with needles and catheters, and the room itself…it is filled with family and
nurses and friends of the family, and few clergypersons, one in particular
that had never, never gone through something like this with anyone he
had ever pastored. This visit to the hospital for Jennifer had been just
one of many she had experienced in the last year—about 15 months
ago, she mysteriously got sick, and was eventually hospitalized, and
eventually diagnosed with a bacteria that was destroying her liver, and
there seemed to be no way to fight it, to beat back the bug that was
eating away at her young life. She needed a liver transplant—a liver
from another child about her age, and the miracle of it was that she didn’
t have to wait to long, and they found one and the operation was
successful and everything seemed back normal, as much as normal can
happen in those kinds of situations. The between time, the time between
the diagnosis and the operation had often found that blond, 10 year-old
girl, weeping in to her young mother’s chest, scared, and sometimes
begging her mother not to let yet another needle poke or prod her—and
yet she was also amazingly calm, amazingly brave through all of it, it was
a witness that children know more and can handle more than we ever
give them credit for. But we found ourselves here again, in another
hospital room, after the operation, after the supposed success of the
liver transplant, with the nurses and the family and the friends and the
clergy, knowing that indeed the transplant had failed and that there was
nothing we could, any of us—after 15 months of hell for this little girl, her
young parents, the family, the friends, and even people like me, who had
been invited, in some weird way, into their lives for this devastating time.
Finally, the decision was made to turn off her life-support, and within
hours, signs of her life started slowly drifting away. During the last few
hours of Jennifer’s life, her mother crawled into her hospital bed and just
held her, whispering into her ears, trying to gently give her permission to
go if she needed to, that she and the family would all right—words that
no mother should ever have to say to her young child. Finally, the
numbers on the monitors went to zero and her life on this earth ended.
The rest of us who were left, in the waiting rooms, in the hospital room,
the survivors of such a moment, were sent fumbling into the night, trying
to lay down the million questions we had about “why” this had happened,
because in moments like this, as we all know, there are funerals to plan,
people to call, the mundane things by loved ones that must be attended
when we humans give way to death. In those moments, as well, we also
try to package it, to put it together, to try to fit some meaning onto what
seems so random and meaningless—“clearly,” we say, “God had some
purpose in all this, some reason for this to happen, maybe to teach us
something—and at least she is now in a better place, and now, we must
lean more heavily on the Lord of both life and death,” we say to each
other.
Still, trying to stuff all the questions and pain and even anger of it all into
some neat emotional box, so that we don’t have to confront each of
these things doesn’t come easily for a lot of folks—especially when the
questions and seeming injustice of it all is so real, so obvious. Many of
you know that I lost my father a few years ago, but his death had a
logical cause—if you spend 40 years smoking, there is a good chance
that you are going to get some sort of cancer—and he did. It doesn’t
make the pain and loss any easier, but you’re not left with the haunting
question of “why?” You know why—actions have consequences, both
good and bad, and one of the bad consequences of smoking is a much
higher risk of cancer. But that experience is quite different than seeing a
10-year old girl dying of liver failure—I mean, if there was a definition of
innocence, it was her—and the incredible sadness of it all was that her
life had already been hard enough, she had already lived through more
than any little girl should have to live through, even before her liver
failed. After all that suffering, you then add on this mess—it just seems
too much and so unfair! This is how a life that has already had its
challenges ends, this way! This was not fair—if life is truly the result of
action and reaction, cause and effect, if it is rooted in the idea of the
Golden Rule, “do unto others as you have done unto you,” then what
could she have done to deserve this or her parents done to deserve
this?!? And, of course, they hadn’t done anything—and yet life had
dealt Jennifer one unfair blow after another. Ten-year old kids shouldn’t
ever have to go through that kind of hell—if there was such a thing as
innocent distilled in a body, it was her, and yet life and God and the
universe, whatever, had dealt her a blow that seemed so incredibly
unfair and unjust. Even if God had not caused this to happen, why did
God allow this to happen—what in the world could God be thinking, to
allow this to happen?
