In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
As
I mentioned last Sunday as we began our exploration of the book of Job, this
Biblical book forces us to rethink our assumptions. We’ve skipped over 21
chapters since last week and today we have a speech by Job as our entry into
the unfolding story. The premise of the book is that Job is being tested to see
whether or not he will ever curse God for all the calamities that have befallen
him. Job doesn’t quite curse God, but he does curse the day he was born. And
then some of his friends come by to offer him encouragement and advice. Today’s
reading is part of Job’s response to one of his friends. The book of Job
invites us to go deeper into our faith, but doing so will require rethinking
some of the most foundational aspects of our faith.
In
the well-known book published in 1981, When
Bad Things Happen to Good People, Harold Kushner spends a chapter
considering the case of Job. He notes that there are three things that we all
want to believe when we read book of Job. First, we want to believe that God is
all-mighty, all-powerful, and always in control. Secondly, we want to believe
that God is fair and just; that the good are rewarded and the wicked are
punished. Third, we want to believe that Job is a good person, and by
extension, we like to think that we are good people as well. But, as we will
see, the book of Job challenges each of these suppositions in different ways.
The result will be not a faith that is left in shambles, but a faith that is
even stronger than we realized it was. As I said last week, just as the
unexamined life is not worth living, neither is the unexamined faith worth
believing.
This
is hard work, and I want to acknowledge that. Job is a part of the Bible’s
wisdom literature, and as such, it has a lot to teach us about what it means to
be in a relationship with God. Wrestling with our faith has strong Biblical
precedents and is necessary part of having a mature faith. If your faith cannot
withstand critique or questioning, then it isn’t anything more than a
superstition. We gather here this morning though because we know the reality of
God’s love and grace. There is no question that we can ask that will stump God
or render God useless. Even if your questioning causes you to lose your faith,
that is actually more faithful than having a faith that does not allow itself
to be tested. So with that in mind, let’s dive into Job.
We’ll
go in reverse order with our assumptions. We want to believe that Job is good.
When Job’s friends come to visit him, this is the part of the narrative that
they doubt. They are unwilling to question God’s goodness or God’s sovereignty,
so the only logical thing to question, for them, is Job’s goodness. When they
first arrive, they try to comfort Job and join him in his sorrow. But then they
move to problem solving. They say to Job, “Think hard, there must be some
reason why God has done this to you. Somehow you must deserve all of this.” But
Job insists that there is not. This isn’t Job being obstinate, arrogant, or
forgetful, there really is nothing that Job has done wrong. Job and his friends
were not privy to the conversation in heaven that we, as readers, are.
Remember, God puts up Job as an example of steadfastness and goodness. And the
character of Satan is allowed to put Job’s goodness to the test. There was
absolutely no reason why Job was suffering; it was not the result of his
actions.
How
often though do we buy into the false narrative that there are always straight lines
of cause and effect? We see someone on the side of the road holding a sign, and
we assume that they must not have tried very hard in school or are lazy. We run
into someone who is being rude and we assume they are a bad person, when maybe
they’ve just reached their breaking point. And we get into serious trouble when
we bring God into the equation- someone dies of an illness and we think that
God must have had a reason for not healing them.
What Job puts before us
is the fact that sometimes things happen for no reason at all. And that is a
very scary proposition. We’d rather that there be a reason for everything
happening, even if we don’t understand the reason. Job’s friends don’t want to
consider the possibility that Job really is innocent, because that would mean
they have to find fault not with their human friend, but with God.
It’s also worth pointing
out that Job’s friends really left him in a lurch when they went from
accompanying him to questioning him. Many of us like to be the hero, and we genuinely
want to help our family and friends. But in questioning Job and trying to
diagnose what was happening, they only put Job on the defensive and left him
without any comfort. Last Sunday, I mentioned the work of Dr. Brené Brown, and she
has something relevant to say about friendship. There’s a great 3-minute video
that you can find online called “Sympathy vs. Empathy.” Empathy is what happens
with you “feel with” someone, sympathy is simply “being with.” We don’t like
fear or vulnerability, so we tend to be sympathetic and not empathetic.
Sympathy is about adding a silver lining to things, or trying to change
someone’s perspective. But rarely will we ever say something that will solve
someone else’s problem. Empathy, instead, is about taking someone else’s
perspective, about getting down into the pit with them. As an example, consider
a miscarriage. A sympathetic response might be “Sorry to hear that, but at
least you know that you’re able to get pregnant.” An empathetic response might
be “Sorry to hear that, I don’t know what to say, but thank you for telling me
about that, tell me more about what you’ve been feeling.” That is friendship,
but it is also difficult to do because we open ourselves to pain and loss.
Job’s friends are good at sympathy, but less so at empathizing. May this part
of the story help us to become more empathetic.
