Scripture: Job 1 and 2
At the suggestion of the worship committee I’ll be spending the remaining weeks in August with another book from the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Job. There was a lively discussion in our worship committee meeting that led to this, and then Faye Arnold, Mary Dockery, and I continued the discussion later, and I am indebted to them for their thoughts, though as always they should not be held responsible for my deficiencies.
I need to say that I start this series of sermons with some trepidation or uneasiness or discomfort—I’m not quite sure what to call it—and it’s not just because Job gives us too much to deal with in three weeks and no matter how many weeks you spend, you’re not likely to come to a satisfying conclusion at the end. It’s not just because of that. It’s also because I’m not sure I’m in the right place spiritually to do this right now.
The book of Job as you have heard this morning, and perhaps as you already knew, is about a man, a good man, not a medium good man but by any human standard a very good man, who experiences a series of increasingly devastating misfortunes, losing first his fortune, then his children, then his physical health and comfort so that he lives in constant pain which deprives him of even the ability to rest so that there is no respite from his sorrow even in sleep. The story presents Job’s troubles as being attributable to God, specifically to a discussion and a wager between God and Satan, which I’ll get back to of course, but because God is clearly involved as the source of Job’s trouble, it forces the reader to ask the question: If God is good, why does God act like that? If God is good and/or if God is just, why does God inflict such terrible suffering on a really good person like Job, or even allow such terrible things to happen to him? How do we reconcile our image of a good and loving God with the suffering of human beings, whether we’re talking about tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes or about some disease that threatens the life or happiness of someone we love?
Because of the way the book of Job presents itself in these first two chapters, whatever else it may be about, and as I say I think there’s a lot that’s worth talking about in the book of Job, but whatever else it may be about, it’s certainly about these issues of why God causes or allows such suffering among God’s people, especially the good among God’s people. Where is God in concentration camps and torture chambers, in destructive natural events, in devastating disease? And why? Why God? Why me? Why this person I love so much? Why anyone?
The book of Job presents us with these kinds of questions. But here’s where my discomfort comes in. I don’t want to approach this material in some abstract way. I don’t want to treat the book of Job as though it presents us with these interesting questions to think about. This is not a puzzle to be solved. At the heart of the book of Job is the experience of grief—Job’s grief and our own. And I want to keep that very much in focus. We need to keep that very much in focus. The question Job confronts us with is not really about why a good God allows people to suffer, even though I just said it was about that, and it is in a way. But the more basic question of Job is: how do we deal with our grieving? And it’s important to keep that in focus and not to be drifting off into abstract discussions about God and suffering, as though this were some theological riddle.
However, that’s not particularly where I am right now in my spiritual life, in a place of grieving, that is. Grief is not an immediate, overwhelming reality for me right now in the way it has been in the past and will be again for sure sometime in the future. I suppose we can hardly be human in this world of ours if grief is not some part of our spiritual lives all the time. Calamity may not have struck me recently in any direct, personal way, but God knows there is calamity just about everywhere we turn, and I know that people I care about are facing different kinds of calamity in varying degrees, and there are always the necessary losses of our living, parts of ourselves that we lose just in the ordinary course of things.
So grief is always present in a way, in some very real ways, and it’s always good to recognize it, to let it in to our spirits, and not close ourselves off from it. But it’s not there in any specially intense way for me right now, which means that I feel like I could easily fall to speaking about Job’s grief and God’s relation to it in a way that would be distant and therefore disrespectful of the real grief we all do experience up close at some time or another. I am wary of talking about Job because my words may turn out to be too formal, too rational, and because of that faithless. On the other hand, maybe we need at least some distance if we are to talk about grief at all. When we’re in the middle of it, words may not make a whole lot of sense or matter very much. So with all that said, let me go ahead and say some first words about this rich and troubling text.
And because of what I just said, let me start on the feeling level and tell you something else about where I find myself spiritually in relation to the book of Job. I am angry. I am angry at the character of God who appears in these opening chapters of Job, I am angry at the way God is depicted here, I am angry at the Bible, or at least this piece of the Bible, for purveying such an image of God, and I am angry at Job in the story for not being angry at God. In the view of some people I suppose I’m not supposed to be angry. People who write about Job often say that it is a profound and beautiful piece of writing, which maybe it is. And it is the Bible after all, and certainly one common approach to the Bible is that we are supposed to be instructed, or enlightened, or edified somehow by reading it, not angered. Nevertheless, I am angry.
Let’s start with the way God is portrayed. These first two chapters give us what amounts to a behind-the-scenes look at Job’s suffering. Job doesn’t know what’s going on. He just knows what’s happened. He doesn’t know how or why. But as the readers we’re told how this all came to be. God and Satan got into a discussion, or an argument. By the way, I don’t think we should get too hung up on Satan here. This is not the king of the underworld, or someone with horns and a pitchfork. In this story Satan is just part of the courts of heaven, where apparently things are talked about and decisions are made about what is to happen on earth. In this story Satan is not so much EVIL personified as a prosecuting attorney who has a pretty dim view of humanity, all of humanity, even someone as apparently good as Job. People are a pretty sorry lot as far as Satan is concerned, and he says so to God. God says, “Oh no. I give you that there are some people who make me embarrassed to admit that I created the species, but Job is different. He really is one of the good guys.” And as you know, Satan suggests that they test this theory out by sending one affliction after another to Job and just see if he still is so full of goodness and gratitude and faithfulness. And God agreed and so it came to be that Job had all these terrible things happen to him.
