Unbroken: Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Ordinary Time
Then Job answered and said:
2 “Today also
my complaint is bitter;
my hand is heavy on account of my groaning.
3 Oh, that I knew where I might find him,
that I might come even to his seat!
4 I would lay my case before him
and fill my mouth with arguments.
5 I would know what he would answer me
and understand what he would say to me.
6 Would he contend with me
in the greatness of his power?
No; he would pay attention to me.
7 There an upright man could argue with him,
and I would be acquitted forever by my judge.
8 “Behold, I go
forward, but he is not there,
and backward, but I do not perceive him;
9 on the left hand when he is working, I do not behold
him;
he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him.
God has made my heart faint;
the Almighty has terrified me;
17 yet I am not silenced because of the darkness,
nor because thick darkness covers my face. (ESV)
Sometimes, the
Scripture at hand is not something that resolves.
We continue
today in our series on the book of Job, picking up quite a few chapters later
than last week’s introduction to the man who had done nothing wrong but lost
everything anyway. In the interim, three
of Job’s friends had come to sit with him and grieve. Initially, they simply sat in silence on the
ash heap while he contemplated the sudden downturn of his life; this is one of
the greatest examples of friendship in the Bible, to have people so thoroughly
offering the ministry of presence. When
we show up for a friend and simply are, the gift of our being there is
an incredibly powerful thing.
But we humans
are not very good at silences, especially silences in the face of uncomfortable
realities. So the friends start
talking—the chapters between last week’s text and this week’s are a cycle of
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar taking turns trying to convince Job that surely he must
be at fault and if he would only admit that, everything would be fine. Job, for his part, responds to each of them
that not only are they making things worse—he even calls them “miserable
comforters” in 16:2—but they are also wrong.
He knows, he knows that he has done nothing to deserve this.
We as the
readers know that he is right. This is
not a book of punishment, and Job is completely correct in saying that all of
this happened for reason he had anything to do with, no matter how much his
friends want to create a reason so the whole mess can get fixed.
With his
friends failing him, Job decides he’s had enough—and turns to God. “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that
I might even come to his seat!” Job cries.
Job is not asking for God to fix everything or to apologize to him or to
exonerate him to his friends; he asks for God to be present enough to make
everything that has happened bearable. “Would
he contend with me in the greatness of his power? / No; he would pay
attention to me.” Job’s language demands
that God come back and sit on the ash heap with him; if You’re going to cause
this, fine, but You can’t just up and leave afterward.
Today’s verses
do not have a resolution—we’ll get there—but they have a deep and almost
frightening sense of loss. Pastor
Karl Jacobsen points out that, “We can see well enough, what is the heart of
Job’s struggle–not the loss of wealth, not the physical pains, not even,
perhaps, the mourning for the lost hopes and dreams of family–rather that God
is absent. If Job’s question to his wife, ‘Shall we receive the good at the
hand of God, and not receive the bad?’ may be taken as a foreshadowing or faint
echo of Jesus’ cry from the cross, this confession of terror is the raw scream
of it.
“At the heart of Job’s complaint is
neither that he is suffering, nor even that God would allow such a thing, but
that God feels distant, absent, so far removed as to be unknowable. A longing
for a sense of God’s presence, for God’s attention, is what drives Job’s
complaint and is its tacit substance.”[1]
One of the greatest gifts this
strange little book of Job gives us is the permission to demand God’s company. It may feel a little weird, since we often
hear that we are not allowed to demand anything of God—and to a degree that’s
true. But as with any relationship, it
is not only permissible but healthy to expect both parties to be present and to
be wounded when that is not the case.
Job goes through the unimaginable in terms of loss and grief and shock,
but what breaks him is the idea that God is not there with him to weather all
of that. We as humans are pretty durable
creations, and we can handle quite a bit of chaos—but we are not good at
loneliness.
In The United Methodist Church, we
believe that there are three kinds of grace—prevenient, which is the grace
offered simply because we are alive in God’s creation; justifying, which is the
grace offered when we accept the call to relationship in faith; and
sanctifying, which is the grace that follows us through the twists and turns of
actually living into that relationship.
When Job cries out, “he would pay attention to me,” he is going back to
the foundational notion of prevenient grace:
God has promised to be with us, even to the end of the age, simply
because we are. So for Job to go
through hell and back and then to have to listen to his friends completely
misunderstand everything and not support him at all and then to reach out to
God and feel as though God is not there?
