Unraveled: Job 1:1, 2:1-10
Ordinary Time
There was a man in the land of Uz whose name
was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared
God and turned away from evil.
Again there was a day when the sons of God came
to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them to
present himself before the Lord. 2 And
the Lord said to Satan, “From where have you come?” Satan answered
the Lord and said, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from
walking up and down on it.” 3 And
the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that
there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God
and turns away from evil? He still holds fast his integrity, although you
incited me against him to destroy him without reason.” 4 Then
Satan answered the Lord and said, “Skin for skin! All that a man has
he will give for his life. 5 But stretch out
your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your
face.” 6 And the Lord said to Satan,
“Behold, he is in your hand; only spare his life.”
7 So Satan went out from
the presence of the Lord and struck Job with loathsome sores
from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. 8 And
he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he
sat in the ashes.
9 Then his wife said to
him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and
die.” 10 But he said to her, “You speak as one of
the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and
shall we not receive evil?”[d] In all this
Job did not sin with his lips. (ESV)
“There was a man in the land of Uz.” When I was a kid, someone gave me an
illustrated book of Aesop’s fables. I
read over and over about the lion and the mouse, the crow and the pitcher of
water, the tortoise and the hare, the fox and the crane. The book had each fable’s moral set in
italics at the end of the story, just in case the reader missed it: rely on your own wit, be careful whom you
trust, don’t slack off, be wisely kind.
The short tales were comforting in their familiar rhythm of introducing
characters, having some brief action, and closing the scene. Like any good story, the “there once was” or
“once upon a time” promised I was in for a journey in a world that wasn’t mind
but that would inform mine because of my trip there.
Today, we
begin a month of walking through the book of Job, one of the more controversial
books in our Scriptures because it feels like a fable but doesn’t have any
moral we really want to claim. Job has
everything and then loses everything and his friends yell at him about how it
must be his fault, and then God tells him that he can only go so far in
questioning what happened and why, and then there’s a reset button like
everything’s fine. It’s a weird book,
this story of Job, and not terrifically cheerful.
But
terrifically important. “There was a man…and
that man was blameless and upright”.
This starts out like a fairy tale or a fable because it most likely was
one. Professor Katherine Schifferdecker
writes that, “The prologue to the book of Job (chapters 1-2) ‘sets up’ the
meditation on suffering that follows it…This prose prologue to the book reads
like a folktale. There is no mooring in history (contrast Jeremiah 1:1 and
Isaiah 1:1) or place (Uz is not mentioned as a place anywhere else in the
Bible). Indeed, the prologue to the book of Job may be evidence of a folktale
known in ancient Israel…Ezekiel certainly assumes that his hearers know the
figure of Job when he lists Job, with Noah and Daniel, as a paragon of
righteousness (see Ezekiel 14:14-20).”[1]
In this prologue,
we not only learn that there is a righteous man named Job but we learn that God
is paying attention to him. It is
important to know that this opening conversation between God and Satan isn’t a
cosmological duel of opposites; the Hebrew here is ha-satan, the
“satan,” a word that simply means “adversary.”
This is not a horned devil leading the forces of Hell strolling into
God’s house to pick a fight; this is one of God’s lieutenants keeping an eye on
creation as part of his job. Rev. Henry
T.C. Sun calls him “the heavenly district attorney”.[2] And it is God Who brings up Job—“have
you seen my servant Job…a blameless and upright man?”
I haven’t,
says the prosecutor, but now that you mention it I see that he’s doing quite
well; no wonder he worships You. You’ve
given him everything.
And thus the
stage is set: God agrees to testing
Job’s faith to see whether it is anchored in love of God for God’s sake or
whether Job is one of the earliest proponents of the prosperity gospel. In the part that is not in today’s
lectionary, Job loses all his property, all his workers, and all his
children. The only part he keeps is his
health—and in today’s verses, the adversary says, “Well of course he’s still
faithful to You, God. It only gets
impossibly hard when you lose your physical health.”
Those who deal with chronic health
conditions can attest to the fact that yes, the world gets infinitely harder
when we’re fighting our own bodies to live in it. And God, Who created humans, says you have
a point. So God gives license to
take away Job’s wellbeing—just don’t kill him.
Job is afflicted with sores, sitting on ashes having lost everything but
his wife who does not understand why he still won’t yell at God for how wildly
unfair this all is.
It is hard to
square the God Who would let this happen with the God we put in stained-glass
windows holding sheep and smiling at children.
