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Job’s Vision By Dan Schifeling What’s on your mind when it comes to the
question of suffering? If you had a chance to ask God five questions about
suffering, what would they be?... Here
are some that people of faith have asked over the years: God,
do you protect good people from disaster, and punish people who do bad
things? God,
do you ever test our faith by sending hard times? Just
where are you anyway, in the midst of difficulty? Is
it OK to get mad at you when things are terrible and we hurt so bad? Is
there some divine grace that transcends any evil that may come to us, or is
the amount of our suffering the thing that determines whether life is worth
living? Pretty
good questions, right? All questions that are explored – if not given
definitive, once and for all answers – in the Book of Job. Let’s see how the
author of Job presents and delves into these questions. The
first thing to know about the Book of Job is that it is not a work of
history. There is no historical person named Job, who we can say lived in a
particular time at a particular place. Rather, this is a “made-up” story like
the stories of Adam and Eve or Noah and the Ark. There is a mythological
quality to it. Job is no particular person, but he is every person at one
time or another. The Book of Job is written in the most elegant Hebrew in the
Hebrew Scriptures, and it is supremely good at portraying our human
experience. It does not solve all our questions about evil and suffering, but
it tests some of the traditional answers that other Biblical writers put
forward. It encourages theological exploration on our part and broadens the
territory into which we may venture considerably. And it anticipates some
later answers that we find in Second Isaiah’s suffering servant and in the
life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Most
Biblical scholars believe our present Book of Job is based on an even earlier
folktale about a completely upstanding, righteous man who is tested by God
and remains true to his faith. In this tale, God calls Satan’s attention to
Job’s faithfulness and Satan responds by challenging God to test him by
allowing misfortune to strike him. God puts him into Satan’s power and soon
Job’s children are dead, his animals and crops are destroyed, and his body is
covered with boils. In the midst of his suffering, Job is visited by friends
who tell him that he is stupid to cling to his trust in God, and that he
should curse God and renounce his faith. Job, however, will not be swayed by
their bad advice. In the end, God takes away his afflictions and rewards him
for his faithfulness. The
author of our present Book of Job is not impressed with the easy piety of
this earlier tale. He, himself, knows the depths of suffering. He doesn’t
believe so easily in the view of divine justice that says that God is in
charge and always rewards the good while punishing the bad. He sees that the
world doesn’t always reflect that view. So he decides to rework this
folktale. He separates its beginning and the end, and inserts into the middle
some of the greatest poetry and theological argument ever written. In his
version, Job struggles to understand what is happening to him. His friends,
far from urging him to curse God, insist that it is he, himself, who must
have sinned in order to deserve what is happening to him. They urge him to
repent and beg forgiveness. But Job will have none of it. He is certain that
he has committed no sin, and he demands an answer from God. When God remains
silent, Job resorts to a legal maneuver that is tantamount to suing God.
Finally, God answers, but it is not the answer that Job – or the reader –
expects. Indeed, the plot that our present author develops is so shocking
that later scribes try to soften the blow by changing his wording in some
places. But the basic outlines of his thinking still remain. Let us see if we
can discover them... Most
obviously, the author of Job wants us to stand in Job’s shoes and experience
his pain. He wants us to see that suffering is real and that it can come to
even the most faithful person. Further it is OK to complain, even to wail
about it, and it is OK to get angry with God. Listen
to Job in the height of his anguish: Oh that I were as in the months of
old, as in the days when God watched over me; When his lamp shone over my head and I
walked by his light through the darkness; When I was in my prime and the
friendship of the Lord was upon my tent; When my children were around me, when
my steps were washed with milk... When I went out to the gate of the
city, when I took my seat in the square, And nobles refrained from talking and
the voices of princes were hushed, Because I delivered the poor who cried
and the orphan who had no helper... They listened to me and waited and
kept silence for my counsel... But now they make sport of me, those
who are younger than I... Now they mock me in song and spit at
the sight of me... Now my soul is poured out within me,
days of affliction have taken hold. The night racks my bones, and the pain
that gnaws me takes no rest... My skin turns black and falls from me,
my bones burn with heat. My lyre is turned to mourning and my
pipe to the voice of those who weep. (29:2-4, 5b, 6a, 7, 9a,10a,12,21
and 30:1, 9a, 10b, 16, 17, 30-31) But
contrast Job’s pain with the easy counsel of his friends: How long will you say these things,
and the words of your mouth be a great wind? Does God pervert justice? Does the
Almighty pervert the right? If your children sinned against him,
he delivered them into the power of their transgression. If you will seek God and beg God’s