It’s no wonder he says, “God has made
my heart faint.” My heart would also be
pretty broken if I lost everything and was not only told it was my fault but
that even God had abandoned me in my hour of need. It is this, more than anything else, that Job
cannot withstand. If this is how God is,
there is no point in continuing to be faithful.
Dr. John Holbert writes, “In one very
clear sense, Job does curse God as the Satan promised. At least he curses the
God he thinks he knows, the traditional and conventional God of his upbringing…But
the effect of Job's railing and cursing against his fate and his God is to
clear the decks for a new look at God, the very thing the author of Job hoped
that we would do…this God of demanded sacrifice and whimsical testing of the
chosen ones is not the God we have come to worship this day or any day.”[2]
What breaks in these verses of sorrow
and rage is not, it turns out, Job himself; it is Job’s idea that God runs on
the human concept of rules he had been taught his whole life. As we talked about last week, this whole
fable wraps around the idea that we do not have a quid pro quo God;
there is no list of rules carved into a wall that we can use to force God into
giving us this amount of money or success or time if we do this number of
prayers or actions or donations. There
is, at the base of all things, only the relationship. There is the grace that God extends to us,
the affirmation and consent we give, and then the expectation that we are now
together in this, God and us. Whatever
happens, it happens in the “and” that connects us, in this need for presence
that Job so rightly claims.
Some of you may know that I’m a
pretty big “Star Trek” fan. In the
series “The Next Generation” that aired in the late 80s and early 90s, one of
the main characters is an android named Data whose character arc is primarily his
desire to understand humans and be more like us. In the second season of the show, there’s an
episode in which the crew of the Enterprise is part of some war games and Data
miscalculates the ship against which they are mock-fighting, missing some very
human series of quick decisions that make no sense to a walking computer. Knowing that his mistake cost the Enterprise,
Data has a sudden surge of uncertainty and tries to excuse himself from the
remainder of the games. He runs
self-diagnostics, certain that there must be a malfunction within himself to
have lost the engagement, and isolates himself from his community of friends
and officers.
Captain Picard hears of this and goes
to tell him to rejoin the command crew on the bridge; he is expected to be part
of the crew no matter what happens because they are in this together. “Captain,” Data replies, “with all due
respect, perhaps it would be better if you choose another to serve as your
first officer…I have not been able to isolate the problem, sir. I might make a mistake.”
After a few more considerations,
Picard replies, “Commander, it is possible to commit no mistakes and still
lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”[3] Data considers this and eventually retakes
his station, learning the very human lesson that being together matters even
when everything else is falling apart.
After nearly twenty chapters of his
friends telling him to run more diagnostics and figure out where his weakness
must be, Job says enough. There is no
mistake. There is no weakness. There is this life, and in this life I have been
promised God’s presence, and I am allowed to demand that that promise be
upheld. Data returns to the bridge
because he is there with the rest of the crew, walking with them through the
losses and the wins alike. Job returns
to his plea to be heard because he is leaning on the promises of God that the
dark will never be entirely without Light, that all prayers are at least heard,
that even when there is loss there is God.
Have you gotten to that place, child
of God? Have you heard others telling
you that God has walked away—or told yourself that surely you have looked
everywhere for God but not found any evidence of the presence, sure that God is
not paying attention to you? Have you
demanded to be heard but felt only silence in return?
You are not alone. You are not alone in that you are not the
only one who has ever felt that way and you are not alone in that God has not
left. It is part of being God that such
a thing is impossible; the God we understand in this faith cannot not be
somewhere. So we, like Job, are
encouraged to keep speaking.
Keep going to the bridge. Keep praying.
Keep singing. Keep shouting. Keep demanding. Keep inviting. Keep hoping.
Keep loving. Keep being
honest. Keep being present. Keep the relationship that you have accepted
and for which God, too, has made promises.
It is not rude or unfaithful to speak of the rawness of how we
experience the world; God was crucified, there isn’t much that can come as too
much of a shock. But keep
communicating, breaking into pieces the idea that we are ever too much of a
burden for God or that we can ever make a mistake big enough or miss something
important enough to make God walk away from us.
This, after all, is life. Sometimes, like our text today, it doesn’t
resolve yet. But God is there with us in
that uncertainty, in that pain, in that hope, in that joy. This is what faith is: to believe so deeply that we keep going even
on the days sinking under the weight of doubt.
“I am not silenced,” says Job, and
no, he is not; we have at least two more Sundays of this book and what Job and
his friends have to say. May we, also,
refuse to be silenced into loneliness; refuse to be pushed away from
relationship; and refuse to stop fighting for the faith that makes us whole,
one argument and one blessing at a time.
Amen.
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