We have all paused to scratch our heads in consternation at one time or another after having watched the evening news with its daily drone of violence and wrong-doing; whereupon, we’ve probably said to ourselves, what in the world is happening? Why does evil prosper? Why is so much suffering carried on the backs of the innocent and the poor? And, where is God in this world of ours?
I would like to put forth an answer; which I intend as a word of encouragement, as it were, for those of us who travel amidst tempest and darkness.
Let’s begin with this afternoon’s first lesson, from the prophet Habakkuk. Here, in the opening chapter of his short three chapter opus, we recognize that what perplexes us about our world today is really a very old dilemma. Habakkuk, one of the twelve minor prophets of the Hebrew Scripture, who lived in the seventh century BCE, at about the same time as the greater prophet Jeremiah, is asking the same questions that we are asking as to why God does not rescue or deliver a fallen and troubled creation. What Habakkuk puts before us today is really a significant religious question, a common one for any believer to ask and to direct toward his/her God.
Little is known about Habakkuk. We do know that Habakkuk’s name means “wrestle” or “embrace;” obviously a hint as to what he has to say about the nature of our relationship to God. And, from what he has briefly told us this afternoon, he is a man who fears God, but the righteousness that he genuinely holds to is getting him nowhere. This enigmatic situation of doing what is right in a world where wrong is overlooked or rewarded therefore places him somewhere between belief and unbelief, a relationship with God in which he is struggling. Frustrated, he looks to and for a God who is woefully silent or absent in the face of active evil: “O Lord, [says Habakkuk]…”how long shall I cry, and thou will not hear!” (1.2); a lament/prayer that is remarkable similar and perhaps more familiar to us when voiced by the Psalmist, “Why do you stand so far off, O Lord, and hide yourself in time of trouble?” (10.1). In other words, in a world of tempest and darkness, a world of suffering, why is God hidden/removed?
What is sounded by Habakkuk or by the Psalmist is a cry against abandonment, a plea from the heart to a hidden God, a prayer by the believer for divine intercession, judgment, and mercy. It is a cry for rescue/deliverance that we ourselves voice from time to time in a world seemingly gone haywire. Habakkuk, in other words, like the Psalmist, is the righteous individual of every generation who suffers and agonizes for doing what is right/good, and gets caught in the net of anxiety and pain, the powerlessness and unmanageability of life in the kingdom of this world, a world where God does not seem to matter, where God is seemingly no where in control, and a world in which fear, violence, and death have great hold.
“Break the power of the wicked and evil” [says the Psalmist in a desperate plea for God’s righteous intervention], “…search out their wickedness until you find none” (10.16).
But, as we all know, that does not seem to happen very quickly or enough to satisfy us, to fulfill our need for safety in a terrorized and captive world such as we inhabit.
“Is that all there is?” croons the late Peggy Lee in the song by that same title which she popularized. If, indeed, that’s all there is, which is to say, an endless seesaw of loss and futility, anxiety and depression, then, maybe we can advise Habakkuk that it’s time to quit believing or time to depart. Like Virginia Woolf, we might just as well fill our pockets with stones and walk into the Ouse.
Or, might we look for the answer in a deus ex machina; a solution from nowhere; which is to say, some unforeseen magician, a leader, for example, in which we can put all our trust that he/she will straighten things out, returning a reckless and lost world to law and order? But, that is the soil of which dictatorships and greater tyrannies are born.
No is the answer in both these cases.
So let’s return to that odd little prophet of this afternoon’s first lesson.
A Jewish reading of today’s text from Habakkuk, remember he is a Jew writing to Jews, would lead us to consider two possibilities.
First of all, mystical Judaism keeps sacred the number 36. It represents thirty-six righteous men whose identities are unknown, both to themselves and to others, men of each and every generation who justify humanity before God. As long as thirty-six righteous men exist in an unjust or corrupt world, creation according to this mystical belief will continue. Is Habakkuk one of the thirty-six? Is the righteous believer of any generation akin to the sacred 36?
Secondly, is Habakkuk’s lament and vision, also another way of expressing two major longings of the Hebrew People; 1) their deliverance from the land of Pharaoh in the Passover and subsequent exile to the Promised Land; and, 2) the messianic anticipation for the end time of God’s judgment, breaking humanity’s captivity to fear, violence, and death with the coming of the kingdom of heaven and in the triumph of Israel as God’s rule is at last established over the nations of the world.
