“Thus far you shall come and no further,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped.”
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I had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago of visiting Crackington Haven on the North Cornish coast and walking on the sands.
It was a bright day and a peaceful scene.
At least, it was until I noticed a small trawler
completing the seascape
by bobbing up and down at the entrance to the cove.
My stomach registered it as much as my eyes.
It surprised me how easily a relatively calm sea could throw it around so.
Here is the 20-year-old Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.”
It is from his undergraduate poem Heaven-Haven.
So, can we ask to be ‘out of the swing of the sea’?
I don’t suppose those on retreat before ordination are praying this.
And it didn’t work out that way for Hopkins.
Here are words suggesting a different kind of haven:
“Thus far you shall come and no further,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped.”
The line comes from God’s answer to Job, which we heard at Mattins.
God answers Job out of the whirlwind. It is not an answer Job had expected.
God does not justify his actions by the light of human reasoning and ethical concern.
It is as if the rug is pulled from under the argument Job and his comforters have been having.
Firmly – and humorously – God challenges Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
And takes him on a tour of all that God has made, some of the most awe-inspiring and some of the most absurd examples.
Just the kind of tour we love to settle down to on a Sunday evening natural history programme.
It is not that human ethical concerns are wrong.
But that we ourselves are part of all that is made, both awesome and laughable –
our thinking is wholly dependent on the signs we can construct from all that is around us.
How can our created intelligence know the mind of God?
How can we expect our ethics to measure God’s purposes?
“Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor?”
Will the pot say to the potter, ‘Why have you made me like this?’
So – if in so many areas of human life today we see the prospect of gales and high waves, is the witness of Job simply that we face it stoically, saying ‘God’s will be done’?
There is more to this daring poem than that.
Here are three points, and a fourth that I’ll take from today’s gospel.
First:
God speaks. God addresses Job.
Not the chaos of whirlwind only, but the gift of something comprehensible;
not the void of silence but relationship.
“Gird up your loins like a man. I will question you and you shall declare to me.”
There is the assurance that our life – and all in existence – is because God desires it to be,
that God remains in relationship with it,
that it bears the stamp of God’s overflowing creativity as gift – the gift of being and of life.
“The heavenly beings shouted for joy”.
Second:
God raises Job’s understanding.
Job’s horizons expand – to the foundations of the earth, to the heavenly beings, to the seas.
My own life – however self-absorbed I may be, however diminished I may become – my own life ever exists in and from a wider network,
depicted here as connected through our common origin in God’s making.
Am I afraid of what is to come, of dark clouds gathering? Of what I know being shaken and disappearing?
All that I value takes its place among the things God values.
And God’s delight in what He has made connects us with every other thing whatever comes. No loss can be absolute.
And third?: –
“here shall your proud waves be stopped”.
Within the gallimaufry of existences made by God
there are – and remain – boundaries.
‘I set bars and doors,’ God says.
God is no Cnut to get his feet wet.
We may have deeply-rooted fears:
what our actions will do to the environment and to all living creatures;
what irreversible antipathies we shall conjure up between nations;
what kind of artificial humanity we are lining up to take our place;
what nuclear or biological or chemical violence our warfare may bring;
what a welter of human sorrows we are assembling.
We may nurse these fears,
and certainly we are right to take them seriously,
to question, as Job was right to question.
But to the seas of chaos God says, ‘thus far you shall come and no further and here shall your proud waves be stopped’.
All remains in God’s keeping.
And the very seas themselves? God depicts them to Job as His tender baby.
Our fears have their limits. And beyond their limits, God’s love remains.
So in today’s gospel, we catch up with Jesus calmly asleep in the stern of a fishing smack, as the waves wash over.
It is an incredible, frustrating and glorious picture of what it is to live in full awareness of God, whose bars and doors remain – that contemplative knowledge to which Job came, declaring, “I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.”
Which leads to the fourth and final point:
God’s incomprehensible purpose does not only operate beyond the start of time,
or hazily behind the mists of this changing world.
God has not rested in Hopkins’ heaven-haven
but has brought that heaven-haven onto a cushion of a fishing boat in a sudden violent storm on the Sea of Galilee.
“Peace! Be still!”
God in love participates in what we fear, even to a cross.
And there is the boundary – “Here shall your proud waves be stopped” –
beyond which is life, resurrection life.
“We are treated as dying – and see, we are alive”.
May that faith of Paul and the Apostles, that eye which sees God in all things, be yours.
Amen.