Between: tragedy

Showing posts with label tragedy. Show all posts

Wednesday, 2 October 2024

A real relationship and conversation with God

Here's the sermon I shared at St Andrew’s Wickford this morning:

Although he doesn’t deserve it, Job is a man on whom all the troubles of the world have come (Job 9.1-12, 14-16). In rapid succession he loses all his livestock, servants and children. Then sores break out all over his body and his wife tells him to curse God and die. If we think life is hard for us, we might want to look at the story of Job and think again.

The book of Job is told as a series of conversations. It begins with a conversation between God and Satan about Job, continues with a conversation between Job and his friends about God and his response to suffering and ends with a conversation between Job and God himself.

Job asks in 9.14-16:

“How then can I answer him,
choosing my words with him?
… If I summoned him and he answered me,
I do not believe that he would listen to my voice.”

However, Job’s experience, as the story progresses, is that it is possible for him to discuss and debate with God and what changes Job in this story is not the arguments and words of other human beings but the experience of genuinely meeting and speaking with God himself. Job asks why good people suffer and his friends reply that people suffer because of their wickedness, because they have not helped others and that we are punished in order to repent and be healed. Job knows in his heart and in his conscience that he has helped others and has not done wrong. Job’s friends are only able to tell Job what they think about God what they aren’t able to do is to help him encounter God himself. The story is told as a series of conversation because Job entering in to a conversation with God himself is what the book is all about.

Job’s friends - and, to begin with, Job, himself - think that being in relationship with God is primarily to do with our keeping a set of rules and regulations. If we do the right things then we will have God’s favour. The problem with this view is that we can look around the world and see wicked people who seem to prosper and good people who experience tragedy. This problem is acute for Job because he is one of those good people who experience tragedy. This view is still apparent in many churches today despite our knowledge of God’s grace and forgiveness in Jesus. Yet, when we act like that we are, like Job’s friends, setting up a series of standards which we believe come from God, and saying that if you don’t meet those standards or don’t repent, then you are outside of God’s will and no longer a follower of God.

But at the end of this story, it is Job’s friends with whom God is angry, not Job. In fact, Job himself has to pray for his friends so that they are not disgraced by God. The problem God has with Job’s friends is that they have not spoken the truth about God, as Job did. And yet much of what they had to say about God is standard theology about God. So, what is the difference between Job’s friends and Job? The difference is that Job wants to speak with God while his friends want to speak about God.

Job’s friends have a black and white view of God with no shades of grey and this is actually a way of avoiding encounter with God. In this way of thinking if life is going well then you know you must be keeping the rules because you have God’s favour and if life is not going well then you know you must have done something wrong and need to repent. Life is very simple and when you understand life like that you can keep God at arms length and don’t need to talk with him because you know what you have to do and all that matters is doing it right.

Job, however, knows that life is not as simple as that and, as a result, he wants to ask God about it direct. And when he starts talking to God, God starts talking to him. And what God has to say isn’t about giving Job rules and regulations to follow; it isn’t even about answering Job’s questions. It is simply about allowing Job to experience the magnitude of being in a real relationship and conversation with God. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Midnight Oil - World That I See.

Sunday, 4 April 2021

Artlyst - Sean Scully: Philosophical Poetic Pastoral, The 12 / Dark Windows

My latest article for Artlyst is a preview of Sean Scully: The 12 / Dark Windows in New York from 6 May:

"By placing a black square over Landline bands of colour, Scully brings both approaches to spirituality together; an integration of affirmation and negativity, the cataphatic and the apophatic... "Tragedy is part of spirituality,” he commented, standing next to Doric Nyx ... ‘I am not drawn to tragedy: I believe that it is always possible to overcome it and that in the end, a ray of light will shine through.’

The Dark Windows are a further meditation on tragedy. Scully says: ‘There is no doubt that they are a response to the pandemic and to what mankind has been doing to nature. What really strikes me as tragic is that what is a relief for nature is a torment for us. And what is a pleasure for us is a torment for nature. That seems to be the conundrum that we’ve got ourselves into.’ This new body of work serves as a reappraisal or a reckoning – not simply suggesting that while the dark clouds hover and we remain in darkness, the blight will soon be over, and the world will heal itself – rather the realisation that a ray of light will always shine through the darkness or, perhaps, as was the practice of Pierre Soulages, that light will be reflected from the black."

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Taylor Swift - Epiphany.

Tuesday, 29 May 2012

Tragedy and euchatastrophe

I was gripped by Antigone at the National Theatre tonight but that may have had more to do with the strength of Sophocles' play than the strengths of this particular production. King Creon and his advisers are depicted here more as managers and bureaucrats than as the military dictators that Sophocles would seem to have created. That may be a comment on the way in which military might is commonly exercised today, as the initial recreation of the US Government's viewing of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in the opening scene of this production would seem to imply. While that is theoretically a genuinely scary perception (Assad rather than Gadaffi, for example), here the look and feel of the office set and costumes meant that the petty bureaucratic tyrannies of a David Brent were also in view and may have underminded to some extent the forces Sophocles unleashes through the play.

I was left wondering from where those forces arose. On one level, Creon makes an ill-advised decision which he then feels obligated to enforce as to back down would undermine his authority which he assumes, as King, is and must be absolute. Sophocles would then seem to be critiquing absolutist approaches to power and advocating greater responsiveness from those with power to those who are governed. Yet the same stubborn insistence in following through an initial decision that is criticised in Creon also characterises Antigone's actions and these are presented, within this production at least, as fairly unambiguously heroic. The difference then would seem to be, in part, that one stubbornly follows the wrong course of action while the other stubbornly follows the right course of action. Yet that, by itself, is relatively banal.

The greater sense of tragedy comes partly from the sense that it is the combination of both the wrong and right stubbornnesses that create the inevitability of the tragedy and also the sense that this inevitability is either the judgement of the Gods on Creon, as prophesied by Creon, or an outworking of the curse on the family, the doom which befalls three generations across the Theban plays. This latter sense of Sophocles' tragic conception sits least easily with the contemporary managerial setting of this production and may well be what creates the greatest sense of disjunction between events and setting.

Before seeing this production, I had had a conversation in which a literature lecturer spoke of contrasting Greek tragedy with Biblical narratives. The latter, because they have 'happy' endings are seen as comedic narrative structures rather than as tragedies. This is despite in some cases using essentially the same plot elements. The contrast is instructive. The story of Daniel and the Lion's Den, for example, begins in essentially the same manner as Antigone in that a King enacts a law which is then deliberately broken leading the King to feel compelled to put to death the one who is the lawbreaker. In the biblical version of the story, however, God supernaturally saves the lawbreaker whereas, in Sophocles' version, the gods punish Creon through the deaths of all those he loves. Similarly, the biblical story of David and Bathsheba, in the confrontation between David and the prophet Nathan, parallels the confrontation between Creon and Tiresias in Antigone. The difference is that David repents of his wrong actions as a result of Nathan's intervention whereas Creon resists Tiresias until the point as which his attempt to redress the situation is too late. In the David and Bathsheba story, David does not escape the (still severe) consequences of his actions because of his repentance but does avoid the total meltdown that Creon experiences and which leaves him with nothing and as nothing. The biblical narratives consistently uncover hope in despair which is why they are, as J.R.R. Tolkien phrased it, eucatastrophes rather than tragedies.

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Sixteen HorsePower - I Seen What I Saw.