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Then the Lord Answered Job
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
July 15, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Job 38:1-21
Mark 10:35-45

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: ‘Who is this that darkness counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man. I will question you, and you shall answer.’”

“Too long I’ve owed you this apology,” says God to Job in Robert Frost’s The Masque of Reason,

Frost’s reading of Job had always been my own until this week. The Deuteronomist, from Exodus through Second Kings, tells of a God who showers blessings on those that keep covenant and curses any who do evil in God’s sight. But even grade school children know better, know on the playground among peers or at home behind the closed doors of abuse that “Life is not fair.” The innocent suffer. And so it is that the adult project becomes the search for meaning in random suffering, in suffering that comes upon us or those we love when we least expect it and certainly do not deserve it. This universal project turns out to be more difficult, I think, for those who profess belief in God.

Epicurus

Or more succinctly put, as George Adams reminded me over punch last Sunday, the Accuser in Archibald MacLeish’s play J.B. opines: “If God is good, he is not God/If God is God, he is not good/Take the even, take the odd.” In other words, if God is good then the character who takes the bet with the Accuser is not God. But if the character who takes the bet with the Accuser is, in fact, God, then God is not good. Taking the even and taking the odd interpretations of God’s speech from out of the whirlwind, therefore, I invite you to reconsider God’s answer and Job’s answer as you reconsider your own. Do we encounter God at the boundaries of what we must bear with irony [“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you”] or with awe [“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you”] or with hard-won faith?

Not incidental to our taking the even or taking the odd is that fact that, within the Book of Job, God is named in two distinct ways. God’s initial encounter with the Accuser who dares God to test Job as well as the God who restores Job’s fortunes and recreates his family in the end is the God of Israel whose name is Yahweh. This is the God of the second creation story in Genesis, the story of Adam, Eve and the serpent in the garden.

The God who is the subject of conversation among Job and his friends and who speaks from out of the whirlwind is named ’elohim, the common name for the God of Israel and yet a name that may be used for other gods as well. This is the God of the first creation story in Genesis, the God who created day by day and at the day’s end pronounced creation “good.” Says Jack Miles of these names and the difference each makes in the world, “The world as created by God, ’elohim, was almost wholly positive; nothing in it was forbidden to [humankind], whom God commanded only to be fertile, to increase and to have dominion. By contrast, the world as created by the Lord, yahweh, was shot through with a kind of danger; there was indeed a prohibition in it, and when the prohibition was not observed, massive and largely inexplicable punishment followed swiftly.”

The God at the beginning and the end of Job, then, is the God whose interactions with creation are real and consequential and terrible. The God who is the subject of conversation among Job and his friends is a theoretical god or even no god at all, a God whose moral goodness is beyond reproach and whose creatures can only be at fault: the god [as we said last week] of religion versus the God of revelation. Take the even, take the odd!

First, we will take the even: If God is good, he is not God. From out of the whirlwind roars a God of “withering sarcasm and towering bravado,” writes Miles, “as an amoral, irresistible force.” Whereas for Israel, from the beginning in Egypt, the God who met Moses in a burning bush was a God distinct from all others, distinct because Yahweh was a God of power and a God of justice, the God who answers Job speaks only of power. Using the words of the psalmist, words that begin by extolling God’s greatness displayed in creation and end in praise of God’s justice and mercy, the God who answers Job fails to mention justice and mercy.

Why? According to Miles, God is in a bind. God has something to hide—namely the beginning of the story and God’s willingness to inflict suffering on Job for no reason [Is God able to prevent evil but not willing? Then God is malevolent]. And even though the God of the whirlwind is ’El rather than Yahweh, what echoes in my mind is a sort of midrash on the second creation story where God rather than humankind is tempted and God rather than the human being is naked, needing to hide. God hides, notes Miles, “by rising to his full majestic stature, drawing the robes of creation around him…and regally changing the subject.” Job has asked after the reason for his suffering and God has countered with a show of power.

