"The impatience of Job" given 10/18/15

We’ve all heard about the “Patience of Job”, but if you read the Book of Job as a single piece of literature instead of in dribs and drabs and pious quotes it becomes clear that after a certain point in the story, poor old long-suffering Job turns out to be anything but patient.

The Book of Job is a kind of extended morality play-- a philosophical parable written in the form of a series of arguments-- almost a courtroom drama.  It’s not fiction or non-fiction—but a parable—a myth in the sense that it conveys truth deeper than did it really happen like that—but truth in the deeper sense of ultimate truth about existence.

The passage opens the book is a prologue added later to the original book. It recounts Job's idyllic life before his troubles began. Then, quite quickly, in just a few verses, everything falls apart. He loses his family, his possessions, his health.

At first, Scripture tells us, Job held fast to his faith that these events, as terrible as they were, were part of some sort of Divine plan and had some rationale behind them. Even when he faces terrible misfortune, Job was able to assert, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there" (Job 1:21).

Here is the traditional Ozzie and Harriet world-view of expected, explainable values that most of us grew up with. This is the moral universe in which virtue is rewarded and wrong punished. The good guys always wear white hats. God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Bad things happen to us as punishment for our sins, and earthly success comes as to us as reward for our faithfulness and piety.

All might be well in Job’s tidy moral universe if there were no intrusion, no conflict, no misfortune. Conflict intrudes into the story with the appearance of “The Satan”, the Accuser. In the parable of Job, The Satan is not portrayed as God’s enemy. Quite the contrary-- The Satan (it’s not a name—it’s actually a title that means roughly “The Adversary”) is presented to us as the member of God’s heavenly court charged with spying on the world. He’s God’s prosecuting attorney.

The accusing angel and God share a common concern - uncovering true piety. The Satan says, "Of course Job is pious; you make it worth his while. But what if you withdrew your rewards?" (Job 1:6-11).

            That's when bad goes to worse: Job is buffeted, assaulted, beaten down by totally unexpected, undeserved suffering. In misery Job cries out asking, "Why God, why? Why me?"

We all know this part of the story from personal experience. When our once placid lives are disrupted by the late-night phone call, the letter that was unexpected, terrible words, “You’d better sit down. I have some bad news for you..." - in those moments everything seems to come unglued and we cry out. We ask, "Why?"

Part of the reason we ask is because the tragic event has disrupted all of our old, accustomed answers and explanations. Everything has been torn loose, and we are desperate to get some answers that will enable us to restore our life's equilibrium.

When Job at last reaches that point and speaks his stunning, howling words, he does so with heroism, with poetry. His words "That day, let that day be darkness" are a dramatic reversal of the words with which we began our story with God in Genesis: "That day, let there be light.".

This complaint is in sharp contrast to the way Job spoke earlier. Now, language is being pushed to its limit. Prose is crackling open into poetry. Someone has said that poetry is violence done to prose. The language of tradition is now being challenged. Job has not technically cursed God, but he is coming quite close. Instead of seeking the release of death, Job demands to confront his accuser face to face.

Ambiguity is being introduced. Suffering does that. “The rain falls upon the just and the unjust alike.” Our lives, which once seemed so orderly, fixed, dependable, and serene, get disrupted, torn apart by pain and we haltingly ask, "Why?"

Job, the epitome of patience has run out of patience. Job, the noble silent sufferer becomes Job the verbose complainer. And now, because of Job's eloquent complaint, a world that was previously settled, fixed, and absolute has to be defended in the speeches of his "friends."

If you have been really sick, or suffered some loss or misfortune, then you know firsthand what it's like to have well-meaning friends or family try to offer you comfort. And if you’ve had that experience, you also know that well-meaning people, wanting to say something helpful, sometimes say the wrong things. In an attempt to offer some comforting word, they sometimes end up saying something that actually makes you feel worse rather than better.

Poor old Job suffered from the worst series of would-be comforters who ever tried to say something helpful to a friend in need. There’s even an expression you may have heard, “Job's comforters," It’s used to talk about people who say the wrong thing to somebody who is in need.

What do you say when a friend's life has been torn apart? Listen to Job’s friends: Think Job, what did you do to deserve this trouble? Nobody ever suffered innocently. You are suffering? You must have done something wrong. Your children died? They must have sinned.  There is a kind of moral arithmetic in the world, Job. If you do right, right will be done to you. If you do wrong, wrong will be done to you. Think now, what did do wrong Job?   

In the speeches of these so-called friends, there is no poetry. There is only adversarial speech, a free-for-all verbal battle of moralistic one-upmanship. The friends aren’t arguing to comfort, or even necessarily to be a witness to Job. They’re arguing because they’re desperate to get their own comfortable old moral worlds cut back together.

I suspect that ore reason why lots of us find it difficult to be with someone who has experienced some terrible calamity is that their misfortune threatens us. We say-- “There but for the grace of God, go I” But then we add to ourselves “So why him and not me?” Terrible, unexpected, undeserved tragedy threatens our simplistic explanations for what’s going on in the world.