These kinds of haunting, difficult questions about life and death,
suffering and guilt and innocence, all of these kinds of questions actually
get dealt with in the Bible, or at the very least, they are struggled with
and through. The book of Job, and, actually, a whole set of books called
the Wisdom Books of the Bible, are meant to deal with all the hard
questions and dilemmas that we humans are stuck with, if we’re willing to
be honest and truthful with ourselves, and if we’re willing to allow for the
fact that asking disturbing questions is part of faith, as much as anything
else. We’ve left the history of Israel behind, and we’re going forward to
some of the more interesting stuff, in my opinion, books like Job and
Ecclesiastes, Proverbs and the Song of Songs, books often classified as
Wisdom Literature. Now, we are also actually going to be looking at the
Psalms in this next few weeks, and to be honest, they are not technically
part of this classification known as Wisdom Literature, but we’re going to
conveniently ignore that fact, and go on, knowing that the Psalms are
really a whole form of Biblical literature that is unlike any other. But first
things first: Wisdom literature is simply a style of ancient literature that is
concerned with insight, instruction, and mediation on the meaning of life,
and moral exhortation—of simply giving you advice and insight on how to
life your life and to help you give meaning to the life you are living,
especially from a spiritual perspective, though it sometimes can be very
practical as well, as you will see later in the Psalms. The focus of this
kind of Biblical literature is not history, or even the meaning of history,
actually—rather, it is focused on the individual and the human struggle
to live and ethical life within a world that sometimes seems amoral,
sometimes immoral, and sometimes even meaningless—it is literature
that is meant to struggle with the seemingly meaningless and painful and
unjust moments like the one we spent in Jennifer’s hospital room,
knowing that this shouldn’t be, that all our fantasies about the way the
world should be, got shattered in that moment, in that place.
And the book that spends the most time dealing with that issue is the first
book we’re going to study of the Wisdom Literature— that most clearly
deals with the issue of theodicy, which is the “vindication of God's
goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil,” as the
dictionary defines it—it is an attempt by humans to make sense of the
senseless moments in God’s world, in a world that at the very least God
has control over—or at least, has traditionally been understood as God
having control over. The book of Job is actually set during the time of
Noah, though most scholars think the book was written sometime in the
late 6th or 5th century, BCE—some 2500 years ago. It was also a book,
a writing, that was in wide circulation by the end of the 2nd century BCE—
people were reading or had heard of it, and it shows a similar style to a
vein of literature that was prevalent during that time in the Near East—
this style of ancient literature was concerned with the book of Job is
concerned with—the question of whether the gods were just and whether
or not they managed the world justly and wisely. So, the kind of book
Job is would have been familiar to readers of all types in the ancient
world—trying to answer the question about the goodness of God, and
the presence of evil in God’s good world—these sorts of questions
existed in every religion, even non-Jewish religions.
So, the book of Job asks three basic but very tough questions: First, is it
possible that a person can remain moral even he or she is not rewarded
for their goodness? Now, in a few minutes, I’ll explain to where this
question comes from. The second question is the one that I brought up
earlier: Why do good, innocent people suffer? And the third, and
obvious question to draw from these first questions is: What role does
God play in causing human suffering? All three of these questions are
struggled with this in this book and in this story—AND, I would say, the
reality is that there are no real answers found for some of these
questions. If you go to Job for completely satisfying answer to why you
are suffering, I’m not sure you are going to find the answer. I think what
is so wonderful about this book is not so much because it gives us
answers to question of why we are suffering—or even why someone like
Jennifer suffered—what makes this book so powerful is that someone of
incredible faith and integrity, someone like Job, simply asked the
question—he showed us that being a person of faith means also being
able to ask the uncomfortable question about who God is, what God is
like, who we are, and what it means to be in relationship with a God who
actions or whose lack of action can be infuriating and baffling and can
simply sometimes call into question whether God is just or unjust. In the
book of Job, we have a witness that you can ask the hard questions and
you struggle with God and barely be on speaking terms with God, AND
still be considered a person of incredible faith.
And so the first 2 chapters of the book of Job set up the story and begin
to tell the tale, to tell of this honorable man who lived in the land of Uz,
perhaps around the time of Noah, and whose reputation and goodness
had even reached the heavens, had reached the ears of God. Not only
was he was a good guy, but he was very wealthy, and in the ancient
world, goodness and wealth were associated with each other—after all,
clearly, the heavens must be in your favor because you’ve got a lot of
stuff, and you have a large family, which was also valued. The idea was
that good people, like Job, get rewarded with good stuff, like wealth and
large families. Bad people get the results of their bad lives, which bad
stuff. What happens is that this idea gets challenged in the book of Job,
this idea that what happens to us, or the stuff we have, is directly a result
of our goodness or lack of goodness. In the first two chapters the story
is set-up: one day God is bragging on Job to the heavenly court, and the
really interesting thing here is that Satan is present in that court, in that
gathering of heavenly beings. It’s almost as if Satan has some sort of
official duty in this gathering and it seems to be that of an accuser, or
some sort of master spy, who challenges the motives and actions of
people whom he checks out here on earth below. I mean, most of us
consider Satan as the ultimate outsider to heaven, but here, in this book
that was probably one of the earliest books of the Bible to be written, Job
is seen simply as part of God’s court, a tool of God’s in order to test
people. Well, the story goes that the bragging got to Satan, who
basically challenges this idea that Job is good because he is actually a
good guy—Satan thinks that Job’s a good guy because God has so
clearly rewarded his goodness. And so he proposes a plan to God, to
test Job by inflicting hardship on him, to see whether or not he will turn
on God, or become unfaithful—“if you take away the good stuff, will he
remain a good man, a faithful man?” Satan seems to be asking. And so
God allows this to happen, and Job becomes a pawn in a battle of wills
between God and God’s servant Satan—will Job curse God if his own life
becomes cursed? It goes back to that first of those three questions that
the book of Job asks: is it possible that a person can remain moral even
he or she is not rewarded for their goodness? And so it happens: Satan
takes care of business, so to speak. Let’s look at Job 1:13-22.
