"The Challenge of Job"

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on October 8, 2006
Text — Job 1:1, 2:1-10

There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.

One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the Lord. 2 The Lord said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the Lord, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” The Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason.” Then Satan answered the Lord, “Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.” The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.” So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.

Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” But he said to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.

When I told Shari that I’d be talking about the Book of Job and she said, “Job is one of my favorite stories.  I’m not sure why.” So today, I’d like to try answering the “why?”  Maybe she likes stories about death, and boils, and cursing God. Maybe Shari has a morbid personality.  The image of Job sitting on ash heap, scratching his sores with a piece of broken pottery is pretty vivid and memorable, I have to confess.

But seriously, I suspect Shari likes Job for the same reason many people like it — because it faces one of the most troubling religious questions. This is the “problem of evil.” If God is everything God is supposed to be, loving, powerful, and all knowing, how do you explain all the bad things that happen? Why do children get cancer?  Why do bad people go unpunished? Job doesn’t give any simple answers, but this book faces the fact that life is complicated, and the pieces don’t fit together in a neat way.  That recognition is satisfying.  It rings true.

The book of Job expresses a minority opinion.  It takes a different view of life than the rest of the Bible.  The majority opinion, the view you find in rest of the Bible is that the pieces do fit together, and that view is crystallized in the book of Deuteronomy.  According to the book of Deuteronomy, God has set up a consistent, predictable moral order in our lives. If you worship the one, true God, if you obey the commandments, you’ll be blessed, you’ll prosper, your children will prosper. But if you turn away from God, and disobey the commandments, you will pay for it, you’ll suffer, and your children will suffer, even to the third and fourth generation.  That’s Deuteronomy, and it’s a rather straightforward view of things. And there’s some truth to this understanding of moral justice. There’s a lot of truth to it, in fact.

Another way of putting Deuteronomy’s message is that sin comes with a cost.  Today, we’re paying the price for the sin of slavery. That’s probably the best example of the sins of the father being visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation, or to the seventh, eighth or ninth generation.

How we live, what we do, what kind of people we are, has consequences. Doing good tends to bring rewards. And doing wrong tends to bring punishment, a cost. We teach this to our children. And we were all taught it when we were children: If you listen to the teacher and study, you’ll do better in school. If you sleep during class, your grades will suffer. If you eat right and exercise, you’ll be healthier.  But if you eat a lot of sugar and fat and spent too much time on the couch, you’ll have more problems.  If you’re nice to people, you’ll have more friends.  If you’re a jerk, people won’t like you as much, or your friends will be jerks too. These principles work to a large extent. 

But they don’t work perfectly.  Here’s where Job and the minority opinion come in.  People have blessings they don’t deserve.  People suffer in ways they don’t deserve. We know this is true. There isn’t such a perfect relationship between following the commandments and being blessed, and breaking the commandments and being cursed.

I was at a clergy gathering where the ministers were sort of moaning about the things that ministers tend to moan about, like too many soccer games on Sunday.  One minister said, “If only we could get people to believe in hell. That would get people into church.”

He said this playfully, and everyone laughed.  It’s true: people don’t believe in hell the way they used to.  Hell has lost its sting. It’s lost its sting, in part, because this idea of a reliable system of reward and punishment isn’t as plausible as it used to be. So that motivation for doing good and resisting evil has slipped away. 

So, getting back to Job, by the end of the book, Job raises many objections to his friends who insist that Job deserves his suffering, for being too proud, or for some hidden sin.  This debate between Job and his friends takes up most of the book. Job wants to put God on trial.

Then, in the final chapters, God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind.  But God doesn’t explain anything. Instead, God says, in effect, “Who do you to think you are?  How could you ever understand these matters?  Where were you when I laid the foundation of the universe?” Who is Job to put God on trial?

That’s the basic message of Job.  It’s not an explanation, but it’s satisfying because at least it admits there’s a serious, unanswered question at the heart of human life.

But that’s not all we find in Job.  Why do all these bad things happen to Job, just on the level of the story as we heard it in our scripture reading? This whole story is set up as a contest, like a friendly wager between God and Satan. God brags to Satan about Job’s integrity.  Job’s children have been killed and his property destroyed, but Job remains steadfast in his faith.  Then, in the part we read, Satan offers another challenge to God: “Skin for skin.  Let me hurt Job directly, let me strike his body, and he will curse you to your face.” And God says, “Go ahead. He’s in your hands.”

What kind of God is that? Imagine saying to a parent, “Let’s see how much your children love you. Let me torture them, and they’ll curse you to your face.” This isn’t a very flattering picture of God.  And I don’t take it literally, of course. But is there a real insight lurking in this image of God as the author of good and evil?

Many years ago, when I was in my early thirties, a teenaged girl in the congregation was killed in a car accident, late at night.  There were six teenagers in the car, going too fast, the car went out of control, and hit a tree. This girl was sitting in the middle of the front seat without a seat belt.

The girl’s mother, Shirley Flynn, said something that shocked me.  She said, “It must be God’s will.” When I heard that, I said (to myself) that’s the most ridiculous, theologically wrong-headed idea I’ve heard.  God doesn’t want teenagers to smash their cars into trees.” I felt I knew better than that.  After all, I’d been to Divinity School. I had a Master of Divinity degree. (Don’t you love that name, “Master of Divinity?”  Could anything be more ridiculous than that? There are no masters of Divinity, that’s for sure.)

But that statement “It must be God’s will” worked on me for many years and I found I couldn’t dismiss it entirely. First, why did that mother say it?  I think she said it because it gave her.  Why did it give her comfort?  I suspect it was her way of saying that the world, and God, and the way things work, are still basically good even though this terrible thing happened. So she, a mother whose daughter had just been killed in this violent, bloody, fiery wreck, could go on living, even with this load of pain and grief weighing her down.

She didn’t mean that God micro-managed the car crash.  God didn’t pick out her daughter to die that day. It was her way of saying “This is too big to understand.  And even though I hate it, it has to be accepted as part of the bigger picture.” God didn’t ordain the car crash, but God did create a world that includes cars, and teenagers, and free will, and bad judgment, and accidents.  Shirley Flynn was on to something that I with my Master of Divinity degree, hadn’t quite caught onto.

 And that’s really what the challenge of Job is. Good and evil aren’t spread around in a fair way. We all need to make peace with that.  It’s the main spiritual challenge of our lives. We’re all a mixture of good and evil ourselves. In terms of rewards and punishments, or blessings and curses, we all get more than we deserve in some ways and less than we deserve in other ways. 

So I’ll close now with these memorable words of Job.  They make a good prayer to recite when you lose something you treasure.   

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there.  The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)