Be with us, O Lord, for if you are with us nothing else matters, and if you are not with us, nothing else matters. Amen.
“Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” Those words of Job express so much about the human condition and both the blessings and the challenges of saying anything about God. This morning, I want to say four things about the grandeur of God, but first I will give a very short summary of the Book of Job to make sure that we’re all up to speed on how we got to this, the final chapter in Job.
Job was a righteous man whom God was quite pleased with, as he was living an upright life. However, Satan says to God, “It is only because Job has such a good life that he is such a good person.” Now, a quick note on who Satan is and isn’t. The word “Satan” means “accuser,” and he is a heavenly being, not a fallen angel, thanks to John Milton for sowing that seed. One of the most helpful ways to think of Satan is as a prosecuting attorney – his job is to find people who are transgressing God’s ways and apply justice to them. So God says to Satan, “Fine, test him by taking away his blessings and let’s see how he responds.” Job never curses God for the calamities that befall him. When his friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar come to console him, they challenge Job and insist that he must have done something wrong to deserve his recent misfortunes. Right before today’s reading began, God responds to Job’s complaints saying “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” Job has been put in his place and responds in the passage we heard.
The first thing for us to hear from Job is that God is overwhelming. There is nothing about God that we can fully grasp. God’s love is more incomprehensible than our minds can understand. God’s very nature and being are beyond our ability to comprehend. God’s wisdom is not something that we can figure out. God is a mystery; and not like a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which we can gather all the clues and use our reason to solve, but rather a mystery like falling in love or encountering beauty. Mystery is something to encounter and be transformed by, not dissect.
How magnificent God is! In the busyness of life and in the minutia of religion, we can sometimes lose sight of the grandeur of God. The sheer magnitude of what is meant by “God” ought to destabilize us, dazzle us, inspire us, confuse us, mesmerize us, encompass us. How splendid is Creation and our very being! How wonderful it is that through the gift of the Holy Spirit we are given to participate in the Divine life of the Holy Trinity! How merciful is God to redeem us from Sin and Death! How fantastic it is that we are given hearts to know God and to love each other! How awesome that God, who was beyond all human knowing, came to us in Jesus Christ so that we might know of the depths of God’s love for us! How marvelous it is that the infinite God who is beyond space and time very much is present with us in our otherwise insignificant nature! How blessed are we that God is such a grand mystery!
As we stand before this grand mystery of God, we come to our second lesson from Job – that we ought to always have a sense of humility in our faith and life. Job says, “I have uttered what I did not understand… therefore, I repent in dust and ashes.” When it comes to God, we always stand in ignorance, we always see through a glass dimly, we never have the full picture. But that doesn’t slow us in declaring which candidate God supports, or which people are worthy of compassion, or who deserves punishment for their actions. The problem is that when our strongly held convictions are built on the foundation of our ignorance, we end up with arrogance.
Whether it be in our faith, in our politics, or in our approaches to life, it is far too easy to take ourselves too seriously and overestimate our intelligence. Job had his ideas of what fairness looked like, but he had not considered his ideas in the face of the mysterious grandeur of God. And God humbles Job by reminding him of God’s tremendousness. We all have opinions on what the ideal worship service looks like, or what the best tax policy is, or what is a generous amount to pledge to the church. But Job’s encounter that reminds us that we are all wrong, at least in part. We should remember that we are all dust and ashes in the face of God’s enormity.
And so Job repents. As I often say, repentance is not about saying “sorry,” rather it is about being transformed. The Biblical notion of repentance is that it is a reorientation, a repositioning of your heart, a changing of your mind. Job is a wonderful example to us because he admits that he was wrong, and a little more of that humble admission of guilt in our society would go a long way.
The reason why Job comes to this moment of humility brings us to the third lesson in Job – that despite the fact that God is beyond our knowing, God is still intimately knowable. It is a paradox, but paradox is not beyond the bounds of what God’s mysterious nature can encompass. Job utters, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” While God can certainly be perceived by any of our senses, the point here is that God is not aloof or invisible. God is not an object for us to think about or discuss, rather God is the ground of our being, our final rest, and an abiding presence in between.
We heard God chastise Job’s friends in this final chapter and it was because they tried to make God into an ideology instead of experiencing the living God. When God says to the friends “For you have not spoken of me what is right,” the translation lets us down. What the Hebrew very clearly says, and means, is “For you have not spoken to me what is right.” Job’s friends were speaking about God instead of with God. Though God is beyond us, we also have an intimate relationship with God. In Jesus, we saw the Father face-to-face, and by the Holy Spirit God dwells within us and is always knowable.
Faith is an incarnate experience, not a theoretical exercise. Faith is always about a relationship – a relationship with God and with all of Creation, which bears the mark of its Creator. Coming to know the vast love of God for you and finding the peace that comes from humility by not needing to have all the answers is saving and transforming. And I pray that each of us come to know this more fully. By spending time in prayer and in reading Scripture, we come to know God; not knowing about God, but entering into a relationship with God. By prioritizing coming to Sunday worship above everything else, we prepare ourselves to more fully enter into a relationship with the living God.
This relationship with God is what leads to the fourth lesson that Job provides, that we can put our hope and trust in God. As the Book of Job concludes, we hear that “The Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.” If that seems to you too much like a “happy ending,” perhaps that’s because it is. Scholars are divided on whether or not verses 7-16 are original or not. But that’s not a question we’re going to solve this morning. Rather, what this restoration of Job’s fortunes points us towards is our hope that God will rectify all that has been damaged by Sin and Death. I find the words of Julian of Norwich to be some of the most faithful and comforting in all the world – “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Job shows us that, at the end, love wins, justice triumphs, and all is redeemed. In our lifetimes, this very likely will not be fully manifest, as we will still grapple with injustice, with doubt, with war, with famine, with illness, with death. Why is it this way? Remembering the immense mystery of God, all of our responses are incomplete. But what we can know is that God is compassionate, merciful, and just. When we humble ourselves in the face of that Divine mystery and come into a relationship with God, then we are able to trust and hope that God’s love is the source and end of all things. We are able to take part in the peace of God which is located in God’s future even amidst things that are passing away. When our hope is placed in the grandeur of God, then all things become possible, even redemption from the darkest of situations.
St. Teresa of Avila put this better than I could ever hope to when she prayed “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things are passing away: God never changes. Patience obtains all things, whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.”
The vast mystery of God puts us in a place of humility. This humility becomes the only suitable foundation for having an authentic relationship of intimacy with God. And this relationship with God becomes the means by which we come to experience the grace of God, trusting in God’s goodness. Mystery, humility, relationship, and trust – this is what Job has to say to us this morning. And this is exactly why we have gathered this morning – to come into the fullness of this experience of God in the Holy Eucharist.
How is it that God is made present to us in bread and wine? How is it that Christ’s death on a Cross ushers us into the New Creation? We can’t say for sure, it’s a mystery that we are brought into. And so we approach the altar with humility, first confessing our sins, being at peace with one another, and kneeling at the rail. And in humbling ourselves before the Cross of Christ, we are brought into relationship with God as we receive the Body of and Blood of Christ. And these tokens of our salvation which we receive are but a foretaste of the ultimate peace and restoration of all things. Because we have tasted and seen the goodness of the Lord, we are strengthened in this holy meal to have hope and trust in God’s abiding love.
In the Holy Eucharist, we encounter what the Book of Job tells us about God – mystery, humility, relationship, and trust. We, the people of God, will soon receive the gifts of God to feed on in our hearts, remembering that Christ died for us, receiving them by faith with thanksgiving. Thanks be to God!