Job 1:13-22
So, its interesting this last line—in the end, Job remained silent, he didn’t
charge God with wrongdoing—and listen to the language—it is the
language of the court. Satan is the accuser, Job is the plaintiff, or is God
the plaintiff, or do both end up being accused, each by the other? We’ll
get some sense of that later, but the story goes on: Job remains faithful
and does not accuse God of wrongdoing, though Job himself has done
nothing to deserve the wrong that is being inflicted upon him. In chapter
2, the testing gets more difficult, and God’s continued bragging on Job
pushes Satan to propose a much more personal test—“enough with the
exterior stuff—let me test him by attacking him directly!” Satan says, and
the so Satan is given permission by God to ask his very body with sores
from head to toe. And finally, Job’s wife has had enough—she seems to
be one of the few remaining relatives Satan hadn’t killed—and she wants
to him to give up on God—curse God, since it seems God has already
cursed you, and just die!” But its interesting—Job remains a man of
integrity and faithfulness, in verse 10 of chapter 2, he says to her, “You
speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at
the hand of the God, and not receive the bad?” In all this, Job did not
sin with his lips.” He didn’t utter a word of complaint against God, even
when his wife encouraged it, and his attitude seem to be that if you are in
relationship with God, you’ve got to accept the good with the bad—and
this was one of those bad moments. Soon, three of his friends join him
and comfort him amidst all of this trouble—in fact, in verse 12, it says
that “when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and
they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw
dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven
days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw
that his suffering was very great.” There is a time to speak and at time
to be silent, and they knew that couldn’t speak until he spoke, until he
told his side of the story. And speak he does and speak these three
men do—from chapters 3 to chapter 38, 35 chapters of dialogue about
the meaning of this suffering, the meaning and consequences of sin, and
it goes back and forth, between Job and these three men. Job doesn’t
curse God, but somehow he musters within him a defense, a defense of
himself and his integrity—because his friends assumed that the
devastation that had been wrought on him MUST have been the result of
Job’s personal sin—somewhere down the line, his friends thought, Job
must have really ticked off God, and what he was experiencing was a
clear result of some sort of divine disfavor. So, in many ways, Job
indeed remains faithful to God, he never really utters an accusation at
God, but he does begin to defend himself against his friends—he says to
them, I haven’t done anything to deserve this, you’re wrong: I am not
guilty of what you accuse me of—I am an innocent man!” Job’s friends
live in a world where the innocent do not suffer as Job has suffered—
God is just and would never allows such a thing to happen. But the irony
here is just thick, because the truth of the matter is that Job is suffering
not because he is a bad man, or an unrighteous man—he is suffering
because he is, in fact, a good man, because he has been caught up in a
test of wills between God and Satan—Satan is testing Job in order to see
if humans will remain faithful when it seems that God has become
unfaithful. In Chapters 3-38, Job and his three friends go back and forth,
with Job declaring his innocence, and cursing the day he was ever born,
because of the incredible depth of his suffering, and his friends thinking
they are arguing in defense of God—“You cannot be innocent, Job,”
they seemed to saying, “because what would it say about who God is
and very justness and character of God.”
So, here you have a stand-off between Job and his three friends, a
stand-off that eventually gets mediated by God, who speaks out of a
whirlwind in chapters 38—it is, in fact, one of the last times in the Old
Testament that God speaks so directly to people: from this point onward,
God will speak through others, through the prophets, the messengers
sent by God. So, God speaks and what comes out of the mouth of God
is a defense, of sorts, an answer that is no real answer to the questions
Job and we struggle with. God immediately begins to tell Job of what he
has done—who are you to question, the One who can do this or that? It
is almost as if God is bragging on God’s own self—showing off to remind
Job of who just who God really is and who Job is in the great scheme of
things. Let’s look at chapters 38: verse 1-11, 28-30
Chapter 38
This type of talk, this type of explanation, this type of simply pointing out
reality, goes on through chapter 41—God is simply pointing out that “I
am God, your creator, I have done more than can you ever dream of
doing, I am not you and my ways are not yours” Its almost as if God is
simply pointing out the stark difference between God and humans,
setting a clear boundary between the Creator and the creation, and
reminding the creation of the One who has created it. It is a reminder to
Job that he is not God, though Job is not admonished for questioning
God, so much as he is reminded WHO he is talking to. It’s an odd, odd
moment, really, because, at least from the story, Job never gets a
reason for the ordeal he went through—God doesn’t tell him that he was
a pawn in a battle of wills between God and Satan. He doesn’t get an
answer to why he suffered, or why any man, woman, or child suffers.
