The book of Job is a literary masterpiece. It has inspired plays, movies, novels, music, and plastic arts. Alfred Lord Tennyson called Job “the greatest poem of ancient and modern times.” William Blake did a whole series of engravings on scenes from the book of Job. There are musical settings by the likes of Orlando de Lassus, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Joni Mitchell. H. G. Wells and Elie Wiesel both wrote adaptations of it. Even the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who is not usually known for his love of biblical themes, wrote a novel called Job: A Comedy of Justice.
What gives the book of Job such broad appeal is its stark treatment of two claims that seem on the surface to be irreconcilable with one another: (1) that there is a just God who rules the world and upholds it, and (2) that human beings suffer, often so horribly that even the most heartless person would try to help, and yet God seems to do nothing. The genre of literature that specializes in wrestling with this paradox is called theodicy, and Job is certainly among the finest examples of it anywhere.
The first scene begins with God and Satan making a wager. God is bragging a bit on Job’s excellent character, but Satan argues that the only reason Job is good is because God blesses him for it. It’s true that God blessing Job with abundant wealth and happiness, but God thinks Job would still be a good man even if that all dried up. So they make the bet, and the scene shifts to earth. Immediately Job’s fortunes change. His children are all killed, one after another; his wealth evaporates; and he himself is stricken with an agonizing illness. As blow after devastating blow falls, Job remains steadfastly good — the narrator says, “in all this he did not sin with his lips.”
After a while, the scene shifts and Job sits outcast on the trash heap outside of town. Three friends, named Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, come to visit him in his grief. They sit with him in silent mourning for seven days, and then Job speaks. His soliloquy reveals the depth of his suffering. Job wishes he’d never been born, that death would have taken him before life ever started. He longs for the sweet oblivion of death. His friends hear this and realize that Job’s speech calls God’s sovereignty into question. It is God, after all, who decides who shall be born; it is God who decides who shall die, and when. In their view speech like that is blasphemous and must never be allowed.
There follows an extended dialogue between Job and each of his friends, and if you read them (which I urge you to do) you find that each one makes excellent points. There doesn’t seem to be a clear “right side” or “wrong side” in this argument. The drama is trying to grapple with the tension between belief in a God of justice and love and the obvious unfairness of Job’s situation. Job’s friends believe it’s important to salvage God’s sovereignty at the expense of Job’s integrity; Job thinks otherwise. The scholar Norman Habel observes that the failure of Job’s friends is not that they are theologically incorrect, but that they lack compassion.
What people then tended to do, just as they still do today, was to gloss over the dissonance between the two contradictory claims I laid out at the beginning. Most often, what we do is blame the victim, which is what Job’s friends did: Well Job, if you’re suffering, you must have done something to deserve it. To that, Job denies that he has done any wrong. I’m innocent, he says, and I don’t deserve this mistreatment at God’s hands! They retort that no one is truly innocent, especially compared with God; how dare Job claim that he is right and God is wrong! And that’s the beginning of an increasingly acrimonious argument that lasts for much of the rest of the book. It’s a case of three against one; Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar are well educated, prosperous, and smug (hashtag #blessed). They just want to see Job restored to favor and their world no longer problematic. All Job needs to do is repent his sin; surely, God will bring him back to blessing. But Job is having none of it. He knows he doesn’t deserve this, and he refuses to pretend otherwise.
It’s in this dialogue that Job says what we read this morning. He’s got no hope for his own lifetime, so he wants to write his accusation in a scroll, to chisel it into stone, and take his lawsuit to the throne of God. He is confident that if he can just get a hearing before the Divine Judge, he will be vindicated against the spurious accusations of these three “miserable comforters.” The redeemer who Job says is alive is God’s own self. Job’s hope is that God would come, read the written case, and render a judgment that would vindicate Job’s innocence and put the world back in order, not by changing Job’s specific plight but by changing God’s apparent policy, which allows the wicked to flourish while the righteous suffer, and allows those who sit comfortably in their armchairs to blame the worlds ills on the very people who experience those ills most harshly.
