Pentecost 21
October 25, 2009
Job 42
A few weeks ago, Holden and I took our kids to see a reptile show at the National Theatre. It was one of the free shows they do on Saturday mornings for families and given the size of the stage area and the closeness of the audience, I was expecting things like lizards and small snakes. But this man kept bringing out bigger and more lethal creatures. First a snapping turtle, then a crocodile, then an anaconda, then a giant 25-foot python. And the whole time, he was using this calm, sing-songy, almost comical voice as he talked about the reptiles. “This is Banana Boat. She is a giant python. She looks very slow, but she can actually move very fast. She could cross this room before you’d even realized she’d moved. She eats her prey whole. She can eat a giant pig. I love Banana Boat, but she doesn’t love me. When I’m gone from her I miss her, but she’ll never miss me…” The whole thing was a little surreal. These cold, unfeeling, dangerous beasts that could turn at any moment and eat one of the children sitting on the carpet near the front.
Unfortunately, the portrayal of God in the book of Job feels a little bit like that.
Today we get our fourth and last installment of Job. In case you don’t have all four segments of Job cemented firmly in your minds, I’ll do a quick recap.
Week 1: Job, a wealthy and upright man, becomes the focus of interest at a heavenly counsel when God asks Satan to consider how righteous Job is. Satan protests that Job is only righteous because he is so prosperous. And so a wager begins to see whether Job will retain his faith in the midst of suffering.
As an aside, I have to say that this piece is actually my biggest problem with the story. This terrible bit where God gives the okay to Satan to torment Job. I wasn’t preaching 3 weeks ago when this part of the story was told, but I’ll tell you now that it helped me, and maybe it will help some of you, to learn that this wager story-line was actually an ancient pre-existing story that the author of Job used as a literary device to set up the rest of this poetic parable. This conversation between God and Satan is not intended to be taken as a realistic portrayal of how God runs creation. Thank goodness. Some commentators suggest that this interlude between Satan and God could be seen as a metaphor for the place God makes in the world for free will. But, that is really just a red herring in the scheme of this book, so moving right along…
Satan destroys Job’s possessions and family, yet Job still clings to God. So Satan ruins Job’s health. Job’s wife suggests that Job “curse God and die.” But Job still resigns himself to God’s will, saying “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not the bad?”
About this time, and this wasn’t in our lectionary readings, Job is visited by some friends, who presumably come to comfort him, but end up doing no such thing. “Job must be guilty to receive such punishment from God. Job should just apologize to God and be done with it.” “Job will learn and grow from his suffering.” Yada yada yada. Pretty much all the absolutely wrong things any of us have ever heard from all the well-meaning people who come to visit us in our hour of need. And some of the things we’ve probably said to people suffering around us, thinking we were being helpful.
On to Week 2: Job rages against his plight and insists that God come before him so that he can lay his case of innocence before God and be acquitted. Job feels abandoned by God and wishes he could die.
Week 3: Finally, God’s voice comes out of the whirlwind, not to answer or acquit Job, but to challenge him with questions that show the power of God as evidenced in creation. Rebecca talked about this part last week. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God asks Job.
And today, Week 4: Job is contrite and satisfied. “I have uttered what I did not understand,” says Job. And God restores Job to his former greatness, doubles his possessions and children, and Job dies in old age, happy and fulfilled.
Today’s reading is the end of the book of Job, and I have to wonder whether the lectionary folks were banking on us having forgotten the first three segments of this series and feeling all warm and fuzzy because Job has now found peace with God and God has “restored Job’s fortunes.” Maybe by now we’ve forgotten that small detail of Job’s first set of children who all died in a horrible catastrophe in Week 1. Because if we’d forgotten that, maybe it would be possible to rejoice with Job and his new set of kids and his gobs of money and property.
But I haven’t forgotten, and now I’ve brought the rest of you down with me. We started with this problem, this fundamental, ever-present, theological, human problem of suffering. As Rabbi Kushner put it in his famous book, Why do bad things happen to good people?
And at the start of the book of Job, that’s exactly what we find Job wondering. He reasons (and it makes a lot of sense) that either bad things happen because something is wrong with the person (which both Job and God know perfectly well is not true in Job’s case) or bad things happen because something is wrong with God. If bad things happen to a righteous person, it must mean either that God isn’t powerful enough to stop the bad things from happening, or that God isn’t good and just enough to bother to stop them from happening. Either way, God loses in Job’s mind, and probably in most of ours.