forgiveness, if you become pure and upright, Surely then he will rouse himself and
restore your fortunes... (8:2-6) Can
you feel Job’s pain as he remembers feeling that God’s presence and love were
shining down on him like a light... as he longs for his children to be alive
once more... as he recalls the place of honor and respect he was given in his
community? Can you feel Job’s anger at his friends’ blithe assumption that he
and his children simply got what they deserved? Would you like friends like
these to comfort you in some time of terrible loss? William
Sloane Coffin, former Chaplin of Yale University and Senior Minister at the
Riverside Church in New York City, went through an agonizing experience when
his son, Alex, was suddenly killed in a tragic automobile accident at the age
of twenty-four. In a sermon the next Sunday he told of the dangers of
assuming that we know the will of God in some too simple way. He said: When a person dies there are many
things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be
said. The night after Alex died I was sitting in the living room of my
sister’s house outside of Boston, when the door opened and in came a
nice-looking middle-aged woman carrying about eighteen quiches. When she saw
me she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her
shoulder, “I just don’t understand the will of God.” Instantly I was up and
in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. “I’ll say you don’t, lady!” I said. (I
knew the anger would do me good, and the instruction to her was long
overdue.) I continued, “Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never
fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his, that he was probably driving too
fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of ‘frosties’ too many? Do you think it is God’s will that
there are no streetlights along that stretch of road and no guard rail
separating the road and Boston Harbor?” ... My own consolation lies in
knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves
closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to
break. So
a second thing that the author of Job intends us to see is that there is no
neat answer to the problem of suffering and evil. Like Job, when something terrible happens we want
to know why. Why did this happen to me? Am I being punished? Is God testing
me? Am I being called to suffer for the good of others? Or was I just in the
wrong place at the wrong time? But as Coffin’s experience shows, when someone
offers a simple solution to such a terrible event, it doesn’t work. It
obviously misses the mark and does more harm than good. In
our human frailty, we want so badly to be able to pin things down and make
the universe understandable, and therefore a bit controllable. We like to imagine that the problem of evil
reduces down to three logical propositions: A.
God is all powerful. B.
God is completely good. C.
Terrible evil exists. Now of course the problem
is, you can have any two of these propositions together, but not the third.
If God is all powerful and completely good, then we think there should be no
evil or suffering, because God should logically have created a universe in
which everything always works out beautifully – kind of like the original
picture of the Garden of Eden. So evil and suffering should not exist. Or,
God could be all powerful, but not completely good, and create evil. Or, God
could be completely good, just not totally powerful and in charge of everything,
and evil could come into being outside of God’s control. We want to understand things in terms of
simple logic. But as the author of Job shows us, reality is simply impervious
to our desire to make it simple! When God appears to Job out of the whirlwind
and begins to question Job, we see the futility of trying to impose our
desire for a safe and predictable order on God’s creation. God’s life is so
vast, God’s intelligence so profound that human understanding pales in the
face of it. There is nothing wrong with trying, mind you, but we must also
appreciate the mystery of God. Poetic language will often take us further
than logic. Listen to what Job discovers he is up against in his stubborn
desire to have a rational explanation for what has happened to him. Here are
a few of the questions God puts to him: Where were you when I laid the
foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements – surely you know! Who laid its cornerstone when the
morning stars sang together And all of the angels shouted for joy? Have you commanded the morning since
your days began, And caused the dawn to know its place? Have you entered into the springs of
the sea, Or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed
to you, Or have you seen the gates of dep darkness? Where is the dwelling place of light, And where is the place of darkness?
(38:4,5a,6b,7a,12,16,19) The
majesty of the poetry itself suggests how high God’s intelligence is in
comparison to our ability to use human reason to comprehend God. We can’t do
it. We are not in position to reduce the problem of evil and suffering to a
handful of logical propositions. No human can say whether the God who speaks
to Job is all powerful or completely good. This God is not defined by terms
such as these! If you came here hoping to hear the once and for all answer as
to why there is evil, I’m afraid you are going to be disappointed! The author
of Job doesn’t understand it, admits that he doesn’t understand it, and even
celebrates with his poetry a universe that remains mysterious in the face of
all our efforts to subject it to reason. Finally,
the author of Job shows us that what we need most in the midst of suffering
is a sense of God’s presence with us.
