Job Part 3- Rev. Wendy McCormick- Oct. 20,2024
Job – Part 3 Rev Wendy McCormick
October 20, 2024
If you’ve been following this little series, you’ve been waiting three weeks for an answer. If you read the book of Job, you wait through 37 long chapters. If you are a human being who has ever tried to make sense of suffering and pain, then you have been waiting a very long time, perhaps a lifetime.
This is the moment. Chapter 38. God speaks. Out of the whirlwind, the classic biblical representation of the voice of God.
We may be on the edge of our seats. Surely this will be the moment when all of Job’s questions – all of our questions will be answered. This is the moment when God will explain, when we will have the satisfaction we yearn for as to why a 16-year-old boy is dying a cruel death of uncurable cancer, why a young single mom is staring down death and wondering what will become of her toddlers, why whole communities of very good people in western North Carolina have lost absolutely everything in unprecedented flooding and face years and years of building some new sort of life long after their plight fades from the news.
This is the moment. Why do bad things happen to good people? What reason is there for Job’s incredible and unjustified suffering?
And God finally answers.
But it is not what we expect.
The Lord’s long-awaited answer comes in the form of more questions: Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? In other words, who do you think you are? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you make it rain? Can you send lightning? Can you hunt prey for the lion or provide for the raven? If we were to read the section in its entirety, there are no fewer than 60 rhetorical questions posed by the almighty in response to Job’s pleas.
If you find this less than satisfying, you are not alone.
Taken in summary, the Lord’s response to Job’s many questions of WHY is pretty much summed up, ‘Because I’m God and you’re not.’ With Job, we have been asking about the fairness and justness of life in this world. Theologically, it’s called retributive justice, it’s the idea that we all get what we deserve, that everything happens for a reason, that good is rewarded and bad is punished, that it all fits into a logic model we can grasp.
But in the story of Job, like in many human lives, that model breaks down. Something – or many somethings – happen in which we experience firsthand flaws in the logic, holes in the argument. We have been led to believe that the universe is fair and just, but then we experience that it is not.
And so, on the one hand, this response from God is terribly unsatisfying. Because the questions are not answered. God just poses more questions.
You want to know why bad things happen to good people? Do you understand the majesty of creation? Do you know how storms are made or how all the animals in the food chain get just what they need? Do you know why sunsets or mountain peaks can take your breath away?
Our human approach to this question is binary. But God changes the terms of the conversation. We have a fixed model of how the universe works and we demand to know in our logic model how God can be both all good and all-powerful, how God can be God and not reverse – or at least explain – all the terrible things that happen.
But God’s response might be construed as thinking outside the box, or breaking open the box of our limited understanding, what we sometimes with Jesus call the third way, rejecting our either-or thinking and offering something new.
We expect everything to fit into a worldview, a logic model, we can understand. But when God speaks, our model blows up, or perhaps it shrinks down to its human size alongside a God-size perspective on the universe.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Taken not to mean I’m so busy with the cosmos that I could care less about you. But, rather, you don’t understand why there is suffering because there is so very much you do not understand. Welcome to being human.
It’s not just that God refuses to answer Job’s questions, refuses to give him the day in court he demanded to pass judgment on the legitimacy of his suffering. It’s that God reframes the whole thing.
The morning after something really terrible, the sun comes up at exactly the time it is supposed to. If it is a particularly beautiful day and your suffering is great, you may even feel mocked by that beauty. How can the world keep turning when my world has been destroyed? And yet, the story of Job offers us just that perspective, that we are part of a vast and intricate universe, a glorious creation. We humans may be the center or the pinnacle of that creation – we like to think so – but we are nonetheless a small part of it. “When I consider your heavens, [says the psalmist] the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is humankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” – them – US. And yet you have set us a little lower than the angels. Indeed, God does care.
Fr Greg Boyle, who has invested his entire life in loving and caring for gang members in Los Angeles, building an enormous organization of businesses and services, knows the pain of loving young men who die from overdose or from gun violence; he knows the heartbreak of the unspeakably terrible backgrounds these kids have that make them invisible to people who only judge what they have done but cannot imagine what they have lived through.
Fr Boyle knows well the popular theology on which the story of Job is based – that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. And he knows all the convoluted permutations of this theology people try to come up with.