Why would
someone write this? Why would we keep a
story that looks like God just wants to know if Job loves Him for His cattle or
for Himself? What can we learn from a
God Who allows people to die just to prove a point? There isn’t even a lovely, italicized moral
at the end to tell us what we should take from all this!
This book was
most likely written down during the exile of Israel in Babylon. Dr. John Holbert writes that, “Israel's 6th-century
B.C.E. removal to the world’s greatest city, an exile lasting some two
generations, brought crisis to the imagined settled theology of the people. The
pillars of the YHWH faith: the promised land, the king descended from the great
David, the Temple of Solomon, the regular priestly round of sacrifice and
offering, were all gone.”[3] The religion the people had of a God Who gave
rewards if they followed all the right rules was squashed flat; whatever the
people of Israel had done wrong surely wouldn’t merit being conquered and
deported. What happened to the
covenant? What happened to being God’s
chosen people?
Enter Job, a
man to whom we are introduced from the very beginning, remember, as a man in
God’s favor. “Here is the most important
thing to learn from this prologue,” continues Dr. Holbert: “Job is
magnificently righteous and hence completely innocent of any deeds that could
possibly elicit the horrors he is about to endure.”[4] Everything about this book takes the concept
of a neat and tidy italicized moral and sets it on fire—Job does not deserve
this, any of this. God is not mad at him
and is not punishing him for anything.
The adversary is not out to steal his soul. This is an extreme moment of “bad things
happen to good people” and no human could have stopped that.
It can be
comforting, weirdly, to have that moment of camaraderie with someone who didn’t
deserve what his life had become. There
are some days where you may look at just how much is exploding in your life and
say, “I’ve gone astray, sure, but this?
Not this far.”
Which is
exactly why we keep this book. We sell
ourselves the story, especially in American Christianity, that if we memorize
enough fables and abide by enough rules, then God will make our lives easier in
some way. We have drawn a bizarre and
incorrect line between faith and security—bizarre because we follow a man Who
straight up said, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself,
and take up his cross, and follow Me.”[5]
The other
too-far swing of the pendulum is that no one has any control over anything and
so our actions don’t matter, which is equally as untrue as “we can control
everything if we just act rightly enough.”
There is cause and effect in the universe, as anyone who went through
grade-school science knows. We are
called as people of faith to enact justice in the world and to love with
abundant mercy as God loves us. Job was
named righteous and at the end of the verses today, he still is; “Job did not
sin with his lips,” the narrator rushes to reassure us.
So if we can’t
follow all the right rules and we can’t dismiss all the rules entirely, what’s
left?
Relationship.
“Have you
considered my servant Job?” God asks of the being God is allowing to destroy
Job slowly. Have you considered that he
lives as I asked him to? Have you
considered that he loves Me? Or, as
Professor Schifferdecker asks it, “Does even the most faithful person serve God
only because of what he (or she) gets out of it? Is it possible to love God for
who God is, and not for hope of reward? Is it possible, in other words, for the
relationship between God and humanity to be an authentic relationship?”[6]
We begin this
book of Job on World Communion Sunday, an ecumenical celebration begun by the
Presbyterians and recognized by the 38 different denominations in the National
Council of Churches. It is a moment of reminding
ourselves that in this sacrament, in the memory of Jesus sitting with His
disciples to eat dinner even though He was staring death in the face, we are
together.
The Christian Church is a mess, I
don’t think I need to tell you; we are splintered, distracted, and distrusted
by many. And we deserve a lot of that—we
are far from being as righteous as Job and we certainly have sinned with our
lips. But God still invites us into
relationship, loves us and asks if we can love in return. God calls us to the table where we remember
that we are not the worst thing that has happened in God’s life, we squabbling
Christians around the world, and that in fact we have been asked to be part of
building the Kingdom where there is no suffering, where there is no pain.
In the life and teaching of Jesus we
again get the message that we get from Job’s fable: it is not about the rules, it is about the
relationship. It is about sitting down
with others and saying, “Let us be community together.” It is about hearing God’s invitation to completely
redefine righteousness and center it around service to others, around care for
ourselves, around faith in God even when everything unravels. It is about taking the juice and the bread
with siblings around the world and saying yes, things are a mess. And God knows each of us by name and says let
us journey together; have you seen my servant?
I have given Myself for them, gladly.
May we have strength to bear what we
must; courage to let go of what we do not have to carry; and faith to see that
God is with us in all things. Amen.
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