Unforgotten: Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Ordinary Time
Then Job answered the Lord and said:
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, which I did not know.
4 ‘Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you make it known 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.”
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 came to him all
his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and ate
bread with him in his house. And 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 and a ring of gold.
12 And
the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning.
And he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen, and 1,000
female donkeys. 13 He had also seven sons and
three daughters. 14 And he called the name of the
first daughter Jemimah, and the name of the second Keziah, and the name of the
third Keren-happuch. 15 And in all the land there
were no women so beautiful as Job's daughters. And their father gave them an
inheritance among their brothers. 16 And after
this Job lived 140 years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, four
generations. 17 And Job died, an old man,
and full of days. (ESV)
And they all lived happily ever
after.
There are some
genres of writing that want an ending like this, particularly after the kind of
grueling challenge Job faced, that there’s a descriptor to label them: hurt/comfort.
The stories that have only the challenge and no tidy resolution are tagged
hurt/no comfort. A dear friend of mine
hates the stories that close with all loose ends neatly tucked in; he calls them
“Pretty Woman” stories, referencing the 1990 Richard Gere film that I still
have not yet seen. Others call them
Disney endings or, somewhat accurately to our text today, fairytale endings.
Remember that
when we first discussed this book of Job, it was as a folk tale passed down
through the oral tradition over time, each new teller adding a bit or shaving
off a sharp edge. There’s some debate as
to whether this neatly-tied bow of an ending is part of the original story of
Job or whether someone came along and added it because they couldn’t bear for
Job to go gently into that good night with all of his losses. Perhaps there was a scribe who wanted
hurt/comfort, who wanted to make sure this was all discussing a God Who didn’t
just leave it at Job’s starstruck awe.
But, like my friend
who hates “Pretty Woman” endings, adding on something that resets the stage
back to happiness puts on a strange layer of varnish to an otherwise extremely
human tale. The scholar Karla Suomala
points out, “It’s supposed to be a happy ending where Job gets everything back.
The problem, though, is that this ending doesn’t work. Getting a new family to
replace the old one? Anyone who has lost a family member — a child, a spouse,
for example, knows perfectly well that a new spouse or child never replaces the
one we have lost. We may love them deeply but the new family member does not
erase the memory of what came before…This is so much like what we all want to
do in the face of the tragedy, loss, and grief of those around us — wrap it up
and make it better.”[1]
“Everything
happens for a reason.” Have you had
someone say this to you in a moment of crisis?
Have you said it to someone else?
It’s a go-to in moments where we don’t know how to handle what happened;
it’s a comforting thing. We want to
impose our sense of direction and explanation on the universe. Often, when we hug someone around the
shoulders and say that everything happens for a reason, what we really mean is
that everything happens for a reason we can comprehend.
Unfortunately,
that part isn’t necessarily true, and Job has just gotten a whole
response from God reminding him that “there are more things in heaven and in
earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”[2]
“I have uttered
what I did not understand,” says Job to the whirlwind that spoke his name, “things
too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”
The God revealed to him is so much bigger not only than what he had
imagined but infinitely bigger than the caricature of transaction that his
friends had presented. This God is wild;
this God deals with sea monsters and galaxies, with the shape of the ocean and
the smallest insect. This God is so much
more complicated than “happily ever after.”
And this God invites
Job to be complicated, too.
Even though we
get this ending where all of Job’s things are restored, nowhere does the
narrator say, “And everything was fine because all the sadness was forgotten.” Job’s first set of children remains dead. His servants remain dead. His original wealth remains lost. He gets an entirely new life with twice the
amount and a different understanding of his relationship with God, but that
doesn’t erase what happened.
All of the
anger and anguish that we’ve been following for four weeks remains real, and
God never rebukes Job for feeling it. God’s
response, which Brian Scramlin preached last week in light of God’s presence,
is not to smile and get on with it but to recognize that God’s ways are higher
than Job’s ways,[3]
that there is so much beyond the restoration of cattle which Job will never be
able to comprehend. But, as Brian pointed
out, that doesn’t mean that Job gets left in the dark alone. God is here, always; as Alan Brehm puts it, “one
thing the Bible insists is true of God is that God is faithful. God never
forsakes us, no matter what…God’s justice is the justice of compassion, and…is
found in God’s faithful presence”.[4]
“I know that
You can do all things,” says Job. He has
lost nearly everything—but he has not lost his faith. It is an astounding, wondrous lesson in this
book that Job never once loses his faith.