This ethical drama we call the Book of Job, with its on-going moral and philosophical debate challenges us to listen, to compare for ourselves what is going on, to take sides, to think out our values and opinions, rather than simply accepting a point of view someone else gave us long ago in a Sunday School lesson or a sermon. Encountering the story of Job as a whole rather than in pre-digested single passages will introduce us to radically different images of what the universe may be like, morally speaking. 

The clash of different ethical world-views, which is rather intellectually interesting at first, begins to be tiresome as they go on, and finally excruciatingly tedious. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the needless repetition and wordiness is meant to impress upon us the inability of words alone to resolve the deepest of our questions about suffering, pain, injustice, fairness.

Sometimes those of us in the church fall into the trap of responding to people's pain with words-- words from Scripture, words from our tradition, slogans, sayings, sermonettes, irrelevant anecdotes and trite cliché’s. If you’ve ever been in pain and have been the recipient of this sort of concern, you can probably testify that words alone really don't speak to the depth of the questions, the threatening questions that deep tragedy forces each of us to ask ourselves.

These arguments among the friends and between the friends and Job drone on and on and on. Until all at once, in the last couple of chapters, comes a different sort of speech—a voice from a whirlwind-- the speech of the Lord. What Job has been demanding all along was his day in court-- a trial, a chance to face his accusers --an opportunity to cross-examine his Maker in which God would finally give definitive answers. But Job’s hoped-for, divine-human dialogue never quite takes place.

The God whom Job wants to question becomes questioner. God never actually addresses the issues that Job so eloquently raised. Instead, Job is invited, as we are invited to look at the world, just for a moment, as God looks at it. There are wonders here beyond human comprehension. God brags about the words of creation, the mysteries, the wonders. God's speech is a remarkable vision of the cosmos

Why is there undeserved suffering in this world, asks Job. Why is there injustice? Heartache?  I’ll tell you why, say God.  But first, answer my questions.

Where you there when I said the foundations of creation? Have you commanded the morning since your days began?  Do you know when the mountain goats bring forth their young?  Who has let the wild donkey go free?  Is the wild ox willing to serve you? The wings of the ostrich wave proudly-- but are they pinions of love?

Look at the Hippopotamus, says the voice from the whirlwind-- I made him, just as I made you. Can you do the same? Can you catch a crocodile with a fish hook, or tie down his mouth with a shoelace? Can you even make a tree?

That’s the answer Job gets-- why do innocent creatures suffer? Can you make an ostrich?  Why is there undeserved suffering?  Can you understand my reasons for making a duck-billed platypus?  It‘s no answer-- and yet it is.

The rabbis long ago noticed that, when God boasts of these handiworks, none the animals offered as evidence of divine creative genius are of any earthly use to humanity. What can you or I do with a wild donkey or an ostrich? Moreover, when proudly bragging about all these wonderful animals, God fails to express any pride at all at the creation of humanity. It's a big creation out there and we’re only a small part of its wonder.

Why?  We don’t know, said the rabbis. That’s the point. We don’t know. These utterly useless, impractical, apparently pointless creatures are signs of the extravagance of God’s creation. God only knows why God made duck-billed platypuses and wild donkeys and mountain goats.  Don’t ask me to explain unfairness says the Creator of the Universes, to someone who can’t even make a tree.

The speech from the whirlwind has thwarted Job's expectations of how God was supposed to talk. Job had demanded answers. What Job gets is x crash course in Reality 101, a cosmic-wide view of humanity and the world and of creation.

Look at what Job says at the end. "I had heard of you by the hearing oh the ear, but now my eye sees you" (Job 42:8). Previously, Job had only heard words about a God who sets the world in motion, who creates out of chaos. Now Job sees. 

Job had lived in a rather narrow world where bad things don’t happen to good people, where the good get rewards and the bad get punished. But then come the contradictions, and the questions, and the demand for answers that help him patch his world back together. “The rain falls upon the just and the unjust alike” Job suffers. Is he guilty? Is God fair?

When our familiar world or cause and effect morality crumbles, we find ourselves devastated. Our world has been dismantled. Will anything takes its place?  Why God? Why? Why me? What did I do wrong?

Job has been invited out toward a new world, a world based on more than simplistic, distributive, eye-for-an-eye justice. What does Job receive? We really don’t know. What we do know is Job is given a glimpse of the breadth of the wide world and the depth of the most profound of creation’s mysteries.

God speaks to Job. It may not be the words that Job expected to hear. But what Job gets is better than words. Because the truth is, there are no words good enough or satisfying enough. There are only incomprehensible answers that Job—and you and I must never-the-less live with.

In the end, there is only the Presence that designed us, and made us, and nurtures us, and doesn’t even feel the need to brag about us. In the end, there is only the awesome, inscrutable, Presence who also made the moon and the stars and hung the sun in the sky. In the end, that indescribable, mysterious Presence did it all out of a majestic, incomprehensible, overwhelming love. In the end, Job gets no answers—because there really are none to get. In the end, Job gets that Presence. In the end, Job gets God. In the end, we get God.

Maybe that’s all Job really wanted in the first place. Maybe in our own times of deepest distress and frantic questioning that’s all we’re really seeking as well. Maybe, just maybe that loving, undergirding, mysterious Presence—that assurance that our God in Jesus Christ is standing beside us, and with us is really all that we want and need most. Even more than we think that we want words or need answers. God.