The scriptures referred to are Job 42:1-6, 10-17.
Nothing prepares you to preach on Job like getting a kidney stone the day before your 46th anniversary and then seeing various doctors for it and other problems the week of and week after your 70th birthday! Still, reading Job can work on you like a sad song does when you are blue. It can paradoxically lift your mood. Because you really can't compete with Job. I still have my family, thank God! I'm not rich but what I have hasn't been wiped out. And I'm not sitting on an ash heap, covered in sores.
Author and Keys resident Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book named Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she went through one of the recognized stages of grieving a loss: anger. She was angry about not only getting a life-threatening disease but also with the brutal course of treatment, which primarily consists of poisoning the body in the calculated risk that the more rapidly growing cancer cells will absorb more than the normal cells and so be killed off. She was also angry with having to wrangle with the insurance company she had been paying monthly to deal with such a health event, only to have them forget about all that when it was their turn to write the checks. And she was angry with the fact that everyone wanted her to stop being mad and start being positive. Requiring her to manufacture good feelings during a time of pain and suffering was an additional burden on her. Instead she wanted someone to empathize with her. She felt like Job.
The majority of the book of Job is a poetic debate between Job and his so-called “comforters.” Job was not only rich but righteous. That made his extreme misfortune—losing his family, wealth, and health through a series of disasters—theologically inexplicable to his friends. If Job were a bad man, then his recent reversals could be seen as a punishment. But if God allows the righteous to suffer, doesn't that make him unjust? Shouldn't only good things happen to good people?
We still feel this way. There are many churchgoers who think God is like a bodyguard or like Iron Man's suit of armor. They think God's primary purpose is to keep bad things from happening to them. And, ironically, it is atheists who are most likely to believe this. They think that if there is a God, he is obligated to protect if not all people then all believers from all that is evil. If he doesn't, they say, then he must not exist. Plow through all the angry eloquence of the recent atheists all the way back to the classic ones who preceded them and what you will find is the basic argument that the existence of evil somehow disproves the existence of God. Which shows that none of them really understands the Bible.
If the mere fact that “bad things happen to the innocent” could bring down the faith, then Christianity would never have survived the crucifixion of its founder. Of all the world religions, Christianity is the one that most honestly and deeply faces the reality of pain, loss, injustice and tragedy. Many criticisms were lodged against the movie The Passion of the Christ, but none of them said it sugarcoated what happened to Jesus. And this monstrous act of injustice is at the very heart of the gospel, or good news. Why?
In fact, there are lots of examples of the recognition that “bad things happen to good people” in the Bible. One of the most devastating is the fate of Josiah, the last righteous king of Judah. He eradicated the idolatry that had practically become the state religion for the 70 years preceding his reign. He repaired and beautified God's temple, which had fallen into neglect and decline. During the renovation, the high priest discovered a copy of the Torah, the book of the law of God. When it was read to Josiah, he was alarmed by how far his nation had strayed. He had the Torah read to the people and had them renew their covenant with God. He celebrated the Passover in a way that hadn't been done since before his time. And then he rode out to fight Egypt, his people's ancient enemy. He was unexpectedly cut down by a random arrow and died at age 39. Soon after, the nation was conquered and taken into exile. How's that for inexplicable injustice?
But the fullest discussion of the problem of the relationship between earthly injustice and God is in the book of Job. Job's catastrophic losses have nothing to do with his behavior. That is made clear. But his “comforters” can't tolerate the cognitive dissonance between their concept of how the world should work and the way it actually does in Job's case. And because their concept of God depends on their faulty concept of the world, they take Job's insistence on his innocence as an attack on their faith, rather than the exposure of how simplistic and inadequate their theology is.
A lot of people's faith is like a chain. Each belief is a link in that chain. Like “There is a God,” and “God likes good people,” and “God will not let anything bad happen to me because I am a good or nice or religious person.” Some of those links are forged in steel but some are bound to be faulty, because we are human. The problem with a chain is that it is only as strong as its weakest link. So when one of those beliefs breaks down, the chain comes apart and so does the person's faith. Many an atheist began as a sincere believer whose chain of beliefs was shattered by a pathetically weak link.
Job's friends are like a guy whose GPS app is telling him to go straight when all he can see is a dead end. Yet this guy insists to his wife that his app can't possibly be wrong. Go ahead and laugh. We've all been that guy. We all have maps in our heads of how the world works that are flawed. They all need to be updated at times. What's stupid is insisting that our map is right and reality is what's wrong.
It may not be the map that's wrong, though. It could be that you're not reading the map correctly. You missed a detail. You misread a sign. You skipped a step. You flipped a direction. It's a left turn and not a right. There's a detour. The bridge isn't open yet. Or if you're in Miami, you want NW 123rd Court, not NW 123rd Circle, or Boulevard, or Avenue or Terrace or Street. My point is that people misread the Bible or read into it their own ideas or their denomination's theology. Like the popular interpretation of the rapture. It's only in one passage (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) and it's not at all what people think it is. The Greek terms Paul uses are of meeting a king or emperor when he comes to visit your city. You meet him outside the city and then accompany him into it. He doesn't meet the people and then take them back to Rome. Paul is saying when Jesus returns we will join him as he comes to earth. He's not taking us away to heaven to spare us from the tribulation only to come back later. There's no two-part return. Christians are not going to be absent from a world in tribulation just when it needs them the most. (Matthew 24:22)
Ultimately what God is telling Job's “comforters” is “You got it wrong.” They kept insisting that Job couldn't have had all his troubles if he were really righteous. Only unrepentant sinners end up like that. And Job's continued assertion that he didn't deserve what he got infuriated them. “It's right here on the map,” they're saying. And then God says, “You read it wrong. Job is right. Apologize to him and if he asks me to, I'll forgive you.”