It’s a gutsy thing for Job to say, in the face of what everyone around thinks is a mountain of damning evidence, that he is right and God and everyone else are wrong. “Gutsy” probably isn’t even forceful enough. This Job has some hutzpah! But let’s not be too quick to dismiss the arguments of his friends, because what they say isn’t wrong so much as it is self-congratulatory. The reason we shouldn’t write them off too quickly is that we’ll fail to see how their arguments are also our arguments. How often do we hear that homelessness or AIDS or poverty “probably” come from the deficiencies of the people who are experiencing it — they’re using drugs, being sexually promiscuous, taking out loans they can’t repay, and so on? What about the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East? Well, “those people” have always been at war with each other, haven’t they? Lung cancer? Well they should’ve stopped smoking! I’m not saying those arguments don’t have elements of truth to them; they do. But it’s too easy to say these things when you’re not the one involved. And theologically, blaming suffering on human failures alone lets God off the hook too easily. God stands accused. Job helps us face the charges squarely.
If you know the ending of the story, then you remember that God eventually makes an appearance, with blistering majesty and awesome power, and answers Job’s complaint. The answer given by God when he comes on stage is that Job and his friends are too puny, too short-lived, and too lacking in vision to understand the big picture. Which is obviously true, when you consider it. But somehow that answer still fails to satisfy, when the depth of Job’s pain is portrayed with such poetic power. You may also remember that God shockingly tells Job’s friends that they need to ask Job to pray for them. Seems they “have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” Job spoke the truth about God, and his three friends did not! Job does pray for them, their friendship is restored, and the world is put back into order. Finally Job is made even richer, and is given an even better family, than he had at the beginning. His new daughters are particularly beautiful.
And yet, Job’s silence rings out in that parody of happiness at the end of the book, as if to remind us that God’s answer solves the problem like an aspirin cures an open sore. And in fact, the book never really lets God off the hook: Job’s new family at the end of the book is as much a reminder of what he has lost as it is a consolation. The question, Why does the powerful, just, good God allow the world to be so full of sorrow, isn’t resolved at the end of the book, and really it still isn’t resolved today. When the new atheists say they wouldn’t worship any god who would make a world like this one, that stings because there’s truth in it.
There’s a poem that I often quote in this connection, by the Polish-American Jewish poet Aaron Zeitlin:
Praise me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Curse me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Praise me or curse me
And I will know that you love me.
Sing out my graces, says God,
Raise your fist against me and revile, says God.
Sing out graces or revile,
Reviling is also a kind of praise, says God.
But if you sit fenced off in your apathy, says God,
If you sit entrenched in: "I don't give a hang," says God,
If you look at the stars and yawn,
If you see suffering and don't cry out,
If you don't praise and you don't revile,
Then I created you in vain, says God.
If you’re shocked to hear me say such things, if they sound a little irreligious to you, I’m sorry; I really don’t mean to come across as crass or irreverent. And it’s true that this sermon isn’t going to end with a clear-cut application — which I feel is OK since that’s what the book of Job does. But I invite you to consider that the story of innocent suffering is not just Job’s story, it’s Jesus’ story as well, and that story also includes a moment when Jesus says “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The crucifixion story, like the book of Job, does not exonerate God. Quite the opposite! Jesus accepts the judgment and its punishment, and gives His life. He does not blame the world’s pain on the devil or on other people, but embraces it and makes it part of God’s Life. In doing that He shows what Job also knew, that in the very midst of despair and unutterable pain, God is there too. It is not the end. A just, loving God; an unjust, often bitter world that is God’s creation. Two apparently contradictory truths are reconciled at the cross, not by vindicating one at the expense of the other, but by facing and embracing both. What that means for for me I’m only beginning to understand; what it means for you I can’t pretend to say. But wrestle with the question, and with God, and with the world, and with the truth. That’s where you’ll meet the real God, and that’s how that God will meet with you.