Whatever the answer, Habakkuk records early in the second chapter of his book that he must wait in faith for Truth to come “…in an appointed time…” (2.3); which is to say the prophet must willingly embrace, or wrestle with belief in the goodness and faithfulness of God amidst a present time of uncertainty, suffering and the seeming invincible power of evil. Is this not also the dilemma for the modern religious believer, be they Jew, or Christian, or Moslem, or whatever; a dilemma of the spiritual life and journey in which we are warned to harbor no illusions?
I think it is. It is a thread, an important one, an inner experience that holds one and all as believers in commonality despite our external differences.
This dilemma that always holds us in tension between belief and unbelief, I think, puts us also in synch with Tennyson’s quintessential hero in “Ulysses” who reminds us of the need for a higher moral quest in which one is commanded “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (ln 70) in a world where one is “Made weak by time and fate…” (ln 69). This is in other words, a daily journey, a struggle one pursues in a spiritual voyage through darkness and tempest for what the poet envisions as a newer world, a world from which we cannot rest from seeking.
For the Christian, this newer world and new way of being are associated directly with the Kingdom of Heaven, the advent of which is the messianic era hidden in Christ’s Incarnation, which we are about to anticipate and celebrate in the seasons of Advent and Christmas. And the glory of which is also hidden, but in the mystery of the Cross, revealed in the great seasons of Passiontide and Easter, the commemoration of our Lord’s suffering, death, and resurrection. So, for the Christian, it is by Christ’s Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection that Habakkuk’s prayer is at last answered; which is to say at an appointed time of a new Passover for a new People of God.
Karl Barth, the great German theologian of the modern era, saw the horror and hopelessness of our human predicament: “so dark is our situation…” [he said] “that God Himself must enter and occupy it in order that it may be light” (from Church Dogmatics, as quoted on p. 302, Experiencing God). In other words, the Incarnation and the Cross are the appointed time when we shall see and understand God’s intervention into a world of fear, violence and death to bring about a newer world of reconciliation and hope, for in the Christian schema, without the Incarnate and Crucified God there is neither hope nor fulfillment for Creation. Here, in the Word made flesh and in the sacrificial agony of Calvary are found a God who bears in the Divine heart the wounds of the human family; bears it all for all and all time, so that we and this world may be transformed. Here too we glimpse the meaning and cost of God’s love and presence in the kingdom of this world where God is revealed as self-giving love through the pain and sacrificial gift of the dying Christ.
Discipleship then is to imitate Christ, to enter and occupy the darkness of this world by surrender, mercy and forgiveness, so that God through us may bring the light of a new day. For Bonhoeffer, another great German theologian of the past century, this meant sharing directly in our Lord’s crucifixion. Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment in a Nazi jail was also to be the place of his martyrdom. Yet the time before his execution in the closing days of the war in 1945 was not merely a time of empty waiting but an active witness to his belief in the power of God to overturn evil. “I believe…” [writes Bonhoeffer, in a letter from prison, that] “God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil…I believe that even our mistakes and shortcomings are turned to good account, and that it is no harder for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds. I believe that God is no timeless fate, but that God waits for and answers sincere prayers and responsible actions” (from Letters and Papers from Prison, as found in A Year with DB, p. 234).
Is what this modern martyr says merely wishful thinking, the foolishness of believers? Or, are these words the promise of something more/something greater? I leave you to answer that question for yourself and in your own way, for that is the question with which we must all wrestle in our relationship to and with and through the God who has embraced us first and for ever.
In closing, let’s return once again but in farewell to Habakkuk, as we now see that the newer world, the kingdom of heaven, is brought about in God’s own good time and good way by a God who is not captive to our desires, even if they are noble and true. Our God, and the kingdom of heaven we long for are both here with us now, hidden yet emerging in the lives and witness of faithful men and women of this and every generation, who through waiting faithfully and through persevering struggle with the powers and principalities of the kingdom of this world make love known and understood by their surrender to the will of God and through works of mercy and forgiveness; for that is what it means to be in Christ, and to exist in a new creation, both of which we do because of the Incarnation (II Cor 5.1-21) and the Resurrection of the crucified one.
There is no need, therefore, for stones in our pockets or for sad songs of hopelessness, only for the knowledge of God’s will and the power to carry that out! May God’s grace fill us with just that, power; the light of truth, the joy that God is love!