In fact, according to Biblical scholar Ellie Weiner, most translations get part of Job 42:8 wrong. They have God saying to Job's friends, “You have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has.” The proper translation should be “You have not spoken to me properly as my servant Job has.” In other words, they were speaking to Job about God rather than speaking to God about poor Job. So now Job must speak to God about his “comforters” so they can be forgiven.
So lesson 1 is: take the cry of the one in pain seriously. And lesson 2 is: don't assume people are always the cause of their misfortune. Sometimes bad things do happen to good people. Lesson 3 is: show compassion. Pray for people who are suffering; don't argue with them.
Last week the Episcopal lectionary gave an example of what God said to Job from chapter 38 of the book. It's a majestic, poetic panorama of the creation. But it didn't directly answer Job's question. God essentially says, “Did you create the universe and work out all its details?” And this week we get Job's response, which is, “Nope. Wow! I didn't realize all that was involved in creating the universe. Sorry. I'm satisfied with the fact that you talked to me and with the vision that you've given me.”
A lot of people find the answer God gives unsatisfying. They want a rational answer. They want God to tell us precisely why we suffer. To them I say, “42.” That's the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The answer is given by the great computer Deep Thought. And it doesn't satisfy the pan-dimensional beings who programmed Deep Thought to give them an answer. Of course, Adams' sci-fi version of Candide is a satire. But he has a point. Would any answer to the problem of suffering that could be reduced to words or numbers really satisfy us?
Ask scientists what causes earthquakes and they will tell you about the tectonic plates that cover the earth like armor and on top of which our continents sit. They will tell you the plates shift and scrape against one another, causing earthquakes and tsunamis. They say that if the plates didn't move, life could not exist on this planet. So there's the answer to what caused the tsunami that hit Asia in 2004 and the earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010. Do you think that would satisfy the people who lost their homes and whose loved ones died in those disasters? It's a rational, scientific answer and yet it's no more emotionally satisfying than the answer given to Job.
God's answer is similar in that he points out the variety, complexity, timing and other imponderables about the workings of the creation. He asks Job what he knows about creation and what he can possibly control in all creation. In other words, God is saying, “If you can't understand how these things work, then there is no way I can explain why good people sometimes suffer very bad things.”
The other thing people tend to find unsatisfying is God replacing everything Job lost, down to another 7 sons and 3 daughters. Anyone who has lost a child knows that a new child may comfort you but it's not the same as the one you lost. But the book of Job is limited to the man's earthly life. And that's the best that can be done under those limitations. Ultimately if there is no afterlife then there is no true justice in the universe. Only if a just and loving God will give us a new unending life after this one can everything be redressed and restored to what it should be.
And we get a glimpse of this in the book of Job. At one point he says, “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God, whom I will see for myself, and whom my own eyes will behold, and not another.” (Job 19:25-27) That sounds eerily like Job is talking about resurrection. And his Redeemer is God who is not simply a spirit but who stands on the earth and can be seen with his eyes. Which sounds a lot like a vision of Jesus.
Whereas earthly words and actions cannot satisfy us emotionally in the face of loss, Jesus, the Word of God incarnate, can. As Ellie Weiner says, Job was asking the question “why” and when God appeared, instead Job got “who.” And while God's verbal answer at the end of Job doesn't seem to give us what we need, his answer in Jesus does.
Let's face it: God seems a bit distant and detached in Job. He talks about creation the way an IT guy talks about a computer that seems to have randomly deleted your pictures of your wedding. He doesn't seem to have a stake in it.
But what about a God who has everything at stake? A God who is not separate from his creation but has become a part of his creation, who has entered into it, rolled up his sleeves and started the hard work of making reality fit his original plan for creation. That kind of God has more satisfying answers.
But not as satisfying as a God who is also as vulnerable as we are. If he is not subject to the same obstacles and risks as we are, then it's like sending Superman to show us how to live a righteous life in an unrighteous world. He wouldn't get the full experience of how hard and risky and painful it is for us to stand up to injustice and evil. And so his answers about suffering wouldn't be as satisfying as those of a God who really knows the risk firsthand. And those wouldn't be as satisfying as the answers given by a God who has suffered and died.
The real answers to the questions of the suffering of the innocent can only be found in Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man, and who is fully immersed in the experience of being just in an unjust world, suffering to the full extent what the world can do to a person. But not all of those answers can be given in words. Nor can they all be received and understood merely by hearing, but they can by doing what Jesus did. The final lesson is this: to understand the suffering of the world, we must take up our cross for the good of others as Jesus did for us. We must put on Christ and as the body of Christ on earth, take up his mission, redeeming and repairing the world in his name. Only in healing the world's pain do we find its meaning.
This sermon was first preached on October, 25, 2009. It has been updated and revised.
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