Devastating Silence
Jan 20, 2025 - Bible Reading
Bible Reading:
Job 30-31, Luke 20
Passages that arrested me:
Job's words:
Job 30:19-20 ESV
[19] God has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes. [20] I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me. https://bible.com/bible/59/job.30.19-20.ESV
Luke 20:19-20 ESV
A response to Jesus and His Stories
[19] The scribes and the chief priests sought to lay hands on him at that very hour, for they perceived that he had told this parable against them, but they feared the people. [20] So they watched him and sent spies, who pretended to be sincere, that they might catch him in something he said, so as to deliver him up to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor. https://bible.com/bible/59/luk.20.19-20.ESV
Devastating Silence
The joy moments in our lives are often full of sounds and noises and voices. Conversations, joking and laughter, games, reunions, heart to heart sharing, parties and celebrations, often family, often friends, welcoming babies, singing, worshipping. With.
But the pain moments in our lives are often accompanied by a singular companion. It's not the companion of self that we always carry with us. So not self-pity. Not self-contemplation. Not self-care, self-love, self-interest. No. In the pain moments, in the gut-wrenching, soul-crushing, heart-bleeding, emptied-even-of-tears moments, our sole companion is the Silence of God. And with Job we say, "I stand, and you only look at me."
Jesus is not unfamiliar with this all too human reality of deep pain. There is a sorrow that accompanies Luke's description of the ways the religious teachers respond to Him. The scribes and the chief priests were ones who ought most earnestly to have been looking for Messiah, ought most clearly to have recognized the signs of Messiah's coming, ought above all to have been sensitized to the panoply of sin that separates from God. Instead they are full of anger, violence, self-protection, fear, subterfuge, false sincerity, preying, and plotting.
And they are successful.
Jesus is put on a Roman cross, and echoes Job's cry to God, "and you only look at me!"
Is it possible that in the silence of God He is most near?
Love to my West Coast Willseas