God's Wager

In the opening chapter of the Book of Job, the devil and God made a wager on Job’s faithfulness. Such faithfulness, the devil said, was due to the Lord’s protection on Job and blessing him with many riches material and immaterial. “Strike everything he has”, the devil said to God, “and he will surely curse you to your face” (Job 1: 10-11). To this wager, the Lord agreed.

The ins and outs of Job’s travails and his response to them are too much to cover in a space of a blog post, and not really the interest of this post. What is of interest, is the willingness of God to enter into a wager regarding human affairs.

Christians might be familiar with the idea of God acting as the Lord of all things, ruling all and working through all. We might, however, be less familiar with the idea of God being a deity that is willing to get into a bet.

Now, if the Scriptural reference is the only thing to go by to support this idea, one may be forgiven for dismissing the idea as something that is characteristic of God.

However, I have been prompted to revisit this idea, thanks to the Christmas letter that was issued by the interim president of Communion and Liberation, Davide Prosperi. This letter was mentioned in part of my interview with Fr Harrison Ayre on Clerically Speaking, which was mentioned in a previous post.

In that Christmas letter, Prosperi put the question to us: can the Incarnation of the Divine Word, the event from two millenia ago, nonetheless bear something new for us today?

Prosperi’s answer came in two parts, but of interest is the second part of the response, which arose from his reading of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s writings, in particular a passage that dealt with the significance of the incarnation for the former Pontiff. To quote Benedict:

God became a baby, a baby who needs a mother. He became a baby, a creature who enters into the world crying, whose first sound is a cry for help, whose first act is to stretch out his hands in search of security.

And again:

God became a baby. However, we also hear it said that these things are nothing but sentimentalism, that it would be better to leave them behind. But the New Testament has other ideas on the matter. For the faith of the Bible and of the Church, it is important that God should have wanted to be a similar creature, dependent on a mother, dependent on the beneficent love of man.

God’s choice for such a dependency was, for Prosperi, the new thing for him. For Prosperi, God’s choice of this dependency constitutes another one of these bets, only this time it is a bet concerning what we do with God when he is placed in our custody. As he wrote in his letter:

Dear friends, these words of the pope emeritus truly shed new light for me on the moment that we are passing through. Not only does God walk with us, but, with an act of even more vertiginous generosity, He entrusts Himself to our freedom, He begs for the help of each one of us, He hungers and thirsts for our freely spoken “yes.” Never before has it been as necessary that the “bet” that God makes on each one of us become habitual content of our self-awareness.

As he suggests in the last sentence of that passage, God’s bet on our freedom is not a once off, just as it was not a once off in Job’s case. In Job’s case, the choice to accept what was placed in his custody, in the face of a constant barrage of suffering, was something that needed to be renewed day after day. Likewise, as we go about our year, God’s bet on our freedom is something that his renewed with each new sunrise.

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