Job
1:1-22, 3:1-10
Matthew
9:35-10:8, (9-23)
As my own
congregation will remember, I have chosen to use the Narrative lectionary this
last year as a change from the three year cycle of the revised common
lectionary that I’ve used for the last 20 some years. The narrative lectionary is on a four year
schedule and it looks more intensively at each book of the bible, following it
through with longer readings, skipping a lot less material, in order for us to
get a real look at these books. For this
next month, the narrative lectionary is looking in depth at the book of Job,
which is not a scripture that we usually give much of our time. When we do look at Job, we usually will give
it a single week of our attention, rather than spreading it out over a number
of weeks. It is an uncomfortable book
for many of us in many ways. So today I
want to give a bit of an overview.
The book of Job is
one of my favorite books in the bible, for reasons that we will explore more in
the coming weeks. One reason, which we
will explore more today, is that many people have come to understand it as a
book that addresses the question of why bad things happen to good people, or,
to put it another way: many have understood it as a book that seeks to explore
the age-old question of evil. The
question of evil is, in many ways, THE theological problem that people of faith
face. As many theologians explain it, in
particular, Rabbi Kushner in his book, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People,
and Frederick Buechner puts it in his book Wishful thinking, A Theological
ABC, there are three statements that people of faith generally believe to
be true:
1.
God is all Powerful
2. God
is all Good
3. Bad
things happen.
One of these three statements has to go. They can’t all work together. If God is all powerful and all good, then
even things that look bad must in fact not be.
If God is all powerful but bad things happen, then God, the creator and
controller of all things, must be the author of those bad things so God can’t
be all good. And finally, if God is all
good but bad things happen, then God must not be all powerful. There must be other forces at work in the
world, in our lives and in the universe that have some sway and some say over
what happens and that make for bad things to happen.
People are uncomfortable with this. And in general people strive and desperately
want to believe that all three statements must be true. We don’t want to believe that God is other
than all powerful and all good. But we
also experience that bad things happen, every day, all around us. And so we often jump through huge hoops in
our thinking in order to make all three of these statements work. And what we tend to discount can be a strong
indicator of where we stand in our theology.
More fundamentalist and evangelicals, for example, tend
to discount the statement that bad things happen. They try to find ways in which the terrible
things that happen are not really bad, or they say that the bad things didn’t
really happen. This often ends up with
the devastating result that people say the most inhumane and unkind things to
other people who are suffering. Have you
ever heard someone say to a person who has just lost a child, for example, “God
needed that child more in heaven.”? What
a horrible thing to say to someone grieving: that they shouldn’t feel sad at
the devastation they have just experienced because God somehow needs the baby
more than they do! Why would God “need” this
child in heaven? Or how about, “Everything happens for a
reason” to someone who has just gone through an experience of loss or worse, has
experienced some kind of truly torturous situation. Their agony had a reason behind it? Another favorite of mine is, “God never gives
us more than we can handle” as if God had given us something bad in order to
test our ability to handle things. And
we all know that people DO, all too often, experience more than they can
handle. People commit suicide because
they are experiencing more than they can handle, they lose their minds, they
become bitter or cynical, they DIE, overcome by disease or despair. Every day people experience more than they
can handle. To tell someone who is on
the verge of collapse that they haven’t been given more than they can handle is
cruel because it declares their inability to handle the situation as a personal
flaw. And all of this points to a
theology that says that the things that we experience as horrible are not, in
fact horrible.
Other times, people deal with the “bad things happen”
part by assuming that anything bad that comes their way is punishment for bad
behavior on their part. This, too, is
problematic for many reasons. First of
all, if God is all powerful, why would God allow us to act out bad behaviors that
God then punishes? Also, what kind of
god is it that would hurt us because we made mistakes? Not a very loving God, for sure. But many people go to this place, don’t
they? Kushner himself tells the story of
a parishioner who came to him after his daughter had died saying he had missed
a high holy day at the temple and that this must be why God had punished him by
killing his daughter. Again, what kind
of god does that describe?
