Job 42:1-6, 10-17
1 Then Job answered the Lord:
2 “I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me that I did not know.
4 ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’
5 I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you;
6 therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”
10 And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends, and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. 11 Then there came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and they ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money[a] and a gold ring. 12 The Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning, and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. 13 He also had seven sons and three daughters. 14 He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. 15 In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters, and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. 16 After this Job lived one hundred and forty years and saw his children and his children’s children, four generations. 17 And Job died, old and full of days.
Mark 10:46-52
46 They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47 When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” 50 So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51 Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” 52 Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
Does the book of Job have a satisfying ending? In the very first chapter we read that, following a wager between God and “the adversary”, Job loses all of his children, his livestock, and his home, then here in the final chapter we read the Job received a new home, hew animals, and new children. “The Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than the former”, we are told. He ended up with better everything than before; his second daughters were apparently even more beautiful than the first. The conclusion here sure seems to be that, in the end, Job’s suffering was worth it because his final situation surpassed his previous situation - even perhaps that, surrounded by all this blessing, his suffering had been forgotten.
It’s hard for me to imagine that, if I were in Job’s situation, no matter how wonderful my new children, no matter how truly thankful I was for them, there would still remain an abiding sorrow at the loss of the children I had loved, that nothing could ever begin to replace them, that there is no possible compensation, only a wound that could be covered, but not healed. That the book of Job concludes with this epilogue seems to trivialize Job’s suffering, seems to excuse God’s explicit role in what has happened. And although we read that Job lived happily ever after, given that Job had already lost everything for no good reason, we shouldn’t assume he couldn’t have lost it all again. No one could’ve blamed Job if he’d decided that starting over wasn’t worth the risk. His was an act of faith in a God who hadn’t exactly shown himself entirely faithful.
If you’ve been here the past few Sundays then you already know that I find the depiction of God in Job deeply problematic. I would even go so far as to say that we do not see God revealed in Job, but what we do see illuminated is our bewildering experience of life with God. The book, I have come to think, does not so much show us God as God is but rather God as God seems to us. And it’s precisely in that space between God as God is and God as God seems where we find the jumble of hope and despair, joy and sorrow, understanding and ignorance that is the human condition. And this is where Job continues to prove an indispensable part of Christian Scripture, for it doesn’t explain our sufferings or justify them, but teaches us to keep the faith even when suffering is senseless.
What Job wanted most was simply for God to show up. More than being delivered from his sufferings, he longed for the assurance that God was not indifferent or absent, not callous to his cries. And finally God does show up. And it is this, quite apart from any answer God provides, which satisfies Job, simply to know that he is not alone in his sufferings. In fact, before Job’s fortunes have been restored, he declares that, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you;”. He has come to an awareness of how far beyond his comprehension God is, which perhaps is the truest knowledge of God we can hope to have. And this awareness, this encounter, is terrifically humbling. He feels diminished in God’s presence, and yet it’s wonderful, a moment of recognition and fulfillment, a satisfaction of the deepest longing of every human heart and mind.
This is the point of Job, finally: that to know God is all we could hope for. And what both Job and the passage from Mark reveal is the relationship - perhaps even a necessary relationship - between suffering, humility, and knowing God. Job was a righteous man from the start, but he did not really cry out to God until he found himself humiliated, he did not come to see God face to face until he had suffered. The lesson is not exactly that we must suffer, but the Scriptures do repeatedly attest that humility is a precondition for seeing God, and the surest way to humility is via suffering. Job found himself stripped of any illusion that he could save himself, so he desperately longed for the one who could save. It was his absolute poverty that made him see his true need. We are in a worse position that Job before his calamity, for we are essentially materialist people who have all their material needs met, and yet we feel alienated, somehow both aware and very unaware of our spiritual poverty. It would potentially do many us a world of good to be confronted with the truth about how poor we really are.
Blind Bartimaeus, could see the reality of his situation. Because he spent every day of his life dependent upon the kindness of others and defenseless against their cruelty, he was well acquainted with his powerlessness to affect his own condition. He was poor and he knew it. So when Jesus came to town, Bartimaeus did not hesitate to cry out. The others tried to silence him, presumably because they thought his cries unworthy of Jesus’ ears, an embarrassing distraction from more important business, but Bartimaeus kept on crying out. His desperation rendered him immune to concerns about being socially appropriate. He had nothing to lose.
It is certainly true that Jesus takes particular concern for the welfare of the poor, both in his teachings and his actions. He cares for them especially, and therefore so should we. May we never doubt that. But it’s also the case that Jesus cares disproportionately for the poor because they are more willing to seek his care. And so we should not only see Bartimaeus as representative of those on whom we should have pity; we should also identify with him in his poverty, his need for God, in his willingness to cry out to Jesus, for however insulated we are from the most obvious forms of sufferings, we can still be desperately poor. And acknowledging that is a painful yet liberating gift.
Jesus heard Bartimaeus’ cry, called him forth, healed him, and said, “Go; your faith has made you well.” This is a remarkable statement. What was Bartimaeus’ faith? What could it possibly have been? Prior to this moment, Bartimaeus certainly had never been in Jesus’ presence. At most he’s heard rumors about Jesus’ teaching and healings, but, like just about everybody else, he probably didn’t have a fixed opinion about who Jesus was. And even if he had somehow reached the conclusion that Jesus was the messiah - he did address him as “Son of David”, after all - he couldn’t have understood what they really meant. It’s tempting to posit that he had some sort of special divinely inspired insight, that he could see with the eyes of faith. However, I imagine that Bartimaeus was from certain that Jesus could heal him, that me maybe he thought it was quite unlikely, but that nevertheless it was worth the risk. that he simply had much more to gain than to lose. Whatever doubts Bartimaeus had, whatever skepticism he maintained, he cried out anyway. He asked Jesus to heal him. And this was the faith made him well.
We tend to think of faith as having content, of assent to particular propositions. We now have a “What we believe” section on the website so that curious people can get an idea what we take the content of faith to be. But it is a profound mistake to think that having faith equates with agreeing to particular content, as if Bartimaeus got healed because he intuited the Trinity or anticipated creedal formulations from the 4th century. Bartimaeus’ faith, I think, more or less lacked content altogether; he didn’t know who Jesus was, he’d never met God, but he proceeded as if Jesus could heal him, as if here he would meet God. It is precisely this as if that is the essence of faith, for we, like Bartimaeus, walk by faith, not by sight.
If you are someone who wrestles with how or even if Christian doctrine can be true and who therefore questions if you have faith or if you even could have faith - and I believe this is increasingly the place where modern Christian find themselves - be comforted that faith isn’t primarily about believing stuff but about living as if those things were true even when we lack understanding. And also be challenged that faith is really only faith when it’s not merely in your head or heart but in how you live and move and have your being. Faith looks like Job and like Bartimaeus, risking societal condemnation and crying out to God, as if God might actually answer, as if Jesus really is the way, the truth, and the life.
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