His patience, yes; his temper, certainly; his hope, maybe. But not his faith. He has cried out to the seeming emptiness and
God answered, calling out to this good and faithful servant that he did nothing
wrong in wanting comfort for his hurt.
God restores everything, twice over, and Job says yes, You are God, I
despise myself for having tried to take on Your job in the idea that I could do
it better, I do not have Your understanding but now I have remembered my awe.
And God does
not ask him to forget.
If you
remember nothing else from studying this book, remember that God never once
tells Job to stop reacting to what’s happening.
When God answers in multiple chapters that Job could not possibly
understand just how much he doesn’t know in the workings of the world, God
doesn’t tell him he shouldn’t have asked.
When God restores all of Job’s belongings and family, God doesn’t say
that everything is fine and everyone lives happily ever after forever, this is
all comfort and no hurt.
The story of
Job was written down hundreds of years before God’s incarnation in the person
of Jesus the Christ, but its promise of God’s faithfulness is grounded in the
fact that God does not ask us to stop being our human selves who have
complicated endings and messy restarts.
Time goes on; new children are born, new crops are sown, new machinery
is purchased, new memories are made.
There’s a well-worn saying that “time heals all wounds” and it’s kind of
true, but time is a long, long thing and absolutely no emotion we experience,
whether grief or love or hope or anger, is linear. As God reminded Job, we do not have a vantage
point over the vastness of time, we mortals.
So we feel,
deeply, and then the new dawn rises, and we keep going, and the faithfulness of
God’s presence remains.
I’ve been
slowly reading through a collection of poems by Najwan Darwish, a Palestinian
born in Jerusalem who speaks volumes of the complications of that city and of
the effects of Israeli occupation of Palestinian cities. One of his poems, called “Tell,” goes like
this:
Tell me who
this young lion is
and how he
leaped into the air
as they hunted
him
from Musrara
to Sheikh Jarrah
Tell me about
that gaunt and gallant man
and how a whole
squadron assailed him
at the
Qalandia checkpoint
yet could not
bring him down
Tell me about
that girl who stood tall
as the
bulldozer leveled her
like an almond
tree in March
Tell this to
those
who say we’ve
been defeated[5]
Darwish’s defiance tells his audience to remember; remember
the strength, remember the ferocity, remember the fact that not all stories end
happily. This is what it is to be human:
to grieve and rage and feel and get up tomorrow and try again, over and
over, each time writing a new scene of hurt and chasing a new ending of
comfort. We humans cannot simply erase
what came before and should not; we must remember the stories of the children
we’ve lost and the girl who stood up to oppression and the ways that life was
blisteringly unfair because these are part of who we are.
But, with Job,
we learn not to dwell there and only there.
“Now my eye sees you,” Job said in a culture where looking right at God
meant death. At this ending of the
story, this transition to a new beginning, Job reaches out and renews the
covenant that he is God’s and God is his and this will be messy until he dies
an “old man…full of days.” This is
faith: to have everything fall apart and
then to take that into what comes next, leaning on the promise that God is
there with you, remembering all that has come before and walking into whatever
comes next.
“I know that
my Redeemer lives,” says Job in chapter 19, “and that at the last he will stand
upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I
shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not
another.”[6]
“Somehow,” writes Professor Kathryn
Schifferdecker, “through the grand vision of God’s creation, Job’s profound
desire to be in the presence of God has been fulfilled. He has seen God. And
that vision moves him out of despair into life again.”
Job sees God—and we see that this human
experience is a beautiful mess. We do
not get the neatly wrapped ending with no loose ends and all comfort where the
pain is forgotten and we understand why everything happened. What we do get is the rich, humbling,
sorrowful joy of a life lived, of a God Who never asks us to be less of our
best human selves, Who blesses us out of love and never reciprocity.
It is a complicated blessing. It is a complicated life. It is a complicated story.
May we remember, and give ourselves
grace to continue on. May we continue on
and give ourselves grace to begin new stories.
May we begin new stories and recognize always that God is there with us,
celebrating the beloved creation that we are.
Amen.
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