Job 1:1, 2:1-10
1:1 There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.
2:1 One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord, and the accuser also came among them to present himself before the Lord. 2 The Lord said to the accuser, “Where have you come from?” The accuser answered the Lord, “From going to and fro on the earth and from walking up and down on it.” 3 The Lord said to the accuser, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason.” 4 Then the accuser answered the Lord, “Skin for skin! All that the man has he will give for his life. 5 But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.” 6 The Lord said to the accuser, “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.”
7 So the accuser went out from the presence of the Lord and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. 8 Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself and sat among the ashes.
9 Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.” 10 But he said to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive good from God and not receive evil?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
Mark 10:13-16
13 People were bringing children to him in order that he might touch them, and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 14 But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. 15 Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” 16 And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
I doubt that many of you will be disappointed to hear that, less than a month into this community’s existence, I’m not going to talk about Jesus’ teaching on divorce today. It shouldn’t be avoided, but instead I’d like to focus on Job, a book which we think we know something about even as we’re also aware we don’t understand it. The OT passages for the 4 weeks of October come from Job, and it’s my intention to take a look at the book in its entirety, while also bringing the Gospel of Mark into the conversation.
It’s often assumed that Job is a “theodicy”, an attempt to justify the ways of God to humanity, to explain the problem of evil, to reveal the necessity of suffering in God’s economy. If we come to Job with these expectations, we will be disappointed, or worse, we will conclude that God is no better than the accuser, that God is good sometimes, but other times God is evil. However, rather than attempting to explain human suffering, Job takes the reality of suffering as a given and the question it addresses is simply, what it would mean to know God, to worship God, to even love God while suffering in a world of suffering. It doesn’t provide answers so much as a way of being.
In chapter 1, after we’re introduced to Job, we hear of the “heavenly beings” or even more literally, “the sons of God” assembling together. These beings, including the one called Satan, are on the same team. This is not the devil of popular imagination. It’s a bit like God is the president and these are his cabinet ministers, and Satan leads the IRS and has just returned from an audit of the earth. Then God starts bragging about the righteousness of his servant Job, to which Satan responds that it’s easy for Job to be righteous given how much God has blessed him. Take all that away, and see what happens. So God does exactly that. But even after the death of his children and the destruction of all his property Job maintained his righteousness. So Satan, unimpressed, returns in the passage we read to say that if God really wants to see what Job is made of then Job needs to suffer physical afflictions. So God agrees and immediately Job finds himself scraping at his festering sores with a shard of broken pot.
I hope it goes without saying that this not to be taken as a literal depiction of how business is conducted in heaven. If you wonder how to square the picture of this capricious God with the loving God revealed by Jesus, the answer is that you do not square the picture. If God is the sort of being who consents to - even directly instigates - human suffering just to prove a point in the heavenly court, then God would indeed be worth fearing, but not worth loving. The troubling reality, however, is that the picture of God presented in Job does, in many respects, accord better with our actual experience of the world, where suffering and calamity seem dealt out for no rhyme or reason, where appeals to God go unanswered. The book of Job - especially the man Job himself - rejects the prevailing assumption at the time that blessings and curses were apportioned according to one’s righteousness. Job’s friends are convinced that he must’ve done something to deserve his fate. But the book comes close to suggesting the opposite, that Job’s righteousness and prosperity made him a target. In which case, good luck trying to figure this out.
Job’s wife is clearly not interested in trying to figure out how God might be lovable after all. After Job has lost everything but her, she says to him: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die”. Job’s righteousness, which included offering sacrifices on behalf of his children in the chance that they might’ve somehow sinned, has gotten him nowhere. Those children are dead. And this God of whom Job will not speak poorly is responsible. If God is like that, then what’s the difference between blessing God and cursing God. Have enough pride to tell God to get lost.
Job’s wife is kind of the patron saint for all those who have rejected God because of the suffering they see and experience the world, who assume that if God is love then God ought to be more obviously involved, that cause and effect ought to have some intelligible relationship. In Job’s day it never occurred to anyone that there might not be gods; it was a given. The question was always, What is their character? Nowadays, of course, it’s entirely imaginable that God doesn’t exist, not only because we’re all materialists, but also because we’ve come to believe that the apparent moral logic of the cosmos - or the lack thereof - makes more sense without God than with God.
Job responded to his wife,”Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”. It’s easy to hear this as an unreflective resignation to the status quo, to be blind to the moral outrage of the situation. Like how much good would you need to receive to make all the bad stuff worth it? How do you make that calculation? And if God has more to give, why doesn’t God give it? If God withholds, Why should we love God?
Difficult questions, made more difficult by the fact that we are in the habit of thinking about God as if God were a power, an agent within the universe, that God is really just a god, like Zeus or Thor or what have you, who decides to act or not. But if God is God, God doesn’t exist as an entity within the universe, God exists prior to and apart from, the subsistent act of being which makes all other being possible. Job’s question, shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” is - whether he / the author quite meant it this way or not - asking us the fundamental question of whether life is worth living? Is existence itself good? And if the answer is indeed yes, however much we might suffer, then God is worthy of our praise. But that still leaves unanswered the question of why is life like this and not some other way? Is this really the best of all possible worlds? Is this really the best God can do?
For Job, if he’s going to continue living, there’s nothing to do but keep crying out to the God who is the source of life itself, imploring God to listen, to show his face, to justify himself, to make things right. He might be angry at God, he might doubt God’s willingness or ability to respond, but there’s no other court of appeal. By the end of the book Job does get a response from God, but it hardly answers his questions or reveals all mysteries. Instead, what Job learns and what we learn from him is that life with God - however frustrating, disappointing, and painful - is better than life apart from God. To reject God is to favor death, and though he’s tempted, it’s an option Job refuses, and it’s one we should refuse as well, however tempting it might appear.
Jesus told us that to enter the kingdom of God we must receive it like a little child. My own children never stop asking questions, they long to understand, for mysteries to be revealed, even as, in some sense, they recognize the poverty of their own understanding. They have no choice but to accept the situation, to submit to their parents, the authors of their life, and trust that, even when appearances seem to the contrary, we love them and have their best interest at heart - and that one day they will indeed understand as we do. Job gets on with his miserable life as best he can, not by suppressing his pain and confusion, but by giving it voice, not by retreating into false piety, but by railing against God. Job becomes like a child, and it is by trusting even when he does not understand why God is trustworthy that he finally comes to know God, even to love God. He seems to be acting irrationally, without evidence, and yet what choice does a child have but to trust their parents? And what choice do we have, really, but to trust God?
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