Sermon — October 17, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
The ancient Greeks told stories about gods who were neither good nor bad but amoral superhumans struggling against one another for power, using us as pawns in their games. The prophet Zoroaster and his followers spoke of two opposing cosmic forces, one good, and one evil, in an eternal struggle for the universe. Modern fantasy authors invent alternate worlds in which their good protagonists struggle against evil villains, often with the help of a magical mentor who will make everything right in the end; Dumbledore always appears to make things right in the second-to-last chapter of the book, even after—spoiler alert—even after he’s dead; Gandalf and Aslan are unopposable forces for good.
These are all, in their own ways, attempts to answer one of the oldest human questions: if there is a God (or gods), and if that God is good, then why on earth are things sometimes so bad? This is sometimes called “the problem of evil,” and it’s a question that any religious tradition has to answer, especially in times of famine, war, or plague. The Greeks could simply answer that the gods are not good; one might send a plague upon you just to spite another. The Zoroastrians could point to that evil force working against the good one as the balance shifted back and forth. The fantasy authors—and it’s no surprise that Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling are all Christians—point to a higher power who swoops in to rescue the more-human characters from evil in the end.
And the Book of Job gives us one of several Biblical answers to this question. We’ve been reading selections from Job for a few weeks, but we’ve been having so much fun with the gospel readings this fall—this is fun, right?—that we haven’t even gotten into Job. Job is an important and a powerful book, so I thought I’d spend some time with it this morning; and apologies if the sermon is a little long. Things kind of got out of hand.
The Book of Job starts and ends with a fable, written in simple, fairy-tale style. Once upon a time, there was a man named Job. He was a good man. And he was a rich man, endowed not just with seven sons and three daughters but with 7000 sheep and 3000 camels, 500 oxen and 500 donkeys and very many servants. (Job 1:1-2) One day, God was bragging about Job to Satan—as one does—how righteous he was, how humble he was, how grateful he was to God for all his blessings. And Satan said, in effect, “Of course he is. Look at everything you’ve given him! Let me ruin his life and we’ll see how pious he is then.” And God takes the bet.
So Job’s livestock are stolen, and Job’s flocks are destroyed, and Job’s oldest son’s house falls down and all ten of his children die. But still Job won’t curse God. So Satan turns to Job himself, covering him with “loathsome sores,” and he’s reduced to sitting in a pile of ashes in mourning, so pitiful that even his wife says to him, “Curse God and die.” (Job 2:9)
And then along come Job’s three friends: Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar. And this is the real meat of the book, a series of speeches alternating between the friends and Job, written in some of the most ancient and difficult-to-read Hebrew of the whole Bible, speeches that go on and on and on, grappling with the problem of evil for thirty-six chapters of the book.
Ancient wisdom literature like the Biblical book of Proverbs, took for granted that good people are rewarded in this world, and bad people are punished. In his speeches, Job protests: I’ve been a good person all my life, so why is this happening to me? His three friends try to rationalize what’s going on, but their words are cold comfort. Eliphaz tells Job that good people end up all right in the end, even if there’s some suffering along the road. Bildad says that Job must be missing something; maybe he’s not quite as good as he thinks. Zophar is the harshest: surely what’s happened is evidence that God is punishing Job for some secret, hidden sin; he needs to repent of whatever it is that he’s done.
Over time, Job becomes angrier with God, begging for a fair trial with an impartial judge who can make a ruling whether he or God is in the right. The friends become angrier with Job, calling him arrogant and stubborn, telling him over and over that he must have done something wrong. Finally, a fourth friend shows up, Elihu, and he rips into Job for his audacity in questioning God’s inscrutable ways. God is not accountable to human beings, Elihu proclaims. He’s far beyond you and your petty concerns: “The Almighty,” he concludes, “we cannot find him! …He does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit.” (Job 37:23-24) And he rests his case.
“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” (Job 38:2)
Thirty-seven chapters of interminable wrangling over the meaning of suffering and the problem of evil, and now finally God is going to give some answers.
Kind of.
God’s answer, in the end, isn’t very satisfying. God doesn’t try to answer Job’s questions. Instead, he asks his own, changing the topic from Job’s own suffering to the grandeur of creation. “Who is this,” he asks, “who darkens counsel with words without knowledge?” (38:1) “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Who determined its measurements—surely you know?” (38:4) You think you understand the way the world should work, God says, but I’m the one who made it, and you know nothing.
“Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?” (38:8) “Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place?” (38:12) “Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?” (38:16) “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or seen the storehouses of the hail?” (38:22) “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?” (38:31) “Can you send forth lightnings, that they may go, and say to you, ‘Here we are’?” (38:34) “Can you hunt the prey for the lion?” (38:39) and on and on and on until finally, Job is speechless, and when God prods him to reply, all he can say is: “See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth.” (40:3)
And then God starts in on him again! “I invented the freaking hippopotamus!” he says. (I’m paraphrasing, but not joking.) And Job gives up and yields to the incomprehensible power and wisdom of God. And so—and here we transition back from archaic poetic speeches to the fairy-tale style of the beginning of the story—God made Job healthy and wealthy again. The end.
The Book of Job is a powerful book. It defies the easy rationalizations of suffering that make up the oldest psychological defense mechanism in the book: Good things happen to good people; I am a good person; therefore nothing bad is going to happen to me. Like the Psalms, Job embraces the practice of shouting at God, voicing Job’s anger and grief in prayer. And it warns us against being like the sympathetic friends who try to comfort Job with platitudes and tidy explanations.
But God’s response isn’t very satisfying. I almost wish Job had the chutzpah to turn the question back on God. “Where was I, when you laid the foundation of the earth? No, where were you, God, when I lost everything I had?” Because that’s the question, I think, whose answer Job really wants to know.
Our Gospel this morning contains a clue. At times, Jesus’ answer to James and John on the road sounds a bit like God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind. God accuses Job of speaking “words without knowledge.” Likewise, Jesus dismisses the question: “You do not know what you’re asking.” “Can you lift up your voice to the clouds?” asks God. (Job 38:34) “Can you drink the cup that I drink?” Jesus says. (Mark 10:38)
But the roles are reversed. When God finally answers Job, it’s God who’s magnificent and splendid beyond imagining, and Job who’s suffering. When Jesus answers James and John, they’re the ones who are looking for magnificence and splendor, and it’s Jesus who will be suffering. He’s been teaching the disciples yet again about the difficult road that they’re now traveling on, about his coming suffering and death at the hands of his enemies. But James and John are distracted by their own egos. They want to be made his right- and left-hand men when he finally ascends to the throne in glory.
And Jesus asks them, “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?” (10:38) I’m reminded of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane as he faces his death: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me.” (Mark 14:36) Are you, James and John, able to drink this cup? Are you able to share in this suffering that I’m about to endure? Are you really, truly able to follow me down this road that leads to the cross, with two bandits at my right hand and my left, not a throne flanked by the two of you?
Where is God amid suffering? God is on the cross, suffering alongside us. When God speaks in Job her words can seem harsh and arrogant. But the God who answers Job so insufficiently out of the whirlwind, the God who laid the foundation of the earth and determined its measurements, the God who feeds the young lions by hand when they crouch in their dens, whose nature is so far beyond our wildest imaginings that the only way to answer our questions is to leave us speechless, this God is the one who became a helpless little baby. This God taught us and healed us. This God suffered for us and died for us.
And rose again, breaking death’s power over us, and extending the promise of eternal life to all those who came after him, to all those who drink the painful cup that this life can be. Jesus gives his life, he says, not just in solidarity with our suffering, but as a “ransom,” as the price he pays to free us from the power of death, to transform the meaning of our suffering. (Mark 10:45) The one who painted the stars in the heavens and laid the foundation of the earth is making a new heaven and a new earth, a new world in which we all one day will dwell.
During the last few years, I’ve found comfort again and again in words I read a few years ago, that remind me more than anything of this God who suffers in solidarity and who transforms our suffering. I hope you’ll excuse me for doing something I don’t often do and closing with a portion of a poem. It’s from a series for Good Friday on the 12 Stations of the Cross by a British poet named Malcolm Guite, and it’s entitled: “IX: Jesus falls the third time”:
He weeps with you and with you he will stay
When all your staying power has run out
You can’t go on, you go on anyway.
He stumbles just beside you when the doubt
That always haunts you, cuts you down at last
And takes away the hope that drove you on.
This is the third fall and it hurts the worst
This long descent through darkness to depression
From which there seems no rising and no will
To rise, or breathe or bear your own heart beat.
Twice you survived; this third will surely kill,
And you could almost wish for that defeat
Except that in the cold hell where you freeze
You find your God beside you on his knees.
Amen.