On Thursday morning about 3 a.m.
I woke up from a dream. The details of are
not important except that it was about a man and his beautiful wife. I was his brother, and I offered them some
bread and cheese. He did not take it,
but she did, which led to a painful breach of trust. I only mention this dream because I woke up
with the sense that it was a gift that could help me see what I was supposed to
preach about today. Because what the
people in the dream did to restore the trust that had been broken was to go
outside and play. They went into the
woods and they played with each other—not a competitive game with a lot of
rules and a winner or a loser, but the kind of open-ended, improvisation play
that children do.
Some of the things they did
were pretty silly, but they kept their heads, as the saying goes, in the
game. They never stepped out to an
ironic distance, but whole-heartedly kept running around in the woods holding
pinecones on their heads like rabbit ears, or thrusting their arms into the
stream bed up to the elbows and pulling them out, glistening wet and covered
with tiny black pebbles. There was no
cathartic resolution, no single moment of truth, just a kind of faith in the
game, to give them a deeper understanding, and put things right between them.
We don’t often think of the
Bible as play. We know it is serious,
because, like my dream, it is about broken trust. It also begins with a man and his wife, and a
meddlesome third party, with sharing food that leads to betrayal. It goes on from there to tell how human
beings break their trust with God again and again, but also how God acts to
heal the damage. There’s a lot in there
about scary grown-up business like commandments, and punishment, and sacrifice.
And this can cause us to
overlook how much of it sounds inviting and even fun, like the verse in the
psalm today that says “taste, and see that the Lord is good, happy are they
that trust in him!” Our reading of the
Bible has been known to leave out the message that God wants more for us than
just to feel ashamed and get back into line, and do a better job of obeying from
now on. God wants us to taste and to see,
and to know deep-down how good God is. And
to get this message through our thick skulls, the Bible says, God does more
than give orders and make threats—God plays.
The story of Job pushes us
right up to brink of our worst fears about a God who is arbitrary and cruel,
who plays with us the way a cat plays with a mouse, and tortures us just to see
what we will do. And for chapter after
chapter of the book Job and his friends try to talk each other down from that
ledge, try to salvage their image of a God who plays it straight, who is comprehensible
and predictable and follows the rules.
But when God finally speaks, God’s
answer to Job is not a legal case, to justify Job’s punishment. It is not a philosophical explanation of how a
good God can allow the innocent to suffer.
What it is is a poem. God invites
Job’s imagination out to play, to journey through the orders of creation, from
the “springs of the sea, and the recesses of the deep” to the “storehouses of
the snow…and of the hail.” God shows
Job the animals of the mountains and the plains, the lions and wild oxen and
ostriches, and the monsters that live in the sea. And God’s description of these wonders is
interspersed with questions that ask him to imagine the mind of God: “Where
were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” “Can you number the clouds?” “Do you give the horse his might?” “Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars?”
And so Job comes to the moment
when he does see: he sees himself,
not as the innocent victim of God’s injustice, but as a fool who’s been talking
and talking about things he does not understand. And Job sees God, no longer as a secondhand notion,
but face to face. Job sees God in the grandeur,
and wisdom, and power, the dazzling diversity and wondrous unity of everything
that is. Job sees God at play all
creation, and this revelation is not Job’s alone. You and I can participate in this drama; you
and I can share Job’s vision, you and I can be moved to Job’s repentance, because
God plays in the literary art of this book, and the contemplation of creation that it invites us to enjoy.
The Gospel of Mark does
something similar; it also invites us to see God at play. Again, this play is serious—its purpose is
the healing of a broken world. But what
it dramatizes is not the vastness of creation but the breadth of God at play in
human experience, in the heights of human nobility and love, and the depths of
human cruelty and suffering. Like Job, Mark
invites us to change our minds, to break through to a new way of seeing, and to
do this he invents a new kind of story.
He writes a Gospel, to brings us face to face with God in the life and
death of a human person. And one way
Mark talks about this breakthrough is to tell stories of Jesus giving sight to
the blind.
The story of blind Bartimaeus
is not a simple historical account of a physical healing that happened to
someone else a long time ago. It is an
invitation to discipleship, a dramatization of what it means to see God at play
in Jesus, and to follow him. It is a
deep story, because of the density of its connections with the whole sweep of
the drama. When Jesus asks Bartimaeus
“What do you want me to do for you?” we remember that last week he asked the
same question of James and John. They
wanted to sit at Jesus’ right hand and at his left in glory; Bartimaeus only
wants to see. When Bartimaeus casts
aside his beggar’s cloak, and follows Jesus on the way, we remember a rich man
Jesus also met along the road, who could not give up his many possessions and
become a disciple, but went away grieving.
This story sums up what the
Gospel has already said about discipleship, but it also marks the transition to
what it is going to say. Bartimaeus
follows Jesus, but there is only one more stop on Jesus’ way; from Jericho it
is only fifteen miles to Jerusalem. He
is the last disciple Jesus calls, and for him it is too late to eat his fill of
bread and fish with the 5,000 in the wilderness, too late to see Jesus calm the
stormy wind and sea by night, or see the glory of the transfigured Lord on the
mountain. Bartimaeus receives his sight,
only just in time to be a witness to the way of the cross.
The Gospel story and the way
it is told share the same purpose, which is to open the story of Jesus up, so
we can enter. So we can open our eyes in
a world in which Christ walks, as the depth of God’s mercy and love, healing
the blindness of broken trust. It does not give us a vision of a different
world, but of the true depth of this one—to see and know that we are players in
the theatre of Christ’s passion. One
result of this is that we can never be simply happy. We can know times of laughter and love and
peace, but for us this will never cease to be the world that crucified its own
true heart and soul.
But we can also never be
simply sorrowful or afraid, even in the worst of times, for Christ’s story does
not end with death. When the gospel has
opened our eyes, and we have followed Jesus on the way, we see this as the world
God so loved that he gave his only Son.
We suffer, and struggle, and grieve, but we know that our sufferings and
those of all poor, afflicted humanity are the sufferings of Christ. They are one with his sacrifice, which he
offers continually to God, who repays it with life, and mercy and grace. Our sufferings are his play, which is
completely serious, but also absolutely free, full of perfect bliss and
joy.
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