Scripture: Selections from Job
Introduction to scripture: This is the second of three sermons on the book of Job. The book of Job is a fairly lengthy book that happens to lend itself to a series of three sermons because it is basically divided into three parts. There is a brief opening section of a couple of chapters that I focused on last week that sort of lays out the premise of the whole book. We are introduced to this very good man, Job, who we are told was prosperous and happy and religious, doing very nicely thank you. And then the bottom falls out. Job’s life comes apart at the seams. He loses everything, including his children and finally his own health, and we are told that the reason for all this happening to him is because God and Satan got into an argument over whether Job would continue to be such a good and faithful person if things weren’t going so well for him. And so we’re confronted right away with a whole bunch of difficult questions, such as: Why does God inflict or permit such suffering on people, good people, or anyone for that matter? Is the picture of God we are given in the early chapters of Job a true picture? When people experience devastating suffering, are we to think of it as the will of God? What is our proper response to God in such circumstances?
The second section of the book, a lenthy section consisting of some thirty chapters, is all about Job in a state of grief, how he expresses it, how he struggles with it, tries to deal with it, how his friends try to deal with it. God fades out of the picture here. Job and Job’s friends have a lot to say to God and about God, but God is not part of the conversation. God is off stage as it were at this point. This part of the story is all about a grieving Job, and that’s what I want to focus my reflections on today. What we’re going to hear as our scripture reading for this morning are just a few small samples of the kinds of exchanges that take place between Job and his friends who come to visit him, to offer him some comfort. We’ll pick up first right where we left off last week, at chapter 2 verse 11 and then we’ll hear just a few pieces of the lengthy conversation Job carried on with his friends during the next thirty chapters.
Reading from Job, beginning at 2:11
Narrator: Now when Job’s three friends heard of all the troubles that had come upon Job, each of them set out from his home—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort their friend, Job. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices, and they wept out loud. They tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. Then they sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. After seven days of silence Job was the first to speak. He said:
Job: Let the day perish in which I was born. Let that day be darkness. Let that night be barren; let no joyful cry be heard in it. Why did I not die at birth? Why is life given to one in misery and life to the bitter in soul, who longs for death but it does not come? Truly, the thing I fear has come upon me. I am not at ease. I have no rest, only trouble.
Narrator: Then Job’s friend Eliphaz spoke in response:
Eliphaz: Will you be offended if I say something? But who can keep from speaking? Your words have supported those who were stumbling, and you have made firm the feeble knees. But now it comes to you, and you are impatient. It touches you, and you are dismayed. Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Now a word came stealing to me and my ear received the whisper of it. There was silence, and then I heard a voice: “Can mortals be righteous before God? Can human beings be pure before their maker?” Misery does not come from the earth, nor does trouble sprout from the ground, but human beings are born to trouble. As for me I would seek God and would commit my cause to God. God does great things, marvelous things without number. God gives rain on the earth and sends water to the fields. God saves the needy. Those who mourn are lifted to safety. How happy is the one whom God reproves. Do not despise the discipline of the Almighty.
Job: The arrows of the Almighty are in me; my spirit drinks their poison; the terrors of God are set against me. In truth I have no help in me. My companions are treacherous. In time of heat they disappear. They are disappointed because they were confident. You see my calamity, and you are afraid. Teach me, and I will be silent. Make me understand how I have gone wrong. How forceful are honest words! But your reproof, what does it reprove? Do you think you can fault words, as if the speech of the desperate were wind? I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.
Zophar: I can’t let these words go unanswered. You say, “My conduct is pure” but wisdom is many-sided. Know that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves…
Job: No doubt when you die wisdom will die with you. But I have some understanding too. I am not inferior to you. But I will speak to the Almighty. I desire to argue my case with God. As for you, you whitewash with lies; you are all worthless physicians. If you would only keep silent, that would be your wisdom.