The next assumption to
check is that God is fair and just. This is the aspect of the story that the
character of Job calls into question in today’s reading. Job says “Oh, that I
knew where I might find God, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would
lay my case before him.” Job knows that he is innocent, so he assumes that the
problem is he simply hasn’t had a fair trial. If he were able to debate the
issue with God, he is confident that he will be found righteous. And again, as
the reader, we know that this is actually true – Job is innocent and what is
happening to him is not fair in any sense of the word.
Many of us have likely
heard things like “Well, God must have a reason for doing this, and it isn’t
our place to question God.” That’s actually not a conclusion that you can reach
if you read the Bible, but it is a comforting thing to believe. Job is strongly
within the Biblical tradition of arguing with God. Job wants God to know that
God isn’t doing the divine job of doing justice. This is a great example for
us. How do you pray to God? Do you talk to God as a friend or a judge? As we
heard in today’s reading from Hebrews, “We have a high priest who in every
respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach
the throne of grace with boldness.” One theologian has put it this way,
“Wherever you are, Jesus has been there; where Jesus now is, you will one day
be.” God knows what it is like to be in pain, to experience loss, to be afraid.
God can handle whatever it is that you need to discuss, or scream, or sob. And
this is so crucial to the book of Job. Later in the book, when God responds, it
is noted that Job is vindicated because he kept talking to God. It has been
said that the distinguishing characteristic of absolute despair is silence. So
keep talking, keep yelling, keep crying, God can take it and you need it.
This can be difficult
though, because we, like Job, might think God isn’t listening. Job says “If I
go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he
hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.” Job’s
speech evokes the question “Where is God?” He is in the midst of a darkness so
dark that he’s not even sure that God can see him. The Psalmist puts it a
different way: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Whether it is during
a personal crisis, at the death of a loved one, or in the midst of an atrocity
such as the Holocaust, sometimes it does seem as if God isn’t there.
To be honest, I don’t
have any answer for why this is. It’s something that we’ve always struggled
with. The prophet Isaiah once wrote “You are a God who hides himself,” and even
Jesus on the cross cries out those words of dereliction- “Why have you
abandoned me?” In light of what we’re seeing in Job, the best that I can suggest
is that perhaps we’re looking for an idol of God instead of the image of God.
If we are looking to God to be our vindicator, that assume that God is somehow
in charge of our calamity and distress. If we, like Job, ask God to find us to
be righteous, then we are looking for God to be a judge. But what if more than
a judge, God is a friend? I’ve used this quote before and I’ll use it plenty
more: “What God gives us is minimum protection, with maximum support.” Maybe
when it seems that we can’t find God it is because we are looking for what we
want God to be instead of finding how God is already with us.
So the last assumption
that we have as we come to the book of Job is that God is all-powerful and that
God is always in charge. This is the aspect that the author of the book of Job
seems to disagree with, and is therefore the point of the entire book. When
confronted with suffering and evil, we can either believe in a God who could
relieve the pain or we can believe in a God who doesn’t want us to be in pain.
In other words, is God first and foremost almighty and in control, or is God
first and foremost good and loving?
The issue raised by the
book of Job is that, if Job is innocent, which he is, then God is either
powerless to stop Job’s suffering, or God doesn’t want to stop Job’s suffering.
The book of Job seems to prefer the answer that God is powerless to stop Job’s
suffering, and to be honest, so do I. Now, I realize that “almighty” is one of
the principal words that we use to talk about God, and I know that it’s a huge
shift in our thinking and theology to consider the fact that, perhaps, God is
not all-powerful. It’s similar to that moment when a child first realizes that
their parents are not perfect and able to do anything. It puts us into a
tailspin. Thankfully, God is there to catch us.
But there actually is a
lot of Good News in seeing God this way. For one, it means that God isn’t
punishing you when bad things happen to you. It also means that God doesn’t
actually want the bad things to be happening to you. It means that we don’t
have to set ourselves up for disappointment when the salvation that we were
looking for never comes. It means that instead of being a disappointed parental
figure or a stoic judge, God can be sad and angry, not with us, but alongside
us. CS Lewis once astutely said that if we are going to love, then we are going
to have our heart broken. To love is to be vulnerable.
I do believe that if God
wanted to be all-powerful that God could be, but many theologians have
postulated that God chooses to be loving above all else. This makes God
vulnerable to the risks of love and to the realities of free-will. I am not
suggesting that God is powerless, but the book of Job implies that God is not
always in control. And because God is not in control of our suffering, then God
is free to be lovingly with us in our suffering.
Job’s friends think that
Job is the source of his trouble. Job thinks that God simply isn’t being fair
to him. But the wisdom of the book of Job suggests that God is more interested
in empathically and lovingly being with us than God is in being complicit in
our suffering. It’s a challenging reassessment of our faith to consider that
the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all that is might not be the Great and
Powerful Oz who pulls all of the levers behind the scenes. But, ultimately, by
coming out from behind the curtain, God is able to fulfill the promise to be
with us always. And in reality, that action of loving presence is the most
powerful thing in the world.