There are different ways to describe what Satan and God were debating. Are human beings capable of honest to God goodness, of selfless love, or are they essentially motivated by selfishness, only seeming sometimes to be good but at the core concerned mostly, or only, about themselves. Do people love God purely, or is our faith connected to the rewards it is supposed to offer? Do we love God really just because we hope that it will earn us health or happiness or salvation or something?
These are all interesting questions, or maybe they’re all the same question. It doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter how you put it. God and Satan are having this debate, whatever it’s over, and Job ends up being the victim of their debate. In fact, I should point out the obvious, that Job is not the only victim here. His children were killed as a result of this heavenly debate. So were a whole bunch of animals. We have an image here of a God who goes around snuffing out life in order to settle an issue. In a way God and Satan are doing here what I said I was afraid of doing. They have “issues” to talk about and to settle. The suffering and the grief of human beings is, to say the least, not so clearly a matter of concern for them. This is no God I know, no God I recognize as my God.
In fact, forget about the discussion or the debate. What this whole set-up says to me is that Job’s trouble, and by extension anyone’s trouble who may find himself or herself in a situation at all similar to Job, that when calamity strikes anyone, it is the will of God. I know that God doesn’t actually carry out all the things that happen to Job, but God does give permission. God authorizes the calamity in this story. God says “do it”. I know too that we refer casually to natural disasters as “acts of God” and that when people are in pain, the words “it must be the will of God” seem to come easily to mind. But that doesn’t mean I have to believe it or accept it, and I don’t. And I don’t appreciate it that the book of Job seems to be lending its weight to this notion that God, for whatever reasons, reasons that are unknown to us and unlikely to make sense to us, causes human suffering and is the source of our grieving.
What often goes along with such an idea is the thought that since what is causing us pain or grief is God’s will, the proper response from us, the only proper response would be to accept it, without complaint, trusting completely that God knows what God is doing, and giving ourselves over completely to God’s will. That is an image of faith that I do recognize as having some place in my life. There are times in our lives when all we can do is to place ourselves figuratively in the hands of God, trusting that whatever happens, it will be ok. That is one notion of what it means to have faith, but it is not the only one. In the book of Job, Job seems to take on this calm, trusting, serene attitude in the face of unspeakable grief. It is no doubt why some people talk about the “patience of Job”. His calm and his patience, given what happened, are almost superhuman. But however superhuman they may, I have to say that I don’t find his mellowness here particularly praiseworthy. In fact, not at all. As I said before it makes me angry.
As the book goes along, Job will become less patient. He will ask why. He will insist on a response. He will demand an accounting from God. He will refuse to accept pious platitudes as answers. But all of that comes later. Here he just says “the Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Maybe, I think to myself, if what he was experiencing was a downturn in the stock market or let’s say failing eyesight, then I might expect the appropriate response to be a calm acceptance and the willingness to adjust to new circumstances. But here Job has just lost his children. His children have lost their lives. If not on behalf of his own grief, at least on behalf of his children, he should be crying out in pain and in grief, and in anger, to God—and if he believed it was God’s will, then he should be crying out in anger at God. And that, it seems to me, would be not just a human thing to do, but a faithful thing to do.
There is one character in these first two chapters I haven’t mentioned yet. Mrs. Job. She is the one at this point in the story who refuses to be calm or accepting or trusting or serene. Later, as I say, Job will take up the cause, but it is Mrs. Job who is first to raise her voice in protest. She advises Job to curse God, in fact, meaning I assume that she is already doing it in her heart if not with her lips. And even though she may in fact be cursing a god who is not God, she has a right, a compelling reason, and maybe even an obligation to do so. Her protest in the end is not against God or the will of God. Her protest is against an image of God as one who plays with the suffering of human beings, who wills the suffering of human beings, who brings grief to human beings at the drop of a divine whim.
This is a protest that I guess you know by know I believe needs to be made. It is a protest that needs to be made because it is on behalf of other human beings, and we need to stick up for one another. God doesn’t need our defense. But it is also a protest that is made on behalf of God, on behalf of the God who does not fit any of our easy preconceptions. It is, of course, not that God should be thought of in some other simplistic way—say as rewarding good and punishing evil, that is our ideas of good and evil, or as some infinitely kind, inexhaustible source of comfort and warmth and security—but because we need to challenge all simplistic assumptions about who God is. Mrs. Job’s anger, and later Job’s anger too, move us in that direction.
Many of you are no doubt familiar with the work of Elizabeth Kubler Ross who some years ago wrote a book called “On Death and Dying” in which she described the emotional stages a person goes through in the process of dying and in any process of grieving—people move quite naturally she said from the early stage of denial through other stages like anger and bargaining until they finally come to the stage of acceptance. It was meant to be, and I think was received by many people, as a freeing kind of insight, letting people know that what they were experiencing in their own grief was not weird or unusual or unhealthy. It was just part of a natural process.
I read recently, however, that much later Kubler-Ross was asked in an interview if there was anything in her writings that she would like to change and she said, “I wish I had never come up with those damn stages.” I don’t know for sure why she said that, but from my standpoint, although I have found the idea of the stages helpful at times, it also makes it seem almost as though they are unimportant, just stages after all, something we all go through, but we’ll get over it. At least in the case of anger, I believe it’s more than a stage and anger, like grief itself, may be something we never quite get over, and shouldn’t ever quite get over. In situations like Job’s, in all our situations that Job calls to mind, anger is not a sin. It is, I believe, a way of reaching out for a deeper, truer image of God, and a deeper, truer relationship to that God. It is just one way, but it is a true and an honest way. Our hearts and spirits do reach out, need to reach out, even if it is sometimes in anger, for a truer, deeper relationship to God. May we be faithful to that task. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 13, 2006