The only person who really gets a question answered is God, actually,
who finds out that we humans can endure so much and still remain
faithful, even in the midst of our bitter disappointment with God and the
universe. And no, I don’t think God brings suffering into our lives to test
us, as this story seems to imply—the reality is that this is a story of
particular man, under some very peculiar circumstances, and it is not
meant as some of explanations about why we humans suffer—let’s face
it: most of us are not the center of a test of wills between God and
Satan. Actually, the book of Job does opposite: it disturbs all of our
explanation for why suffering happens—it says that bad stuff can happen
to good people and it has nothing to do with their guilt or innocence. Job
was innocent, and when Job repents in chapter 42, we are not really
sure WHAT he is repenting of—because the ambiguity of the verses and
the translation problems here—was he repenting of questioning God’s
sense of justice, or repenting of just repenting, or maybe, as some
scholars have hinted at, that he is being ironic, even to the end,
concealing his own defiance to God’s seeming cruelty in using him in
order to make a point to Satan. But what really interests me the most in
chapter 42 is what happens after Job’s act of repentance—God gets
mad at Job’s three friends, in verse 7-8
Chapter 42:7-8
God is angry at these three guys because they have “not have spoken
of me what is right, as my servant has done.” It is Job that is vindicated;
it is Job who is declared by God to be an innocent man—Job was right all
along! He hadn’t done anything wrong—and the defense these men
thought they were putting up for God—saying that Job must be sinful
because of all the horrible things happening to him—and that God gives
good things to good people and that God gives bad things to bad people
to bad people—God says that you are wrong about this! It’s a stunning
moment, really, because Job is found innocent, and God is oddly
enough, not found to be completely innocent—not guilty, but not
innocent. The God of Job’s friends is more black and white than the God
we find declaring Job’s innocence in these pages—God simply says to
us and to Job, “I simply do not have to give you a reason for what I do—I
am the Creator, you are the creation, I am God and you are not.”
The words here are simply a reminder that we need to be reminded of
who we are and who God is. And this reminder is not meant to intimidate
us into never asking questions about why bad things happen to good
people—it is simply a reminder that we can know what we know and we
cannot know what we cannot know. For some people, the question of
goodness of God and the apparent contradiction of having evil that still
runs rampant in the world is enough to push them forever from faith.
And to be honest, events like little Jennifer’s death can push all into a
place where we question the goodness and justice of God. The question
before us is: is the answer Job gets from God enough? Does God
simply reminding us of who we are and who God is, is that enough for us
to live with, enough for us to trust God? All that Job ever gets in the end
is simple reminder of who he is speaking to, and he submits to a power
that he cannot understand, who does not give him an answer, simply
because this Power, this God feels no obligation to give him the answer
to the question of why he has suffered so much.
For me, it is enough. Not because I am simply a dupe, or have some
extra faith, or whatever—it is enough knowing who I am in relation to the
One who has created me, and it is enough knowing what I can expect
from God, and what I cannot expect from God—which is the reasons or
the lack of reasons, even, behind the events of my life that seem so
unfair or unjust. It was enough for Job to voice his concern, and it was
enough for Job, in the end, to be declared innocent—he was given no
reason for what had happened to him—only we readers know the reason
in his case—he was simply told that his guilt or innocence had nothing to
do with what had befallen him. The other part of it, for me, is that God’s
faithfulness has shown through in those moments in my life when it all
seemed so unfair, even in those moments, God remained faithful. God
took whatever bad that happened, and turned it into something life-
giving and hopeful in the end. You know, one of the things about the
Gospel is that it is not the story of God making everything alright, of God
righting all the wrongs in this world, and God equalizing and making
everything just and good. The Gospel is the story of how God took the
cross, this sign of monstrous evil and brutality in the ancient world, and
turned that cross into a sign of hope, and a story of how life can come
out of tomb, a story of resurrection. It is the story of how God can turn
even the horror of what happened to Jesus into something that saved us
all, that made life for us as Christians possible. For me, Jennifer’s death,
the resurrection from that time is still in the works, it is for her family, for
the people that loved her, and for the people that cared for her, but it will
happen—it took 3 days for the Savior of the world, God in human flesh,
to come out of the grave, so it will probably take a lot longer for many of
us to see the resurrection of those hard moments of our lives. But it will
happen, this resurrection will happen, for Job it did, when his fortunes is
restored and he fathers a new family, the resurrection will happen, and
that is enough, God is enough, at least it is for me.
