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An Immense Why
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 1, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Job 2:1-3; 12:1-6; 13:1-3 John 9:1-12
“The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident,” wrote Bertrand Russell, “but if it is the outcome of a deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend.” We have come, in our reading of the Old Testament, this week and next, to the Book of Job and to a morning when we can only attempt in our minds to inhabit his rotting skin, to embrace his inconsolable and isolating loss, to endure his insufferable friends and so to take up his immense “Why?” as though it were our own. The imaginations of some here need not take too great a leap to do so, while others will be unable to fathom the darkness we are about to dare. The premise of the book (known to the reader but presumably not to Job) is monstrous and surely flies in the face of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, we think: that the same God, the God of Israel, on a bet with the Accuser in the Heavenly Counsel, and for no reason, would permit the Accuser to take from a blameless and upright man, everything—seven sons, three daughters, his livelihood, his health--in order to ascertain the point of his piety? “The report that God has set out to destroy Job for no reason, like a nefarious sinner who ambushes the innocent,” writes Old Testament professor Samuel Balentine, “is in my judgment perhaps the single most disturbing admission in the Old Testament, if not in all of scripture. The…space it leaves open for interpretations that explain or exonerate God’s behavior is small indeed.” Yet this is the premise of so many in extremis who have wondered whether illness or loss or misfortune or even a chance accident might be a purposed test of faith. I take the test question to be this: Does Job love God for nothing or for something in return? The question, in its best light, is a question having to do with the radical freedom of the relationship for which we were made: freedom not in the sense of caprice, but the freedom which makes of love a gracious choice rather than a quid pro quo necessity. At the beginning, Job acknowledges this freedom, saying in effect “God would not be God if God were not free both to give and to take away.” And so also we read that Job would not be Job if he were not free to receive both evil and good from God’s hand. But most of us do not begin our believing in such freedom. According to Bernard of Clairvaux, we begin in life by loving ourselves for our own sake. It is the only place we are humanly able to begin. Then by God’s grace in the midst of life, often having lost our way, we realize that we are not sufficient if left to our own devices; and so we come to depend radically on God whom we now love for our own sake. “This is the love of dependence and gratitude and expectation,” notes Old Testament scholar Gerald Janzen. “The expectation…may take the form that the One who has given life may be trusted to nurture, sustain and guide it and may be applied to for such needs.” This is the relationship in which most of us dwell and likely, according to the Accuser, was the relationship in which Job did his believing. Yet true faith in the Living God, according to Bernard, is given as one “discovers the intrinsic worthiness of God apart from all interested consideration; or, rather [when] the nature of one’s interestedness begin to shift so that one begins to discover an interest in the love of God for God’s own sake. Finally it may happen,” he says, “one begins to love oneself for God’s sake,” taking us a step beyond the Westminster Divines, it seems to me, who declared that our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. Bernard of Clairvaux would further confess, in the end, that we may love ourselves because God, who alone is worthy of love, has loved us and included us in divine enjoyment. The monstrous question is thus sharpened: when everything has been stripped from a blameless and upright man for no reason, will he, in freedom, love himself and God for God’s sake? With this as the theological premise, we turn to the character of Job. Not by chance, the meaning of Job’s name is “Where is the divine father?” His name and nature seek God’s presence. Moreover, the sound of the name of Job plays upon another word which means “the hated, persecuted one.” So within this man there abides both an invocation and an accusation. The same, I think, abides in us. We seek and invoke the God we love for our own sake even as we accuse God when the operation of God’s providence is too little, too late--an understatement in Job’s case, making Job the poster child of God for our outrage in the face of unjust suffering. For like Israel, we find ourselves at a loss before a blameless and upright person from whom God’s upholding, sustaining, governing and directing has been withdrawn. Again says Balentine, “There is only one stress point that leaves Israel’s convictions about the covenant vulnerable to collapse: the specter of God acting arbitrarily….Israel trusts that God will act in ways that sustain life, not whimsically destroy it. And so do we. “She is such a good person,” we say. “Why is she going through this? It is not fair!” “He led an exemplary