Other faiths, perhaps, come to the conclusion that
perhaps God is not all good, but is more like humans: a creator of good and
evil who gets jealous, angry, vengeful and altogether destructive at
times. Since this is not a Christian
understanding of God, people who believe God to be all good and all powerful
but then experience terrible things sometimes end up chucking out faith in God
at all. They cannot believe in an all
powerful god who would allow these terrible things to happen, so God must not
be real, or must not be an entity worth worshiping.
Finally, then, as we have discussed before, we come to
the theology of people like Kushner and Buechner, and, frankly, of Job. The story of Job does not describe a God who
is punishing Job for bad behaviors. The
book of Job emphasizes repeatedly that Job is righteous. And while some might say that perhaps the
book of Job is describing a God who is perhaps not all good, who in fact makes
an unfair contract with the devil even, there is a different way to understand
this.
I want to start, though, with a little historical
critical look at Job. The passages we
read from the very beginning of Job has this word that is often translated
“Satan” or “the Adversary” but is more accurately, from the Hebrew, translated
as “the Accuser”. There is no sense here
of this accuser as being an “evil” one, or one who was working against God in
the original. Rather the sense is that
this is a being whose job it is to see the truth in humanity and to hold people
accountable for their actions, one who works with God in doing so. This is very important distinction and it is
how the Hebrew people would have originally heard and understood this. To restate, this text is not a story of God
somehow agreeing to the Devil’s demands.
This is a story in which the motives of Job, the deep understanding of
Job is being questioned. Additionally,
when you look at what then happens, it is not that the Accuser goes down and
causes problems for Job. Some of what is
described is natural disasters. But most
of it is the humans around Job doing damage.
As we hear, “A messenger came to Job and said: “The oxen were plowing,
and the donkeys were grazing nearby when the Sabeans took them and killed the
young men with swords. I alone escaped to tell you.” And then, “Chaldeans set up three companies,
raided the camels and took them, killing the young men with swords. I alone
escaped to tell you.” In other words, this
is not a story about two gods: a good god we call “God” who made everything
good and a bad god whom we call “Satan” who makes everything bad that we can’t
handle, and who somehow makes an agreement with the good god to torture an
innocent man. I know the story,
especially in our English translations, can sound that way, but that misses the
intention of the story.
Instead this is, and
again was intended to be, a story that invites us more deeply into the question
of good and evil. As we move through the
book of Job, we will explore this in more depth. But the point of this intro, as well as Job’s
angry rant in reaction to the suffering that he has experienced, is that bad
things happen to good people. Job did
not deserve his suffering, the intro makes that clear. He was a good and righteous man. His suffering was not punishment, his
suffering was not revenge, his suffering was not God, nor some “devil
character” lashing out.
Much of my study leave last week was spent
taking a class on process theology. Process
theology has many facets, but the main point of process theology is that God is
NOT all powerful. God has released power
in favor of freewill. I have said this
before, but God wants genuine relationship with creation. If we are controlled, there is no genuine
relationship. If we are puppets, there
is no real relationship. God has given
us, and all creation, choices, our own personal power to act and react in this
world. We have the power to act, nature
has the power to act. Each of us chooses
how we will be in the world, what we will do with the time given to us, what choices
we will make. That means that when
people make bad choices or do bad things (like the Sabeans and Chaldeans in the
Job story), people suffer. And God has
no power to prevent those people from making those choices. God’s power at this point in time, is one of
persuasion. When people listen to God,
when people lean into the mandates to love all others as one loves oneself,
then good comes. When people such as the
Sabeans and Chaldeans in this story do not see others as brothers and sisters,
do not feel the call to love them as themselves, do not treat them kindly or
well, but instead abuse them and take what they want for themselves, raping the
land and killing those they see as “other”, God is powerless to prevent it.