From decades of experience evil and suffering first-hand, he says very simply: God protects us from nothing but sustains us in everything.
God protects us from nothing but sustains us in everything.
This is my new answer to “everything happens for a reason”: God protects us from nothing but sustains us in everything.
And when we really believe that, it changes everything. We stop asking why, demanding the answers 30-some chapters of Job have said is our due. Instead, we cast our pain on God, trusting that it is God who sustains us.
And, perhaps more importantly, we start to do that for one another. We stop telling ourselves that people who are suffering get what they deserve and instead ask how we can share the sustaining love and mercy of God with them.
In the concluding section of the book of Job, Job responds in a posture of repentance. Not repenting that he did something wrong that caused God to curse him. But repenting the arrogance of being human, of thinking that we can understand the mind of God, that we can and should make sense of the nonsensical, the absurd, the cruel, the devastating. Any more than we can make sense of the bottomless goodness and blessing that flow our way, any more than we can justify the good things that happen as if they are all deserved, any more than we can explain how the natural world is put together in such a way that a single leaf can sometimes take your breath away.
I have been listening to Jon Meacham’s biography of Lincoln, “And There Was Light.” Meacham tells about a time long before he would become President when Lincoln was a congressman for a term and then returned to Illinois to practice law. The political challenges of resolving the many questions of slavery never far from his mind. Meacham shares something Lincoln wrote once after visiting Niagara Falls: “a visit that prompted a philosophic if unfinished essay.” Meacham quotes Lincoln: “Niagara’s power, Lincoln wrote, lay in its ‘power to excite reflection and emotion. It calls up the indefinite past. When Columbus first sought this continent – when Christ suffered on the cross – when Moses led Israel through the Red Sea – nay, even when Adam first came from the hand of his maker – then as now, Niagara was roaring here . . . . In that long-long time, never still for a single moment. Never dried, never froze, never slept, never rested,’ Meacham concludes, “Lincoln may well have been describing history itself.” (Meacham, “And There Was Light,” p. 113) Or we might say he was describing our place in the cosmos.
In the end, some will walk away from God and faith because none of it makes sense and they feel ripped off by the promise that it would. God didn’t promise that, but other people did and often the church did. And so, there are those who cannot get past the sense of betrayal that it wasn’t true. We discover that it’s just not true that good will always be rewarded and evil will always be punished, that everything happens for a reason, and we all get what we deserve. Sometimes it’s true, but not always. It is not a rule of the universe. So, some will turn their backs.
Others will double down on the original idea, pointing to their own good fortune as signs of their own goodness and God’s favor – their blessedness -- and allowing them to turn their backs on other people’s suffering because, well, they must have made poor choices that explain their poverty, their lack of access to good education and quality health care, or their being forced to flee their homeland.
But some will take a step back with Job, with Lincoln, with Fr Greg Boyle, with the psalmist --- O Lord our God how manifold are your works in all the earth. When I look at the heavens, the work of your hands, what are human beings that you are mindful of them? Of us? Yet you have crowned us a little lower than the angels. You, O God, the architect of the universe, the creator of all that is, you have responded to us, you do respond to us, you care for us, it matters to you when we hurt. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow,” said Jesus; “they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?”
Because being crowned a little lower than the angels, being set at the center of creation, puts us in a very different place than the lilies Jesus speaks of, or the mountain goats and the ravens God invokes in the response to Job. God invites us to partner in caring for creation, in sustaining all that God has made. God invites us to share the sustaining love of God especially with those who are hurting.
And God sends us Jesus to show us how to do that. How to love and care for one another even and especially when we are hurting, when senseless human suffering comes our way. How to demonstrate that nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God.
The “let’s suppose” story of Job began with the premise that Job loses everything. It ends with the premise that Job realizes good fortune again --- prosperity, health, and more children. But Job has been changed. And so have we.
We have realized with Kate Bowler that there is no cure for being human. We have experienced with Job that God hears our cries, our anger, our lament, our confusion, our despair. And we have been reminded that we are part of something far more vast and complex than the tit-for-tat scorecard that we have been told is our relationship with God. We are a small part of the creation, a creation whose majesty we cannot begin to understand. And yet we matter. Not just to one another. We matter to the very creator of all that is. And so we live in awe of and in partnership with the one who protects us from nothing but sustains us in everything. May it be so.
