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Religion and Reason: Job and His Friends
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 8, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Job 15:1—6; 30:16-31 Colossians 1:15-24
At the midpoint of our reading of the Old Testament, we are in territory we wish were not so recognizable. It is the “No Man’s Land” of inexplicable human suffering. For many here and for more around the globe, this land is not theoretical, nor is the search for reason in the midst of great pain an idle pastime. In response, religion has ministered to the suffering and dying with consolation and explanation, accomplishing both with varying success. I had planned to skip the dialogue between Job and his friends in favor of doing business with God’s response to Job’s testimony. Instead, I was stopped in midair as I read the poetry uttered by these ancient characters because--after two millennia and the incarnation--the dueling moral imaginations represented by Job and his friends still hold in solution the radically opposed worldviews that have made the consolations of religion less than comforting today and the explanations of religion more than suspect. Therefore I have left Job’s testimony and God’s answer to next Sunday, postponing the psalms--or rather incorporating the psalms that dare to do battle with God in the context of this book that could fill a summer of sermons. At the outset, I must acknowledge my indebtedness to Old Testament scholar Carol Newsom and an article on Job and His Friends that will guide our listening to the texts before us. No doubt the counsel of Job’s friends has been roundly dismissed over the ages as pious palaver and their advice--repeated by well-meaning believers--has been recognized by those in extremis as doing more harm than good. But stepping back from this well-worn judgment with Newsom’s help, I hear--in the story and the practice and the hope Job’s friends offer amid the ashes of Job’s life--the truth on which I have bet my life and ministry. Likewise, I hear in the speeches of Job, in his rejection of the help proffered by religion, the brave honesty of the world I also inhabit, a world in which sense and meaning are so hard to come by. I therefore invite you, this morning, to listen again for yourself and for those whose suffering refuses easy consolation. Listen for sense in a universe that just may be as senseless with a God on whom to call as without a God! We begin by considering the threefold advice of friends to a friend in extremis. To combat the dark chaos that has become his life, Job’s friends offer a story told to reveal the reliability of the moral order, an order that they believe God has built into the structure of creation. “Think now” says Eliphaz, “who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.” Job himself has operated within this order all of his life until now: offering burnt offerings for his children just in case they may have sinned, fearing God and turning away from evil. We see our world through the foundational story we choose to believe, be that story the story of God or the story of the enlightenment or the story of subjective and deconstructed truth. The narrative shapes how we see. What Eliphaz means to do is to help Job put the tragedy that has become his life into a narrative that does not end with his suffering. The story he tells is not a story that offers an explanation but a story that has a different ending: that is to say, a story that has a future and so hope. “When we reach our limits,” writes Roman Catholic theologian John Shea, “when our ordered worlds collapse, when we cannot enact our moral ideals, when we are disenchanted, we often enter into the awareness of Mystery….Our dwelling within Mystery is both menacing and promising, a relationship of exceeding darkness and undeserved light, In this situation and with this awareness we do a distinctively human thing. We gather together and tell stories of God to calm our terror and hold our hope on high.” All of us have done this and do this almost unconsciously. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are stories of God; other times the stories are of a great grandmother whose courageous genes survive still in the body of a granddaughter now wracked with pain. They are stories meant to resist the chaos, to counter the unconscionable reality, to calm the terror, to hearten the hope. In one way or another, we incorporate the present inexplicable and unbearable pain into a narrative that ends in healing--a healing, I must add, that may or may not happen between birth and death. [Soon we will read Isaiah whose story of restoration and word of hope to those in exile was eschatological in scope—set in a time beyond time when God will reign.] Inevitably at issue is the story’s believability. The Accuser’s point with God is that Job has believed the story—we have believed the story and God--“for something.” So when not just something but everything is taken away, what are we to make of the truth—a truth now contrary to our experience--on which the story rests? “One may become uneasily aware,” writes Newsom, “of [a story’s] status not only as something that is made but also as something made-up, aware of the ambiguity of what it means to ‘tell a story.’” And lest we