God has put my family far from me, and my acquaintances are wholly estranged from me. My relatives and my close friends have failed me; the guests in my house have forgotten me. I have become an alien in everyone’s eyes. How long will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words? Have pity on me, have pity on me, O my friends, for the hand of God has touched me.
Narrator: Here end the selections from the book of Job.
Sermon text:
My thoughts this morning are focused on comfort, because as I say Job’s grief is the overwhelming reality we are dealing with in the whole long main section of the book of Job, and the question we are confronted with, it seems to me, is how is Job to be comforted. That is the question that most concerns us here, not the theological questions Job asks and that are always associated with Job about why people suffer and what God’s role is in suffering, but how Job is to be comforted, which is to say how we are to be comforted. “I lift my eyes to hills. Where will my help come from?”
My thoughts this morning will be focused on comfort, but I admit that I have had quite a few different kinds of thoughts in relation to that and they may not all fit neatly together, and it may be that some of them might logically fit better in next week’s sermon, which will be about the final section of the book where God speaks again, memorably. But there was something I intended to talk about last week, that I promised my conversation partners, Faye Arnold and Mary Dockery, that I would talk about but that I didn’t get around to last week, and let me begin this week with that piece of unfinished business. What I intended to talk about but didn’t last week was the “fear of God”.
When we meet Job at the very beginning of the book, in chapter one verse one it says that Job was “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” Mary pointed this out and raised the question of what significance this might have. My first thought was that it was just sort of a standard way of referring to someone who believed in God, worshiped God, maybe stood in awe of God—the way we refer to someone as a “god-fearing” person, though it is interesting that that phrase made its way into our language to describe anyone who is a believer.
My second thought, though, was “let’s not leave it at that”. I don’t want to make too much of that one phrase, which may be just what I said it was, but there is a purpose in asking ourselves what kind of a God it was that Job believed in. Given Job’s circumstances at the start of the book, it is easy to imagine Job imagining God as sort of a comfortable presence in Job’s comfortable life, a kindly presence, a friend who may not be nice to everyone but has certainly been nice to Job and gave Job a good deal of the good things in life and who Job loved in return. It may be this image of God that Satan sensed in the beginning and wanted to unmask. Satan may have been saying something like, “Yes, God, Job may appear to love you but who he really loves is not really you, just some caricature of you who goes around showering blessings on people he likes.”
It’s also easy to imagine Job actually believing in a God he needed to be afraid of, literally fearing God, because God is demanding and has high expectations of us humans, and if we don’t meet those expectations, God is likely to strike out in anger in some way to let us know that we haven’t measured up. I put this in sort of an extreme way, but some version of this is, I believe, not unusual for human beings, to feel that God will punish them for their shortcomings, and so it’s not hard for me to imagine Job this way. And if that’s the God Job believed in, then we can understand his goodness as his way to appease God. God needs to be appeased, and Job did a good job of it, so God felt no particular need to punish Job and allowed him to go about enjoying life. Job understood his goodness as protection—until everything fell apart for him. There is some evidence that Job had this view of God, since he said in the portion of the conversation you heard this morning, that the very thing he feared has come upon him. So maybe Job saw God all along as someone to be afraid of, someone who without too much provocation, could unleash all the powers of hell against a person, but who didn’t do it with Job because Job didn’t give him any good excuse to do it. Or maybe Job did imagine God as his good friend and himself as God’s good friend, and since they were buddies, God saw to it that his friend was happy. Or maybe Job imagined God both ways. Our images of God don’t have to be, and in fact very often are not, logically consistent with each other.
Whatever may be the case in that regard, when Job’s life began to unravel Job had those images of God taken away from him. Job lost not only his wealth, his children, and his health. He lost his God. Any god that he thought he had known before and understood and believed in was gone. That is pretty clearly the portrait we are given of Job in these middle chapters, a portrait of a man who has lost pretty much everything, including God. That doesn’t always happen. Not everyone who goes through trouble, even extreme trouble, loses God. But some people do, and maybe sometimes all people do, or at least that is always a possibility, that in addition to losing whatever else we lose, we will also lose God.
