Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant. Those who lose their life for my sake will save it. The first will be last and the last first. We have heard such words several times this autumn as our lectionary has led us slowly through the heart of Mark’s gospel.
Did you also notice that for the third week in a row our first lesson was from the Book of Job? One more is yet to come next Sunday. Job enjoys as strong name recognition as almost any other biblical character — even among people who never go to church or read the Bible. Unfortunately, the Book of Job is as misunderstood as it is widely recognized. Too often it is reduced to a simplistic message about patience or recast as a solution to the philosophical problem of evil or rejected out of hand as callous and cruel toward suffering human beings.
Part of the problem is that of all the books of the Bible, the Book of Job lends itself least to being excerpted. It needs to be read and pondered as a whole. So, instead of preaching on Job, I probably should just sit down, have someone fetch up Bibles from the library, and invite us all to spend the next hour reading the Book of Job from beginning to end. With your permission I will remain standing. I invite you to engage the Book of Job with me and discover how it might give us different ears to hear the oft-repeated gospel message about first and last, losing and saving one’life, greatness and service to others.
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Let me start by telling the story of Job as briefly as possible.
Once upon a time, a man God calls "my servant Job" is singled out as an exemplary human being: blameless, upright, fearing God and shunning all evil. Oh, and Job is fabulously wealthy, the richest man in all the east. A dispute then arises in God’s court over why human beings serve God. One heavenly being claims humans do so only because of the benefits they receive from God. Why wouldn’t Job serve God, he has never experienced failure or tragedy. Let things go badly and Job will leave off serving God. God allows this hypothesis to be tested. Job loses everything. Marauding warriors kill his herdsmen and steal four thousand oxen, camels, and donkeys. A fire from heaven consumes seven thousand sheep. A desert windstorm demolishes a house killing every one of Job’ ten children inside. And Job himself is afflicted with loathsome sores from head to foot.
Job responds to all this by railing against his fate, cursing the day he was born, and demanding that God answer to him for what has transpired. When three of Job’s friends hear of the disasters that have befallen him, they come to console Job. Some consolation – the three friends insist over and over that Job must have displeased or disobeyed God in some way, else none of the bad things would have happened. Job maintains his innocence tenaciously and reiterates his challenge to God. A fourth man bursts in angry both with Job for his self-justifying talk and with the three friends for their inability to justify the ways of God to Job. Suddenly, out of yet another desert storm, the whirlwind, God speaks to Job, not once but twice, responding to his demand and questioning him about the wonders of God’s creation. Afterwards, Job testifies to a conversion in his vision of God. His fortunes are restored in double measure, he is gifted with ten new children, and he lives happily ever after to a great old age.
Even this minimalist telling of the story of Job threatens to be seriously misleading, first of all because the Book of Job is not really a story. You will find two short narrative chapters at the beginning and half a chapter at the end. The other thirty-nine chapters are nothing but poetry. Think John Milton or Emily Dickinson not a novel or a philosophical treatise.
That’s not quite right either. The Book of Job is more like a drama set in poetic language. So think Moliare or Shakespeare. Almost the entire Book of Job consists of speeches made by a small cast of characters: Job himself, of course; his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar; Elihu, the fourth speaker; and finally God. Not just a drama, a courtroom drama. For the three so-called friends accuse Job of harboring some secret guilt. Their speeches are adversarial and accusatory. They put Job on the defensive. They make Job the defendant. And no sooner does Job deliver a long summation of his self-defense than Elihu arrives with an equally lengthy closing argument for the prosecution’s case against Job. Job’s speeches in turn lodge a series of complaints against God and put God on the defensive for the way the world operates. Think Perry Mason. Think Law and Order.
This drama with its many speeches remains a divine test of a human being. And as with the other great test story of the Hebrew Bible — the command that Abraham offer his son Isaac up as a sacrifice — if we are not careful, we are likely to get stuck on the question of whether or not God would really inflict such an ordeal on a person. We must suspend our disbelief, for the biblical writers aim to test their readers through the accounts of God testing Job and Abraham. They test us in order to tease out of us deeply lodged misperceptions. Like one of those test patterns from a by-gone era of television, the drama of Job provides us the opportunity of adjusting the sharpness or tone or contrast of our vision of self, world, and God.
Remember, too, that it is another heavenly being, the Satan, who suggests testing Job in the first place. Not "Satan" as a name, but "the Satan" as a title. The Satan is a member of God’s heavenly entourage who plays the role of questioning God, of putting God’s work and God’s servants to the test. A devil’s advocate, we might say, except that the Satan, the Accuser, is God’s servant, God’s prosecuting attorney and the attorney who prosecutes God. If Job is being tested throughout this drama, then so is God. It is not at all clear until the end if God’s faith in Job is justified.