So what are we left with? Virginia Woolf once wrote in a letter to a friend: “I read the Book of Job last night – I don’t think God comes well out of it.” And I have to say, upon first inspection, I’ve got to agree with Virginia. Job may have passed God’s little test, remaining faithful in his belief in God throughout all this suffering, but I’m not sure God passes mine. It’s not enough for me that God exists and is in control. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t enough for me that God laid the foundation of the earth. I want a good God. A loving God. A God who cares about what happens to me and whose heart breaks along with mine. And so, like Job, I keep waiting in this story for God to justify God’s self.
I am right there, cheering Job on in his rage against God, in his refusal to let God get away with this, in his persistent “raging against the dying of the light.” If God is too distant and uncaring to hear Job’s cry for help, then by God Job will continue scratch and claw until he’s heard. And I love Job for that. I love this honest, angry outburst that gives us permission to scream right along with him in our moments of pain, “WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME? ANSWER ME!” He’s a lot like blind Bartimaeus in our Gospel this morning who keeps right on crying out to Jesus for mercy even though the people around him keep “ordering him to be quiet.”
And just like Jesus did with Bartimaeus, God responds to Job. God’s answer isn’t quite as gentle as the one Jesus gives Bartimaeus in his search for healing and sight. It sounds a lot more like a frustrated parent’s last resort, “Because I said so!” And truth be told, it wasn’t remotely the answer Job was waiting for. Job was hoping that God would admit God’s wrongdoing and declare Job innocent. For my part, I was hoping God would speak up and explain away any responsibility for this awful pain that Job was put through. But God doesn’t do either. God goes on and on for four whole chapters about something else entirely. Job’s question was about justice and suffering; God’s answer is about omnipotence. God is God and Job is not and that’s that.
And yet, even though God never addressed Job’s question, for Job, it was enough. In today’s reading we find Job transformed from his raging into a place of peace as a result. Why does God’s non-answer satisfy Job so completely?
I think, like Job, we can find the answer in the whirlwind. Several times throughout the book of Job, we hear Job or his friends likening his plight to being in a whirlwind. For most of the book, and in other literary works as well, a whirlwind is used as a symbol of human suffering. Something that comes upon you and envelops you completely, distorts everything around you, knocks the breath out of you. And then, suddenly, we read that God appears to Job out of the whirlwind. Suddenly, God is there with Job. And for Job, that’s enough.
And I think I understand why. My daughter was born with a birth mark – a port wine stain – on her cheek. Not a big deal, but very noticeable, and so ever since she was a baby we’ve been taking her to Johns Hopkins for laser treatments every few months. Before she was old enough to understand what was going on, the doctors had to strap her down and immobilize her head and arms so that she wouldn’t move during the procedure. Her eyes were covered so that the laser wouldn’t accidentally reach them. And for those first years, she would get so scared and just cry and scream for me during the whole thing. “Mommy, mommy, help!” Her face was numb, so it supposedly wasn’t painful, but her fear was heart breaking because there was nothing I could do but hover next to her and love her and cry. My heart was breaking because she was asking for my help and I wasn’t helping. And yet every time after it was done, when she was free from all the contraptions holding her down, she wanted nothing more than to jump in my arms and be held by me. She didn’t understand why she’d had to go through it, had no idea why I’d let it happen, and yet she was at peace as soon as I held her. Maybe that’s how Job felt. Maybe the worst thing that can happen is not to suffer without reason, but to suffer without God.
God had been silent, and Job thought he’d been abandoned. And then God speaks, and although the mystery of suffering is still a mystery, Job knows that he is no longer alone in it. Sometimes to face God is not to get the answers, but to rephrase the questions. The question for the book of Job is no longer “Why do good people suffer?” or even “Is God responsible for our suffering?”, but “How can we trust and love God in the face of suffering?” And the answer, which I think Job discovers and is transformed by, is that we can trust and love God in the face of suffering once we realize that God is in that suffering with us. Once we experience God coming out of our whirlwind. Amen.
Elizabeth Rees