Texts: Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Mark 10:17-31

This is the second week of our four-week walk through the book of Job. Last week we left Job sitting in the ashes, accepting both the Good and the Bad from God, never sinning "with his lips." Job’s attitude suddenly shifts in the following chapter, as he said,

In the long dialogues that follow, Job’s friends repeatedly assert God’s justice as simple retribution—you reap what you sow. Job denies this: he sowed no evil, so why is he reaping it? What has happened is contrary to all of his expectations. God seems to have "left the building:"

Job can’t find God—and he is terrified.

This type of experience is more common than most of us care to admit. It is dominated by the feeling of "real absence," in which God seems to have deserted us. I call this the "Holy Saturday" experience.

Holy Saturday is the "empty day" between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the day of the tomb, between cross and resurrection. It is the sole day of the church year when no sacraments are celebrated. Jesus is absent, his body lying in the tomb while his disciples huddle in shock and terror. There is no route from the cross to the empty tomb that does not pass through the grave.

Quite a few years ago, in another place, I dealt with a situation involving two women who had been very close friends for many years. As time went on, their walks with God diverged, to the point where they came into some very real conflict. In a session involving the three of us and a few others involved in the problem, one of the women turned to the other and said something like, "It looks like our relationship is dead, but let’s pray for a resurrection very soon." There were nods around the circle, as people seized on the hope in that word.

I could not nod. My heart was heavy. In that moment I suddenly realized that they were trying to jump from cross to resurrection, without passing through Holy Saturday. It wouldn’t work, because the relationship did not just have to die, but it had to be experienced as dead, if anything truly new was to emerge from its ashes.

You can’t force God’s hand, and make God do what we think God should do. Job found that out the hard way, as did these two women. It took most of a decade for them to find a new friendship, now on a very different basis.

Relationships die. That’s a fact of human life, whether through the end of a friendship, or the breakup of a marriage, or the death of a spouse, or—like Job—through the realization that we didn’t really know God. Any such loss hurts, and when it hurts we just want to make the pain go away. And we turn to God, who can heal the pain, but sometimes the answer is "You need to learn to live with this loss for a while."

We see another such instance in today’s Gospel. This one passage contains several of Jesus’ hardest sayings, ones that often leave people saying, "He didn’t really mean that! Or did he?" It begins with a man coming to Jesus seeking healing. (No, it doesn’t say that exactly, but what is eternal life if not the ultimate healing that God offers?) The man kneels before Jesus, in the posture seen in other stories where people are seeking physical healing. What Jesus tells him is not what he expected, and in this lone case in Mark’s Gospel, the supplicant rejects the offered healing.

He thought he knew how God acted. He just had to find the right thing to do, to make God come across with the great gift. But Jesus looked into his heart, saw what was preventing him from seeing God as God truly is, and challenged him to remove it. And he could not.

Receiving God’s blessing of eternal life does not come from where the rich man expected—his own labours. Salvation is impossible for us through our own efforts, just as a camel can not pass through the eye of a needle. But salvation is possible with God.

If we rely on our own efforts and resources, God will turn out not to be where we expected, and not to respond the way we assumed.

But if we are prepared to let God be God, and to place our whole trust in him, God may well turn out to be where we least expected, and to do what we find the most surprising. But God will be there! This is the Easter experience, which we celebrate Sunday by Sunday, proclaiming our hope in the God who asks nothing of us except our whole lives, and who opens the door to eternal life to all who hear his voice.

When something in our lives dies, and we find ourselves asking, "Where is God?" let us remember that Jesus had to lie in the tomb while his disciples asked the same thing. In God’s time, God will act, and God will save.

Where is God?

God is here.

God is always here.

Let us then step boldly into whatever life sets before us, embracing the question, and knowing that God will answer.