From this perspective, this is a pretty sad picture we have in Job. Job is desolate and desperate, says so himself. Let’s go back to Job’s “friends” for a few moments. You don’t see what I have written here, but when I say “friends”, on the paper it’s in quotes, because of course his friends turn out to be not such good friends. Job’s so-called friends are proverbial for their bad theology and their poor bedside manner. What they do is, I suppose, a classic case of “blaming the victim”. They start out ok actually. It seems they do care about Job. They break out in tears when they first see him, and they sit silently with him for seven long days, just being there as we might say, maybe holding his hand, wiping his brow, getting him some water.
But when Job finally speaks and it turns out that his words are not so nice, not like they were before when he was saying “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord”, when Job this time says that he is miserable, that his life has become a living hell, that he regrets the day he was born and looks forward to the day he will die, when Job starts saying these kinds of things, this seems to be just a bit more grief than Job’s friends can bear, and so they can’t just be there any more, they have to say something back, and from there it’s all down hill. As far as being good friends or good counselors, as far as bringing any kind of comfort to Job in his distress, they blow it.
Job’s friends have several things to say to him actually but what the say over and over and say forcefully and clearly is that God does not just send suffering to people for no reason, that Job must have done something to deserve this, that maybe Job has some secret sin or something in his past or something that is not so obvious to anyone but that needs to be confessed and somehow put right. If there were nothing like this in Job, none of this would be happening. So Job’s job is to confess his sin, repent of his sin, throw himself on the mercy of God and hope for the best. And if he doesn’t understand what his sin is, then he should confess that too, because it may be part of his sin, or it may be that his sin is to think of himself as such a good person. In any case, in complaining to God rather than confessing and in protesting that he doesn’t deserve such a fate, Job is just making things worse, according to his friends. Whatever other sins he may have committed, he is now adding to them by questioning God’s justice and proclaiming his own innocence. Bottom line: Job has brought this all on himself, and is continuing every moment to make matters worse…according to his “friends”.
Most people who comment on the book of Job are pretty hard on these friends of Job, and they have good reason to be. I certainly am not going to defend what they have to say. Even if Job is not quite as good as he is made out to be, he doesn’t deserve what has happened to him, and his children didn’t deserve to die either, regardless of how good or bad they may have been. I don’t believe that when awful things happen to people that it is because they deserve it as a punishment or because it is in any way the will of God. So I’m not rushing to the defense of Job’s friends, but I guess I want to say a gentle word on their behalf. Maybe they didn’t say the right things, but at the same time I’m not so clear what the right things to say were. So they were clumsy and insensitive in their attempt to bring comfort. I’m certainly capable of being clumsy and insensitive too, even if I wouldn’t do it in the same way Job’s friends did. And as for blaming the victim, we have some modern more sophisticated versions of that. Research has pretty well established that there is often a connection between physical disease and psychological or spiritual issues people are dealing with, or haven’t dealt with, not to mention the ways we have cared for or not cared for our bodies. People do play a role in their own disease and in their own healing. People do sometimes bring trouble on themselves. In the midst of a trouble that someone may be experiencing there may be guilt that needs to be talked about and not ignored. As I say, I don’t want to put myself in the position of defending Job’s friends, but for me, the story doesn’t so much make me feel superior to the friends of Job as it does remind me of how inadequate I often feel in providing comfort. It may be, as we heard Job suggest in the reading, that silence would have been better than what they said, and sometimes silence is the best thing, and the most caring thing. But in the end we need words too, some kind of words, something needs to be said, sooner or later, and we all know that such words do not come easily. So I’m led by the story to reflect on those moments when comfort is needed, when I’m the one who needs it, or when I’m called on to be the one who offers it. It’s not just a question of bashing Job’s friends.