I realize that for some, this is a scary thought. It came up in one of our conversations during
my study leave class that some people say, “If God can’t fix everything, if God
is not all powerful, that is not a God I want to worship!” The instructor’s response (and mine as well),
“If God is not all Good, if God is not on the side of the suffering, if God has
power and just stands by while terrible things happen, THAT is not a god I want
to worship.” (the third statement that bad
things happen is not in question here: Job experienced them, I’ve experienced
them and our world is experiencing them: so that is not the point in question
here.)
(On a side note, this is the power we give to pastors in
the Presbyterian church as well – we do not have the power to make decisions,
though we usually take the crap when decisions don’t go the direction everyone
wants, which is always – you just can’t please all the people all the time,
EVER. Pastors, too, in the Presbyterian
church at least, are only given the power of persuasion. That’s it.)
So, the idea here is that God does not interfere or
prevent the bad things from happening. The
earth, just like humans, is active and alive and so things we call “natural
disasters” because they devastate us happen. Earthquakes happen. Floods happen. Virus’ happen. Sometimes, many times lately, humans make
these things worse. We affect the
weather, we set up our societies in such a way that those most likely to get
sick are also those least likely to get health care and therefore more than
likely to spread disease to the rest of us.
But these are things WE do. Not
things God has done to us.
“Let us not ask God to take away what we have been given
responsibility to handle,” someone once said.
It’s our responsibility to prevent as many deaths as possible. It is our responsibility to act in ways that
limit our potential for earth’s destruction.
When we fail to take that responsibility, bad things will and do
happen. The world has been set up in
such a way that there are consequences, in the big picture, for our actions;
not because God is punishing, but because we have been given co-creative power
and when we use that for evil, for destruction, for bad, then bad things come. In a sense we are punished BY our sins, not
FOR our sins. On an individual basis,
though, this means that life is not fair and there is suffering.
Where is God in that suffering? God is on the cross. And this is the part that we have to
understand. Jesus, too, did not die
because he deserved it. His suffering,
too, was not punishment, and it was not revenge. His suffering, too, was deeply unfair. When it comes to suffering and Christianity,
it is clear that God did not prevent even the cross, but gave humans the
freewill that enabled them to even kill the Son of God. Barbara Brown Taylor in God in Pain
said it like this, “Christianity is the only world religion that confesses a
God who suffers. It is not that popular
an idea, even among Christians. We
prefer a God who prevents suffering, only that is not the God we have got. What the cross teaches us is that God’s power
is not the power to force human choices and end human pain. It is, instead, the power to pick up the
shattered pieces and make something holy out of them – not from a distance, but
right close up.”
The question for us, then, is how do we respond in that
suffering? How do we respond when others
suffer? In relation to God, it is easy
to praise God in the good times, but harder in the bad times. We see this in Job. He eventually gets upset. His crisis of suffering is a spiritual crisis
too, because he, as a member of his community, also had believed that the world
was just and that suffering was punishment.
But now he sees otherwise: from his own experience, he is seeing things
differently. And while he doesn’t curse
God, he never steps to the place in which he curses God like his wife suggests
he do, he does curse his own life. He
rues the day he was born. He
laments. He pours out his pain. We will look more at this next week. For today, though, my call for us is to sit
in the question of evil. Do you see,
experience, feel suffering and evil in this world? And if you do, do you choose to believe in a
God who is all good, or a God who is all powerful? Are you quick to blame God when things go
badly? Do you see a God who is angry and
vengeful? Or do you see a God who has
loved you so deeply into being that God has given each of us free-will with the
cost being that suffering comes? These
are hard questions. They are questions
that are not easily answered. And for
today, I invite you into the questions, into the exploration. Unlike for many, I am not going to give you
quick answers because I think God is in the very questions, pulling us closer,
inviting us to listen, to hear, and to grow in our love for God. I think that IS Good News. A God in the questions. Amen.
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