Be Not Afraid of the Dark
John Shuck
First Presbyterian Church
Elizabethton, Tennessee
October 28, 2012
All Saints
Have you entered into the springs
of the sea,
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been
revealed to you,
or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?
Job 38:16-17
Are You Afraid of the Dark? was a television show in the 90s that
my kids watched. It was a kids’ show on the Nickelodeon
channel. The set up for the show was a group of teenagers, “the midnight society”
telling scary stories around a fire at night. Each
of the characters told different stories and the stories reflected their
personalities. The message in that is
that each of us has our unique dark side.
We are all struggle with and in
the dark in our own way. I think
another message of the show was that you gain courage to face the dark when you
share your stories with others.
The dark is a fearsome
place. You don’t know what might jump
out at you in the dark. As a child I
remember that scary moment between turning off the light in the bedroom and
running for the bed to get undercover as soon as possible. Apparently, I was safe in the bed from
whatever dark creatures lurked about in my room. As
long as you get undercover, you are OK.
Last week we explored
the metaphor of silence. This week
darkness. Both silence and darkness point toward the
spiritual path of via negativa. We tend to think darkness is a bad thing. Even the Gospel of John that we read at Christmas sees darkness as something
that wants to get you and take you over.
The promise is this:
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
True enough.
But darkness is also a path.
For those acquainted with the night, they
know, like
Robert Frost, that this acquaintance is "neither wrong nor
right."
There
is something to be learned in the dark.
Poets, the strong ones, the ones we read, have
dabbled in the dark.
I think
it takes courage to be acquainted with the night and to spend time in
darkness.
In the darkness we keep
the things that we don’t want everyone to know. That is anyone to know, including
ourselves. The darkness hides our
vulnerability. Jung called this aspect of ourselves the
shadow side or the dark side. We prefer to keep that side hidden. We create elaborate masks to wear in order to
show the world that we are people of the light, happy and together and above
average.
The via negativa invites us to explore the
dark places. The truth is that if you
don’t find what is in the dark, what is in the dark will eventually find you. One of my favorite sayings of Jesus is from
the Gospel of Thomas, which is itself
a gospel that had been hidden in the darkness, literally in clay pots for 1700
years. In this hidden, secret gospel we
find this from Jesus:
"If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save
you. If you do not bring it forth, what you do not have within you will kill
you."
Every hero must go into the dark. The great myths of the hero’s quest to slay dragons, find the holy grail, battle
Voldemort, rescue the ring, face crucifixion and so on are about entering the
dark and discovering the courage to take on what you find.
The via negativa is not about defeating what
is in the dark. It could be that, but it
is also about embracing what is in the dark.
In the dark is a treasure. That
treasure is an aspect of our own self.
The path invites us to find that and bring it into the light where it
can be embraced and admired by all.
This is the sense of
the passage in the Gospel of John. The light shines in the darkness not to
obliterate the darkness but so it can bring to light what has been hidden
there. When it is hidden we are overwhelmed,
saddened, and dis-eased. When brought
to the light it is becomes a source of strength, joy, and healing. That is the point of the path.
So God asks Job:
Have you entered into the springs of the sea,
or walked in the recesses of
the deep?
Have the gates of death been revealed to you,
or have you seen the gates of
deep darkness?
The story of Job is the textbook for the via negativa.
There is a lot to say
about Job, that I am not going to say
today. It is enough to know that the
character “God” does not come off well.
He and his drinking buddy, Satan, have a spitting contest about who is
tougher and Job ends up being the object of this wager. God lets Satan torture Job to prove that Job
will be loyal to God no matter how he suffers.
Job is not in on this
little game. Neither of course are Job’s friends. But we are.
Job rejects all of his friends’ theories as to why this might be
happening to him. Job is right even
though he doesn’t know why he is right.
The reason Job suffers is because “God” behaves pathologically.
We are not supposed to
say that because we are pious. We have been taught that the Bible is God’s Word
and that God is good. When we read the
Bible we are told that no matter how barbaric God appears God must be
right. The price we pay for piety is
that we put halos around bad texts and endorse harmful ethics.
Once you get over that
notion that the character “God’ in the Bible is always good, in fact, far from
it, then you can appreciate the story of Job.
God never comes clean
to Job. He never tells him the truth. He never says,
“Hey Job, buddy. The reason you
were suffering is because, well Satan and I had a little bet about you. I hope you aren’t sore. And hey, you helped me win. You were loyal to the end! What do you say, still friends?”
God says none of
that. Nor does God apologize for his ruthless behavior. Instead God conjures up an
impressive hurricane and speaks to Job from a position of power. He goes on for several chapters about how
tough he is. He can drag around
Leviathan with a fishhook. He made the
heavens and the mountains. He tells Job in effect:
What have you done, little man?
How dare you question me!
That’s God’s
answer. Might makes right. In that speech from the whirlwind, God says
to Job:
Have you entered into the springs of the sea,
or walked in the recesses of
the deep?
Have the gates of death been revealed to you,
or have you seen the gates of
deep darkness?
Those are rhetorical
questions to which Job must only answer, No.
No he has not physically entered the place below the flat earth where
the water comes up. Nor has he entered physically
the gates to the underworld.
But, of course, we know that Job truly has seen the gates of
death, the gates of deep darkness. He
has walked the recesses of the deep. He
has done so in the most real way possible.
He has suffered. He lost
everything and he has not given up in his quest to find meaning. He has not given in to simplistic answers
that are not true even as they might comfort.
These primitive notions
of God that are still prevalent today were inadequate to help the author of Job
make sense of life. Job is the story of
what happens when one’s religion is too small for life. Job represents the true hero. In addition to refusing the easy answers of
orthodoxy that his friends thrust on him, he faces the foundation of meaning
itself. He faces God, or the best
understanding of God that he can imagine.
He finds God wanting.
I am not sure if the
author of the story of Job knew what he was doing. His story of Job seems to me to be a
deconstruction of monotheism. God may
be all good or all powerful but he can’t be both. In Job’s story, he comes across as only
powerful and not good.
This is the translation
of that pivotal passage in chapter 42 in which Job supposedly repents.
According to the excellent book,
God: A Biography by Jack Miles, that is a mistranslation.
It is garbled Hebrew that translators
misused to make Job the bad guy.
According to piety, God can’t be wrong, so Job must repent.
This is the NRSV translation:
Then Job answered the Lord:
‘I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours
can be thwarted.
“Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?”
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me,
which I did not know.
“Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you
declare to me.”
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.’
That is the pious
interpretation. But that is inconsistent. We all know that Job
has nothing for which to repent. God is
the one who needs to repent. This translation
from Jack Miles is, I think, more accurate.
These are Job’s final words to God after God delivers his blustery speech:
Then Job answered the Lord:
You know you can do anything.
Nothing can stop you.
You ask, “Who is this ignorant muddler?”
Well, I said more than I knew, wonders quite beyond me.
“You listen, and I’ll talk, “ you say,
“I’ll question you, and you tell me.”
Word of you had reached my ears,
But now that my eyes have seen you,
I shudder with sorrow for mortal clay.
The story of Job is the
textbook for the via negativa.
The author of Job is
showing that the God they had inherited is all power and no love. All power and no goodness. It took a courageous author to create a
courageous character to expose this idea of God as inadequate for meaning. That opened the way for a fuller sense of God to develop.
Job is a model of a
spiritual hero. His is a model for
today, for the searcher, who is not satisfied with the pious explanations that
hold no water, and who will search out in the dark places for a more fulfilling
answer.
Job is a hero who is not afraid of the dark.
Amen.
