And the Answer Is . . .

Text: Job 1:1-2:10

The character I understand best in this story is not God. It is definitely not Job, at least the Job we meet early on in the story. No, the character I understand best is “the satan” or in Hebrew, “the adversary.” And, before you get the wrong idea, “the satan” in the book of Job is not the red-dressed devil of popular religious culture, a slick, mendacious serpent ready to escort unbelievers into the fiery torment of Hell. No, “the satan” is a prestigious member of God’s divine cabinet. For those of you with a legal bent, “the satan” is the heavenly prosecuting attorney – with an attitude!

As the story begins, “the satan” has a problem with God’s adulation of Job.  He has no patience with God’s naïve trust in Job and he has no trust in Job’s naïve patience with God. If you would ask “the satan” if Job is a good man, he would say, “Yes, of course he is.” But, that is not all he would say. He would go on to argue: “Job is a good man, God, because you have treated him well. You have showered blessings upon him and have spared the miseries of life. Under those conditions, God, who wouldn’t be good?”

So, after “the satan” challenges how God assesses Job; he makes a bet with his boss. It is a bet in which God permits all Job’s blessings to be stripped from him, except for his life. Yes, you did hear that correctly. In this story, the great Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, Sovereign over all life, agrees to a bet with “the satan.” This is not the God who makes me want to bow down in prayer or to stand up and shout “Glory, Hallelujah!” As God makes a bet with a heavenly subordinate, and a horribly odious bet at that – God’s behavior is deeply disturbing and an absolute puzzlement. 

The story opens, “Once upon a time a man in the land of Uz.” Go to Google maps and type in “Uz” and it will locate it somewhere in modern day Syria or Jordan. Most likely, though, Uz is located next door to Oz or Hogwarts or Middle Earth or Eden. But unlike Eden, Uz is where life is as it should be and beauty reigns and if paradise is lost it is not due to the duplicity of a serpent or by bad choices made by a woman or a man.

Early in the story, Job’s fortune is wiped out, his children die, and “the satan” inflicts him with oozing sores in every part of his body, and yet Job does not rail against God. Job sounds like a calm realistic amid the fiercest storm as he tells his wife, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” I admire but I find it hard to understand the faith of the Job that we meet early in the story. I find it even harder to embrace Job’s understanding of God as a sovereign who punishes us or treats us upon a whim, or in this case, a bet.

That, of course, is not where this long, complex parable ends. In fact, it goes on and on for forty chapters. Eventually, even in the idyllic land of Uz, Job hits his breaking point and his friends do what good friends do in traumatic times. They show up. They put aside everything else and they come to comfort their friend in his great loss. Unfortunately, they not only show up, they feel compelled to talk as well. They explain to Job that God does not unjustly punish the righteous, therefore, they argue that Job’s suffering comes from God as just desserts for Job’s disobedience.   

Well, at this point in the parable, you and I know better than Job’s friends because the author tells us: “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” We know that when Job’s friends say, “You are getting your just desserts for disobeying God” that there is nothing just about what Job is suffering. We know that no matter how this parable ends, its beginning leaves us with far more questions than answers.

So, a fair question to ask today is why would someone ever preach on Job, especially on World Communion Sunday? Why not run to the Psalmist who comforts us with the promise, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want?” Why not skip to John’s Gospel and let Jesus soothe our souls with the thundering affirmation, “For God so loved the world”? Why not race to Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he opines that there is not “anything . . . in all creation” that “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”? Why spend any time with Job on any day and why today?

 I can easily answer that question, as odd as the answer may sound. Why preach on Job? Because I love this parable. I love the way that it turns simplistic piety on its head. I love the way it pushes me to ask life’s most important, complex, often maddening questions and not to rush to accept simple or simplistic answers. In many ways, Job is the “anti-Deuteronomy” book of the Bible. Remember in Deuteronomy how there is a recurring theme of “if – then”? If you live a righteous life then God will treat you right and if you live a disobedient life then God will curse you.

I appreciate much in Deuteronomy that forms our faith and is the basis for much of the social justice we find in the Gospels. It is in Deuteronomy that we hear the daily call to “Shema,” to hear, to grasp that God is sovereign over all the world and our lives. As in Exodus, in Deuteronomy, we are given the ten words of grace, better known as the Ten Commandments. But Deuteronomy must be read with at least a bit of hesitation, because it is a book to which people turn who want life and faith to be black or white and who see ambiguity as a sign of weak faith.

In Job, Deuteronomy’s theological calculus is turned upside down. Despite his friends’ protestations, Job is not evil and has not done evil. Job follows the commandments and is true to the law of God, and yet evil befalls him and it is intentional evil.

  This parable raises the critical questions that believers are often unwilling or too scared to raise themselves, at least, out loud. After watching Jerusalem burn and being forced march into the Babylonian Captivity, the questions raised in Job must have surely come to mind. After Jesus was betrayed at dinner by one he had trusted and loved, the questions raised in Job must have surely come to mind. As children, women, gays, gypsies, and the elderly climbed out of boxcars into a furnace in Dachau, the questions raised in Job must have surely come to mind. As churches were bombed and as nooses made for quick racial judgment in the South, the questions raised in Job must have surely come to mind.  

As I stood with church members and friends in stunned, grieving silence on the night of 9/11, just a few miles from the Pentagon, the questions raised in Job surely came to mind. As I stood with those whose children had been lost to drugs or had had wires of sanity burn out in their brains, the questions raised in Job surely came to mind. As I have stood with those who have just lost a job or didn’t get the mortgage or were denied a promotion because their race or sexuality was different from mine, the questions raised in Job have surely come to mind.

After spending time amid the harsh landscape of urban poverty in the South Bronx, Jonathan Kozol went to worship with a neighborhood family one evening. Standing in the pulpit, the pastor spoke words of hope of God’s future action to mothers whose sons were in prison. Kozol wrote on his bulletin, “So, where is He? What is He waiting for? Come on, Jehovah! Let’s get moving” (Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, p. 229).

Where are you God? How can you allow this evil to prosper? Those are the questions raised in Job and it not unlike the final question raised by Jesus on the cross. Job is one book in the Bible that can cause us, in the words of the Apostle Paul, to put away childish ways of thinking about God. It is a story that invites us to sit in silence before the awesome mystery of God and the oftentimes confounding unfairness and inequities of life.

Maybe there are few better stories to read or to preach on today than Job’s when we consider the suffering of sisters and brothers who will also come to this table across the world today, some who are fearing for their lives in Gaza, in Beirut, in Tel Aviv, and in the Ukraine, some who are looking out with broken hearts over utter devastation in Asheville and Montreat and Chimney Rock, some who are barely able to lift the cup of salvation because their grief is so fresh, some who are barely able to eat a morsel of bread because the chemo has taken away any hint of an appetite.

Maybe Job is just a story best ignored, a parable with a point but nothing more. Maybe, though, Job is the best possible invitation to this table that is set for us all, including those who harbor far more doubt than certainty, including those who are asking a thousand questions of God and are receiving no answers.

If you fast forward to the last chapter of Job, you will read, “After this Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children’s children, four generations. And Job died, old and full of days (Job 42:16-17). From that tidy, “all works out in the end” ending, you may had hoped that I would end this sermon with a chorus of “God is Good. All the Time. God is Good.” I am sorry to disappoint you, but that is not going to happen today. I happen to believe that that chorus is true despite all in life that argues against it.

Instead of rushing to a “happy ending,” I invite you to sit for a while with Job. May we find in Job a true companion, hopefully not a companion in extreme and unjust suffering, but a true companion in faith whose questions for God, will not finally be silenced.  

AMEN