And those kinds of reflections have led me to still others this week, straying I admit quite far from Job. But the question of offering comfort has led me to reflect on how poor we are in our culture right now at giving comfort, and how much in need of it we are. I can’t go too far in this direction with you this morning. I don’t want to talk that much and you don’t want to listen that much. But I’m thinking of the movies, for instance, and how so many of them seem to me to play on fear, and I think to myself that it’s not just the violence that disturbs me, though it does, but the complete disregard of our need for some kind of real comfort. The alternative is not movies that are warm and fuzzy, but I wonder to myself what does give comfort, and where do we turn for it. It’s almost trite to say that we turn all too easily to pills. Job needs comfort? His friends fail him? Give that man a pill. Help him get some sleep, be less depressed. I don’t mean to take cheap shots at pharmaceuticals or imply that they don’t have their place. Some pills are needed. Some are literally life-savers. But I still reflect that as a whole culture, not just as individuals who wonder what to say to someone in distress or grieving, but as a whole culture we are not very good at comfort.
Well, back to Job. I said earlier that he presents a pretty sad picture, struck by one devastating misfortune after another, surrounded by friends who seem more interested in lecturing him than in offering comfort, friends who seem pretty far away even though they’re right there, and missing God, missing the God who he had once been so cozy with, now that god nowhere to be found. From one perspective it’s a very sad picture. But from another perspective maybe things aren’t completely bleak.
I can’t take credit for this insight, but I wish I could. One person writing about Job commented that Job’s problem was, well another problem Job had in addition to all the others, was that he lacked a conversation partner. And that made a lot of sense to me. I think back to something Job said in one of his speeches that we actually heard this morning: “How forceful are honest words!” I think he might mean, “how forceful, how powerful, how comforting, how healing are honest words”. Job wants more than anything someone he can talk to, someone he can talk with, someone he can trust with his feelings and who will respond to him as a fellow human being, not as an instructor, an advice giver, or a dispenser of pop theology. The friends turn out not to be that kind of conversation partner that Job needs, and so he turns to God. Eventually, he would turn to God anyway, because God needs to be part of the conversation, even if Job is lucky enough, even if we are lucky enough, to have friends who truly are conversation partners in our living. Where does our help come from? Hopefully it does come, at least some, from other human beings who know how to talk with us about things that are not nonsense, that are not trivia, and that are not platitudes. If our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth, it is not because human beings can be of no comfort, and we don’t need to take that task seriously, of being conversation partners to one another. In a way that is what church is all about, being conversation partners to one another about things we don’t have much opportunity to talk about anywhere else. Our help is in the name of the Lord not because we can be of no use to one another, not because we are inevitably of no more help to each other than Job’s friends, but because God needs to be part of the conversation too.
I know that may sound a bit strange or spooky. We’re going to talk with God? We’re going to hear God talk to us? That is one reason why people want to understand the scriptures as the literal word of God, I think, because we so much need for God to be part of the conversation. And what I see happening with Job is his determined effort to make that happen. Deprived of the easier understandings of God he once had, Job is looking for a real word from God. And he doesn’t give up, even though that is a mysterious and uncertain undertaking. If we were able to read through the thirty chapters of Job’s grief, we would get a sense maybe, I get a sense that Job is struggling very much with his concept of God. I know God’s in charge, that nothing happens except by God’s will and God is great and I’m just a poor mortal, I know all that, but what is this God’s will stuff, and what kind of God would cause the people God loves to suffer like this? Talk to me Eliphaz. Talk to me Zophar. Talk to me God. Of course the responsibility for the conversation does not all rest with God. It’s up to us to do our part, and Job sets us a good example. He opens up the conversation, and even though he doesn’t get an answer right away, he doesn’t give up. He keeps at it, and his rantings are not faithless challenges to God. In the sense that our prayers are part of an ongoing conversation with God, his rantings are prayers, a bit unorthodox perhaps, but prayers nonetheless. The picture of Job is not completely bleak because he is struggling his way toward God. In one way, or another, I believe we are all doing the same. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 20, 2006