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Like any good drama, the Book of Job sounds multiple themes and cannot be reduced to a single, simple message. Perhaps now with this background we can listen more attentively to some of its deepest truths.
First. Job complains bitterly against God, blasphemes, worst of all by taunting God to destroy him. Better to be among the dead, Job says, where there is rest than to be alive in this world of agony. When God appears to Job in a whirlwind, we might expect that Job will get exactly what he asked for — a bolt of lightining to strike him dead for daring to challenge God. Job’s life is not destroyed, however, it is maintained by God. God heard Job after all. God honors Job’s demand and answers him. From the whirlwind, God vindicates Job, once again naming him â??my servant.â?? Despite his lament, maybe even through his lament, Job serves God. He serves God by telling the truth, the painful truth, and by maintaining his integrity
Second. The honest rage of Job over his suffering rings more true than the easy, conventional answers given by Elihu and Job’s three friends. The four accusers can make sense of Job’s situation only by falling back on a very old tradition in Hebrew theology. The righteous prosper; the wicked suffer. God rewards good people; God punishes the evil. Bad things just do not happen to people. Some moral fault, some wrong behavior or choice lies behind failure, poverty, and illness. On the other hand, health, prosperity, and success serve as infallible signs of moral uprightness and God’s favor. Job must be to blame for his misfortunes. When God does finally speak at the end of the drama, these four staunch defenders of God, who somehow seem to know fully and exactly the ways the God of the universe operates, are proven wrong. Job’s integrity — vindicated; the accusers’ conventional theology — exposed as indifferent to human suffering and profoundly limiting of God.
Third. And what of God? The most important feature of God’s two speeches to Job may be that they occur at all. God shows Godself to be active and engaged in the world, concerned about God’s creatures – not at all the remote, petty, mechanical moral policeman envisioned by Job’s accusers. Out of the whirlwind, Job is unexpectedly graced with a direct, personal revelation of God. But Job, too, comes to see something new and unexpected in God. God’s speeches call attention to the riotous, comic complexity of God’s universe: waters below, waters above the earth, stars and constellations; and the animals, all the many animals, all given life and sustenance by God: lions, ravens, mountain goats, the silly ostrich laying its eggs on the bare ground where anyone or anything might trample them. And two rare beasts: Behemoth, a land monster, and Leviathan, a sea monster. Symbols of chaos, but preserved and gently shepherded by God. Job, God seems to say, know that I care for you; know that if I haven’t by now destroyed these ancient monsters, I won’t destroy you. I want you to live as I want them to live. But know, too, that the sphere of my care is universal. I am not your private God, occupied solely with your weal and woe. Your life is one precious but tiny part of my enormous household, a mysterious universe full of wonder and transience.
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I leave you with several lessons we might take from the Book of Job today.
God wants honesty from us, not niceness, not slavish obedience. Let us never ignore or deny our deepest, truest human experience, however raw. That raw experience may very well be the whirlwind out of which God speaks to us.
And let us not be silent about the suffering all around and within us. God can bear our lament. True rebellion against God would lie in remaining unmoved by the evil and cruelty in our world.
Let us be converted from all either/or theologies that neatly separate out good and evil, success and failure, those people God rewards and loves and those people God hates and punishes. Let us avoid creating a tribal god for ourselves in the image of our need for safety and security.
Let us, finally, expect the unexpected from God; expect God to be more generous, more attentive, more creative, and more incomprehensible than we could have imagined. For that is the God revealed in today’s gospel. With the story of Jesus we move beyond the God of Job, a God who struggles with the forces of chaos and answers the complaint of the suffering, to a God who takes on all worldly suffering as God’s own. The God made flesh in Jesus does not rest content with speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, but faces the whirlwind alongside Job, in Job, as flesh of Job’s flesh and blood of Job’s blood, as flesh of all human flesh and blood of all human blood. For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.
Amen.
For further reading on the
Book of Job:
John C. Holbert, Preaching Job (Chalice Press, 1999).
Roland E. Murphy, The Book of Job: A Short Reading (Paulist Press, 1999).
William R. Long and Glandon Carney, A Hard-Fought Hope:
Journeying with Job through Mystery (Upper Room Books, 2004).
David Wolfers, Deep Things out of Darkness:
The Book of Job, Essays and a New Translation (Eerdmans, 1995).