We may never get a satisfactory answer to the question of why something
terrible happened, but at least we need to know that God is listening and
that God does care. The most profound frustration Job experiences comes in
the middle of the Book, where Job is searching for God without success: Oh, that I knew where I might find
God, That I might come even to his
dwelling! I want to lay my case before him, And fill my mouth with arguments. I want to learn how he will answer me, And understand what he will say to me. 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. (23:3-5, 8-9) These words of Job remind
us of other words, spoken from a lonely cross: “ My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?”(Mark 15:34) Like Job, like Jesus, we need to know that God is
accompanying us through our times of suffering. In his vision, Job finds God
– a God more powerful and mysterious than he could ever imagine, but a God
who speaks to him. And this revelation is enough. In his book, Peculiar
Treasures, Frederick Buechner writes of Job’s
vision: He had seen the great glory so shot
through with sheer, fierce light and life and gladness, had heard the great
voice raised in song so full of terror and wildness and beauty, that from
that moment on nothing else mattered. All possible questions melted like
mist, and all possible explanations withered like grass, and all the bad
times of his life together with all the good times were so caught up into the
fathomless life of this God, who had bent down to speak with him though by
comparison he was no more than a fleck of dust on the head of a pin on the
lapel of a dancing flea, that all he could say was, “I had heard of thee by
the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see thee; therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.” (42:5-6)... As for the children he had lost when
the house blew down, not to mention all of his employees, he never got an
explanation about them because he never asked for one, and the reason he
never asked for one was that even if God gave him one that made splendid
sense out of all the pain and suffering that had ever been since the world
began, it was no longer splendid sense that he needed because with his own
eyes he had beheld, and not as a stranger, the one who in the end clothed all
things, no matter how small or suffused with pain, with his own splendor...
And that was more than sufficient. Now
some of you may have been blessed with a vision of God’s presence and love
that is as grand and incredible as Job’s. And, of course, many of you may
never have had such a vision, or it may only have come once, a very long time
ago. Is there a way for us to experience God’s presence and concern even if
God does not appear to us out of a whirlwind or in some other transcendent
epiphany? I
learned this week of the spiritual experience of Mother Theresa, who, as a
young person was given many profound experiences of God. These experiences
led her to take up her calling as a nun, but soon they vanished. In her
letters to friends and colleagues she pours out her pain at having lost this
visionary sense of God. Like Job, she mourns the early days when God seemed
so near. Toward the end of her long ministry to the poor a young man seeks
her out with a spiritual problem. “I once had deep experiences of God’s
presence,” he tells her, “but now they have utterly dried up.” “How long has
it been since you sensed God with you?” she asks. “Seven years,” he replies.
“Seven years,” she reflects, “with me it has been fifty...” Yet
we all know that during those years Mother Theresa, despite her pain, led an
extraordinary life of service and love. How was she able to carry on? We know
from her writing that she could do Christ’s ministry because she could see
Christ in every untouchable, every victim of AIDS, every woman with a
starving child, that she encountered. She could also sense Christ in her own
passion for justice, her own sense that God’s will is not being done when
human beings allow such conditions of hunger and poverty to exist. At
the end of the story, God commends Job for his indomitable desire for
justice. God tells Job’s over zealous friends to go off and repent and offer
sacrifices because they have not spoken what is right. God says that Job will
pray for them and that God will listen to Job’s prayers because Job has been
right to pursue justice. So God’s desire for justice finds expression in our
hearts when we seek justice for ourselves or others. Although Job curses the
day he is born and is sorely tempted to curse God, he does not. Even in the
midst of his suffering he stubbornly believes that he will find justice. In
words made immortal in Handel’s Messiah, Job says: I know that my Redeemer lives, and
that at last he will stand upon the earth; And after my skin has been destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God, Whom I shall see on my side, and my
eyes shall behold, and not another. (19:25-27a) When we feel the need for
justice in our bones, we are being drawn towards God’s ultimate will by God’s
Spirit. When evil causes us to speak out on behalf of the poor, or to fight
against political oppression, then we can sense God’s Spirit within us. When
we know in our hearts that the suffering we are experiencing is not fair, and
that God is calling us to resist, then we feel our lives caught up in God’s
great Life. So if you have experienced a desire for justice, then you have
experienced God! Your very desire for justice is God working within
you! The
story of Job is a launching pad for reflecting on God and on the meaning of
suffering. When you have time – or more likely, when you are driven by the
pain of your own suffering – turn again to those five questions with which we
began. As you consider them, read the Book of Job for yourself. The inspired
words of this remarkable author, and the living Spirit of God working within
you as you read, will become a healing encounter with God that will help you
find your way. The
Rev. Dan Schifeling Church
of the Nativity United Church of Christ October 19, 2003 |