(Interesting) Monsters and (A Boring) God (Monster: Week 4)

Job 41:1-2, 13-20, 31, 33

Revelation 17:3-6

Our readings today set before us some imaginatively graphic descriptions of beasts and monsters.

In a conversation between God and Job, God describes the mighty Leviathan, a ferocious sea-beast with rows of razor sharp teeth.  It appears to be a gigantic,  crocodile-like dragon of the sea.  No human being, including Job himself, could catch or tame the beast.  It is too wild and ferocious.  The description of this sea monster lingers for a whole chapter.  The text takes its time, slowly and poetically ratcheting up the details of the monsters strength. 

And yet the point is not simply to terrify the reader.  The point is that Job has accused God of being unjust.  And God has heard enough.  And so God thunders back against Job in a reply that says, “This beast that terrifies small humans like you was crafted by me, and it is a mere plaything for me.”  It is not really a text about a monster.  It’s a text about God’s ability to bring order out of chaos.

The image of the woman riding the scarlet beast from Revelation 17 is another graphic image of threat and harm.  The scene is garish and grotesque.  The scarlet beast on which the woman rides is covered in blasphemous names, with seven heads and ten horns.  The woman riding the beast is decked in finery, gold, and jewelry.  Clearly, she is powerful and important.  On her forehead there was a tattoo naming her mother of all prostitutes, and linking her to “Babylon” (which is a code name for Rome).  She drinks filth from a golden cup.  In other words, she is not what she seems.  The violent, filthy queen can barely ride the beast, because she is drunk with the blood of those she has killed.  She killed them because they testified that Jesus is king, and not the Roman Emperor.  They testified that the world’s hope and peace is God’s new kingdom of love, and not the Roman Empire. 

It seems to me that these ancient texts of Scripture are honest about evil without glorifying it.  They register the powerful threats to human life while confessing that these evils are always hemmed in by God’s goodness.  That is a helpful lesson for those of us alive in the 21^st century, still trying to learn how to follow Jesus Christ.

We are an entertainment culture.   And so much of our media appeals to our most inhuman instincts.  Our political discourse is mean spirited and polarized.  It almost never illumines or clarifies anything.  It is often no more than crass and unkind one-upsmanship.

Our news is often sensationalist, pandering to our lowest instincts and fears.  Headlines are slanderous and negative and fear-mongering. 

Our video games reflect a worrisome fascination with having the fire-power to gun down others.

Our horror films aim to scare us and often leave open the possibility that life is all threatening chaos.  Evil is loose and terror is supreme and unmatched.

You could argue that across a wide range of our lives we’re more interested in the bawdy and the sensational than we are in beauty and goodness.  Meanness sells; kindness, not so much.  The take-downs, the exposes of fraud, the biopic of tragic moral failure – all these entertain in a way that steady, consistent, ordinary goodness doesn’t.

To put it in different terms, our monsters are often more interesting than God.  Monsters are captivating, fascinating, grotesque and fearsome.  God, on the other hand, is described as “love” and “light” (and we yawn).  Hell is gruesome but at least imaginatively so.  Heaven is glorious -- and yet appears kind of dull.  Why so?  What is it that we're failing to capture about life in the presence of God?  What would life feel like if God and goodness were infinitely more interesting than monsters and evil?

Dante’s poem, The Divine Commedy, has three parts: Hell, Purgatory, Paradise.  Most people only read the “Hell” part.  I don’t blame them.  It’s a page-turner.  The narrator enters Hell and begins a hike down the circles of Hell towards the bottom.  At every circle, there are different kinds of sinners experiencing some terrible kind of painful punishment.  But all the way down, you know there has to be something evil at the bottom of the deepest pit.

When Dante gets to the bottom he discovers that hell is not fire but ice – the bodies of the miserable sinners are twisted and deformed and frozen beneath the ice.  Satan himself is a grotesque giant buried waist down in the ice.  On his head there are three faces, with a pair of enormous bat wings flapping beneath each face that keep the realm frozen.  From his eyes flow tears which mingle into a bloody foam in his beard.  And in each of his three mouths he violently chews his victims who are eternally eaten.  It is all pointless pain and meaningless violence.  Here is evil put in it’s place, suggests Dante -- frozen, stuck, weeping, and eating itself.  Dante’s genius is not unlike that of Scripture, for he can entertain me, and at the very same time confess that evil is the most pointless, uninteresting thing in the world. 

Dante’s vision of Hell, like the monsters of Scripture, are imaginative fiction.  And they are also pathways toward pain and destruction that we travel every day.  Unless our lives are transformed by the love of God, we travel the way of destruction.  Unless we learn that our ordinary lives are ways of sharing in God’s love, God’s kindness, God’s beauty and goodness, we sink down into a place of inhuman violence.  The beasts are fictional.  The threats to our lives are real.

It was St. Augustine who said that only God is real.  We are half-real.  I have to remind myself of that from time to time.  Because God is closer to us than our own breath, God is easy to overlook.  Because God is present to the world as its secret energy and joy, God is easy to miss.  Because sweetness, non-violence, forgiveness, and peacemaking are such hard work, so seemingly silly and naïve in the face of anger and hate and violence, it is easy to quietly leave the way of Jesus Christ.

Dante’s third volume, Paradise, is a page turner too.  Moving through the circles of the heavens, you know that at the summit of his journey, Dante will encounter God.  And it happens, on the final pages.  Dante spends most of that time telling you, the reader, that he does not have the words for this experience.  What he saw he cannot quite say.  He is like a baby babbling nonsense.  He is like a person who wakes from a dream and can remember only the faintest impression or feeling. 

He can only say that it was like a flower opening into its fullest bloom.  It was like your desire was finally given wings.  What he saw he can only call “the revelation of the highest Pleasure.”  It is the place where the flame of our longing reaches peak intensity.  What he saw when he gazed into the Light was all the scattered love of the universe finally gathered into one place.  And the feeling was sweetness and gladness.  After finally gathering his bearings, he saw something like three circles, like rainbows on fire.  The poem ends with Dante confessing that the middle circle seemed to be “painted with our human likeness.”  He cannot fathom how there would be a human image within the divine light, and so he gives up trying to think.  But he notices that after thinking is done, his desire is turned like a wheel by the Love that moves the universe.

There was a New Yorker Cartoon that pictured two angels before a clean-shaven God.  One angel says to the other, “without the beard I can’t take him seriously.”  This is a cartoon aimed at the childishness and silliness of the ways we picture God.  And yet past all those pictures is the real God, the interesting God, the God who alone is source of all sweetness, gladness, desire and delight.

We might ask ourselves today whether we really find eternal life with God an interesting possibility.  And forget life after death, for the moment -- what about now?  What about the possibilities open to us in prayer, praise, singing, and contemplation?  What about the reflection of God’s light in the faces and voices and the affectionate touch of others?  What about the deep gladness we discover in caring for others who need us, in ordinary work, in baking and gardening and folding laundry and building fence and rocking children to sleep?  What about the beauty of a landscape or a painting or poem or song that satisfies us and makes us smile?  

In all these ways, our small lives are ways of sharing in God’s big life.  And that is the most interesting, most real thing there is.  Amen.