Job’s response, on the surface and according to most Christian interpreters, is repentance. Yet listen again, for Job’s words are without stage direction. There are no parentheses suggesting the speech be said (humbly) or (defiantly) or (sarcastically) or (reverently). Take the even, then: if God is good then he is not God. Job’s brief verses, according to Miles, “bristle with ironic double entendres and with mock-deferential quotations….” Miles’ translation does the same: “Look, I am of no account. What can I tell you? My hand is on my mouth. I have already spoken once; I will not harp. Why go on? I have nothing to add.” In other words, Job is unmoved by the whirlwind.

Moreover, his supposed repentance at the end [I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes] is rendered by Miles as: “You know you can do anything. Nothing can stop you. You ask, ‘Who is this ignorant muddler?’ Well, I said more than I knew, wonders quite beyond me. ‘You listen and I’ll talk’ you say. ‘I’ll question you and you tell me.’ Word of you had reached my ears, but now that my eyes have seen you, I shudder with sorrow for mortal clay.” Job is even: If God is good, he is not God!

But take the odd and for a moment consider that the answer before us from out of the whirlwind has to do not with power nor with justice nor with moral character but with a terrible beauty;, with God’s aesthetic. The Lord’s answer to Job’s immense ‘Why?’ is “an apologia—the most overwhelming that we have,” says George Steiner, “for the doctrine known as ‘Art for Art.’…Like some ultimate Leonardo, the Deity in Job promenades us through a gallery of masterpieces, of rough sketches, of enigmatically encoded patterns, of grotesques and anatomies….Beyond good and evil, beyond reason and social-ethical accountability,” says Steiner, “rages the drive to create….Comeliness, proportionality are not essential criteria. Behemoth and Leviathan incarnate the naked pulse of creation as faithfully as do the lilies of the field. In the aesthetics of God’s non-answering answer to Job, ‘Art for Art’ or, more exactly, ‘Creation for Creation’ displays its enormity, its festive impertinence to humanity.” God’s I am what I am “explodes in Job” and we are left, if not consoled, then “overwhelmed and mutinous…[before]…God’s choice of the poetic in counterblast to the challenges of the ontological [nature of existence itself], the ethical and the religious.”

Taking the odd, we now hear only awe in Job’s words that suggest the eyes rather than the ears have become the organ of revelation. God’s tour de force has turned him (to repent is to turn) from himself and his suffering to the majesty and mystery of the created world. “There are things in this life” wrote poet Jane Kenyon in the face of her own suffering, “that we must endure which are all but unendurable, and yet I feel that there is a great goodness. Why, when there could have been nothing, is there something? This is a great mystery. How, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there is…beauty?”

Though finally, I think, taking the even or taking the odd misses the zero-sum truth that compelled this ancient writer to consider Job at all. As much as the story is set within the mystery of human suffering and the majesty of God’s power, as much as its plot raises for us the unanswerable questions [or monstrously answered questions] of theodicy, at issue in Job for the writer is God’s powerlessness to compel our love and service. “Can a mortal serve God for nought, without hope for blessing of some kind?” The rub is this: to be loved freely, God can only relinquish control; to love freely, a mortal cannot know the reason. “It was the essence of the trial/You shouldn’t understand it at the time./It had to seem unmeaning to have meaning,” said Frost’s God. Job could not have been let in on this test of his love because “if Job had known the gambit” says Old Testament theologian Christopher Seitz, “the accuser could still argue that such love was mechanistic, based upon defense of God’s honor in hope of ultimate reward.”

In the end, Job passes the test not with patience and passive submission but in the grit and persistence of a real relationship: a relationship riddled with anger and accusation even as it is circumscribed by pathos and passion. In the end, Job will not let God be nor can God let Job go!

But the question still shouted down the centuries [I think especially of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor] is whether love freely given is worth the cost. And though each one of us will suffer not knowing the reason, I take it to be the singular case in Jesus Christ that the almighty, powerless God alone must bear the cost of love uncoerced, must abide the vulnerability of a parent waiting for the prodigal, must assume the role of the shepherd searching for a lamb who is forever free to run. “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life: a ransom for many.” In Him Job’s words become our own: I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Thanks be to God.

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