Where is consolation?
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
June 23, 2024—Proper 7B
Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41
I wonder: does God ever regret having created this world?
And before anyone accuses me of blasphemy, I would remind them of the story of the Flood. In which God became so furious and fed up with the ways in which humanity was going wrong that God decided to wipe the slate clean and just start again.
He then promised never to destroy life on earth like that again. But we should note: God doesn’t promise not to WANT to do it again. And honestly, given how utterly flawed Noah proves himself to be, IMMEDIATELY … it is something of a foregone conclusion. God will continue to regret this. It’s built right in.
And maybe, in fact, God’s regret is part of God’s plan. Not a great part. Not what God might have chosen if God wanted an easy eternity. But necessary, if God wants to be in relationship with her Creation. Because Creation requires matter, and matter decays, and it’s messy, and beings with both instincts and self-awareness are especially messy. And more often than one might like, we are regrettable. We are infuriating, and we are heart-breaking. But God signed up anyway.
And signed us up too.
So, here we are. In this beautiful, terrible, fragile world. Often bumbling around like the disciples: drawn to Jesus but not really understanding all his strange parables, especially the ones about farming and other things they know nothing about. Still, he says and does such amazing things! And today he’s taking them back to familiar territory at last: out to sea in a fishing boat!
And the sea tries to kill them.
Which is painfully ironic, but very true to life. We recognize their fear and desperation as they try to shake Jesus awake. They want him to fix it. Failing that, they want him to calm their fears. And if the boat goes down, and some of them die, they will want him to make sense of it all for them.
In the gospel, this is a story about Jesus having the same power over stormy seas that he has over evil spirits. He speaks a word, and makes it better. But in our own lives, we can still hear the roar of those waves, and our desperate longing for comfort and consolation still looms large.
Many of us probably think comfort and consolation are essentially the same thing, but I recently heard someone make an interesting distinction between them. Comfort, he said, is a tangible thing. It’s a hug, it’s presence, it’s a simple statement like, “I hate this for you.” As such, its truth is unassailable and eternal.
Consolation, on the other hand, attempts to give meaning to our suffering, so that we are more able to endure. It attempts an explanation of WHY life is the way it is, to give us purpose and thus strength to continue. [1]
Which brings us to Job. In an imaginative, humorous and heart-breaking story, The Book of Job explores the very serious question of why even good people suffer. At the end comes this long and poetic response from God that essentially boils down to: “You are human and couldn’t possibly understand the arc of eternity!”
As explanations go, it doesn’t explain much. I do appreciate the vastness of it, which allows my suffering to be a part of the eternal arc of God’s plan, rather than something God deliberately did to me. As such, it offers us a way to believe in the goodness of God, despite all the terrible things that happen in this world: there is a longer view, it assures us, and a way that things fall apart and come together that we can’t possibly imagine.
But consolation, to feel deeply true, also needs to acknowledge the “right now” reality of a person or a people’s life. Someone in the Ukraine or Gaza will find little consolation in being told their sufferings are merely part of a much larger movement of history. They need something that sees and touches their lived experience. And this is where I would suggest that the idea of God’s regret is an icon of hope rather than despair.
Because a God who commands the seas, and could obviously command us in the same way, but chooses not to, and deeply regrets the damage we do because of His choice to surrender control? That vision of God allows us to trust that violence and suffering are not God’s dream for us. That the dream of God lies in the vision of the kingdom we are given, in which those who hunger and suffer and are imprisoned are fed, and healed, and set free. And that is the vision, the consolation that provides the purpose and meaning that strengthen us to go on, powered by the hope that this dream will someday be fulfilled.
But in the meantime… In the meantime, even as we might nudge closer to that dream, we will continue to suffer, in one way or another. And some days, we will feel as though we are at sea in a small boat, and the waves will rise and we’ll think we’re about to die.
As a friend to someone in the very midst of such a thing, your best first offering is comfort. Show up; lend a shoulder and an ear; express that “this is awful.” Say it again. Resist the urge to jump to consolation, to try to give any meaning to their suffering that they don’t say first. Resist the temptation to tell them why this is happening to them, and resist all the platitudes about God’s plans and what they can handle and whether this will make them stronger. Just say “this is awful” again.
If you are the one who’s in the midst of the things, don’t try to jump too soon to the end of these biblical stories. Being put in your place by the Creator of the Universe can wait, as can any kind of blind faith that Jesus will calm every storm. Your place in the story is with the panicked disciples, as they frantically try to wake Jesus up: “Don’t you care that we are perishing?!!!’ Your place in the story is with Job, pushed to his limits and crying out to heaven for some kind of explanation. Or, honestly, who even cares what the explanation is: what we want is an APOLOGY!
Scripture gives voice to that agony and anger, and thus names it as part of a faithful response. Yes, scripture also bears witness to the long view, and on my calmer days, when I’ve had enough sleep, I do find that helpful and sustaining and inspiring. But when the seas get really, really rough, I draw strength from joining my voice with Job’s and the disciples’ and so many others in the Bible, to cry out to God. And I myself draw strength from the idea that God too might cry out in lament and regret about the events of the world. And I pray that you, too, can find hope and blessing in this honesty which could look at first like despair. May it be so, my friends. Amen.
[1] Michael Ignatieff, guest on “Everything Happens” podcast with Kate Bowler, S10 E6