even (or especially) the needs of our enemies and persecutors.

Turning now to our gospel lesson, and in stark contrast with the complexity of Job’s situation, we see blind Bartimaeus, who has a straightforward request to see and who prays for himself. And like the psalmist and Job, we can relate to Bart as well. Each one of us has been in situations where we cry out for Jesus to help us and desperately want to hear from Jesus the words Bart heard: “What do you want me to do for you?” It’s like Bartimaeus knows this is his one and only chance to really be healed instead of settling for a life of being patronized as a blind beggar, and he jumps at it–literally. So what can we learn from this poignant story?

First, like Job, we see great humility and faith in Bart. He knows he needs help and we cannot help but admire him for not wanting to be a victim the rest of his life. So he tells Jesus he wants to see when Jesus asks him what he wants. Did you catch that? Jesus asked Bart the same question he asked James and John in last week’s lesson. But as Fr. Ron reminded us, James and John got it miserably wrong (and had their request denied) while blind Bartimaeus gets it right (and has his request granted). To be sure, there is a literal sense in Bart’s request. He wanted his eyesight restored, which surely required great faith and humility. But Mark also wants us to see the request at a deeper level. Notice what Bart did after Jesus saved him, itself another reminder of what happens when God’s kingdom breaks into our world (the Greek for save, sozo, can also mean to be healed). He followed Jesus on the Way. The Greek for the Way, hodos, is a technical term in the NT for Christian discipleship (cf. John 14.6; Acts 9.2; 19.23). Bart already had acknowledged Jesus as Messiah by calling him “Son of David,” which was scandalous enough. But after being healed, he is prepared to see Jesus as more than Messiah by following Jesus as Jesus heads to Jerusalem and his death on a cross. So here Mark is reminding us that faith and humility are essential elements, both for prayer and for following Jesus. What are you doing to demonstrate your desire to see Jesus and follow him?

Second, we see great courage in Bartimaeus. While it is hard to know for sure, the Greek suggests that when the crowd told him Jesus was calling him, they were not happy with old Bart for making such a commotion. Is that any way to treat a traveling Big Shot like Jesus? Yet Bartimaeus leaves his cloak, the very thing he would have used to gather up people’s donations to him, and goes to Jesus. Mark wants us to see that Bartimaeus is modeling what is necessary to be Jesus’ disciple. He is willing to give up everything to follow Jesus and he is willing to risk public scorn to do so. How are you demonstrating great courage in your praying and discipleship to indicate to others that you are willing to follow Jesus wherever he calls you?

And of course all our praying is possible because as the writer of Hebrews reminds us, we have Jesus, our great High Priest, who is Lord of this world and who is always interceding for us. The function of the High Priest in ancient Israel was to offer atoning sacrifices to God on behalf of the people so that healing and reconciliation could occur and Israel’s relationship with God could be put to rights. Here, the writer of Hebrews is reminding us that in Jesus, God has taken care of our sins and the alienation it causes by dying for us on a cross. How can a God who does that for us be indifferent to our prayers, hurts, fears, and deepest desires? Like Mark, the writer is reminding us to always keep our focus on Jesus.

This, then, is how we ought to pray and live. We are to come to God in prayer with a humble attitude and we should believe that God can and does hear our prayers. We are to be open and honest with God, acknowledging that he is God and we are not. But here is the rub. If we do not really know God, we are likely to yield to the temptation to ascribe evil motives to God when our prayers are not answered in the manner we hope. This, in turn, will likely have a negative impact on our discipleship. Only when we come to know God’s great love for us—paradoxically through regular prayer, by reading and wrestling with Scripture, through intimate fellowship with God’s people, and by partaking in the sacraments—can we ever hope to know God in the manner Job and Bartimaeus did, and so trust that however God does or does not answer our prayers, he always has our best interest at heart, even when we cannot see or understand how God is working in our lives. And when we finally learn the truth of God’s great love for us, it will not only affect our praying and discipleship in many positive ways, we will also know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.