life,” we whisper over the open grave of a young man. “Why has such tragedy befallen him? Where is the justice in this?” We who have loved God for our own sake thought the deal was reasonable: goodness is rewarded; wickedness is punished. Where, then, is the justice in the suffering of good people? Yet according to Cambridge Don George Steiner, Job’s question is of a different order. “Job the Edomite does not cry out for justice. Had he been a Jew, he would have done so. Job the Edomite cries out for sense. He demands that God make sense.” Given the premise of this book, it is precisely what the God who has afflicted Job for no reason cannot do! Nevertheless, what matters far more to Job than God’s glory and mercy is that God is “rational, susceptible of being questioned and understood. Now, in his lunatic suffering,” says Steiner, “Job demands to know the purpose of the creation, the intention of the builder. The clay, made abject, turns on the potter. The ash…challenges the flame. An immense ‘Why?’ surges out of Job.” “Why was I born” Job asks not just in regard to himself but on behalf of the cosmos. The light in the darkness that others have taken for hope, Job experiences as light enough to illumine the deathly darkness. “Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death…who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they find the grave?” Job prefers complete darkness to an existence with light enough only to reveal life’s meaninglessness in the hands of a God he no longer knows or understands. But precisely here we have come to the heart of the matter and to the true immensity of Job’s why. For while all human beings will come to know—to a greater or lesser degree--what it is to lose “possessions, family, health, security and honour,” not all who find themselves in the deathly darkness need come to terms with the knowledge that in the darkness they are having to do with God. “According to his speeches in the central section,” writes Karl Barth, “[Job’s] true sorrow in all his sorrows, and therefore the primary subject of his complaints, consists in the conjunction of his profound knowledge that in what has happened and what has come on him he has to do with God….” What is more, in the presence of his friends who are doing theological back flips to absolve God and to cover-up God’s complicity with the Accuser, Job knows religion’s slick answers to be patently false. With his swollen eyes wide open, he sees God’s hand in what has come upon him; but what he sees is “a God without God, i.e. a God who does not have the features of his own true God, who had become his partner in free faithfulness.” He does not doubt God for a moment, “but it almost drives him mad that he encounters [God] in a form in which [God] is absolutely alien,” unknowable, inscrutable. So Job cries and beats against the darkness and literally suffers from his faithfulness to this God in ways that those who do not believe need not suffer. Yet in response to Job’s immense ‘why’ directed at the God in whom he believes, but no longer knows, God is silent and Job is left powerless against the fact that this is how God has encountered him. Therefore, inverting Psalm 139, he cries: ‘Behold I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him. On the left hand, where he doth work, I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him.” And so also turns Psalm 8 to cynicism: “What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, test them every moment?” Still, the faith that is in Job does not cease. Rather his words have about them a growing desperation and integrity as he attempts to provoke God out of hiding and silence in order to make sense of this relationship gone awry. With barely a turn of the page, I find myself trembling at the thought that this is also the God revealed in the only blameless and upright man ever born to die. Despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom others hide their faces, Jesus alone bears witness to the God whose will was his suffering and his death. “He who trembled and shrank back in Gethsemane, who was betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter and forsaken by all His disciples, who was accused by the congregation of saints as a blasphemer and condemned by the civil authorities as a rebel, who was scourged and scorned before Pilate and Herod, who offered up His life, who shed His blood, who found himself abandoned in death even and above all by his God…,” says Karl Barth, Jesus in all suffering bears witness to the truth of God in his flesh even as he unmasks the pious as liars and religion as a lie. Rejected and abandoned by God, He is God’s Beloved and therefore the true witness to God’s will. The difference is this: not for no reason but for our poor sakes does God will his suffering and death; not for nothing but in order to silence the voice of the Accuser against us has God given his only begotten Son over to the deathly darkness. There he joins us and is light enough. “It’s too dark to see,” says Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. “Then” says Job’s wife Sarah, “blow on the coal of the heart, my darling….It’s all the light now. Blow on the coal of the heart./ The candles in churches are out./The lights have gone out in the sky./Blow on the coal of the heart/And we’ll see by and by.” |