think such unease is only a suspicion we have come to late in time, consider Job! Given all that has befallen him with no reason, Job has given up on the story of a God who rewards the good and punishes the wicked, has dismissed the narrative of a reliable moral order as dishonest. Job counters his friends’ overarching narrative with a series of little stories that are bereft of any horizon. He speaks of a forced labor gang, a day laborer, a slave, all of whom experience time and human existence as “one damn thing after another.” Having no plot, one can only endure moment by moment. Or put another way, the time of a story is a time of delay, of waiting; “the time of a body in pain is a time of urgency.” In sum, for Job’s friends “hope is the shape of time. For Job, the shape of time makes hope absurd.” Both times abide in us even now. The friend’s second response to Job counsels Job to seek God and so to pray. In other words, they offer not only a story but a practice they believe will be of help; offer not so much an explanation as something to do. “Regardless of the reasons for misfortune,” notes Newsom, in the worldview of Job’s friends, “there is always something one can do about the situation, and doing gives the sufferer a degree of agency. Thus the question ‘Why?’ simply has less urgency.” The act of praying, the practices that seek God become the bridge between the now and the not yet. For those no longer raised to breathe the air of the biblical narrative, medicine or therapy is often that bridge. As ravaging as chemotherapy can be to the body and spirit, especially when the chances for survival seem slight, chemotherapy is something we can do, an action that gives us agency. In the same way, Job’s friends prescribe prayer as a kind of medicine for the soul. “If it were I” say both Eliphaz and Bildad, “I would seek El, and to Elohim I would present my cause.” “If you seek out El and from Shaddai you seek mercy….” In addition and almost akin, I think, to Buddhist meditation, Zophar speaks of the “spiritual practice of concentration which precedes prayer, known as ‘settling the heart’ or…‘directing the mind,’” a practice that means to create “a space of untroubled intimacy with God” which will make the present pain endurable. But Job has no interest in the comfort such intimacy with God might bring him and so rejects the “therapy of prayer.” His desire is rather for truth. The truth of what is left of his life suggests that the God whom he is counseled to seek is the cause of his condition. Prayer would cause God to notice him and likely call down upon him more violence! So Job instead begins to compose his testimony, a testimony he will lay before God concerning the wrong God has done to him. Not prayer but legal dispute is the language of Job’s unspeakable suffering; not speech that presumes an unequal relationship of intimacy between parent and child but legal testimony in a courtroom that sets inequality aside and demands an account be given by the one who has inflicted suffering for no reason. Praying animals that we are, we are equally at home in the language of disputation! Job’s friends finally venture a word of wisdom which turns out to be a conversation stopper. Taking up the question of creation’s moral reliability once again, his friends put forth proverbial stories drawn from life about the wicked receiving the punishment that is their due. In the face of life’s complexity, in the presence of suffering inflicted for no reason, after the exile for Job’s first readers and now after the Shoah such simple-minded wisdom can only lead to the worship of a monster. As Newsom observes, “the construction and maintenance of a moral world is an act requiring enormous trust. The system of values and the acts that one does or refrains from doing cannot be sustained if they are experienced as arbitrary and meaningless. In some way they must be anchored in a transcendent reality.” But how is that reality to be known amid the evidence of an ash heap? When Job counters the moral order of his friends’ stories with his experience of the wicked prospering, he is not simply offering the exception to the rule; he is proposing that the rule of love has no basis in reality. Were it not for Jesus Christ, I would have to concur. But because of him, I know only enough to bet my life on a narrative so counter to the reasons we seek for our suffering that I need a community to tell the story to me again and again. It is not the story of a morally reliable order where the righteous triumph and the wicked go down to ruin. Rather it tells of the suffering of him who alone lives in relation to the God for whom we were made, and of One whose suffering with us even unto death has enabled those who suffer for no reason to endure to the end. He is, in truth, not the end as in the conclusion, as in a happy ending, but he reveals in his life, death and resurrection the purpose and goal of history itself: the self-giving, self-emptying love that never ends. “In him all things hold together” Paul proclaimed and then wrote with his next breath, “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake.”
That the Son of God had to die on the cross. Nobody has answered that question. How can I explain it to Katie? …I say to her: a Mystery of Redemption. And Katie? She does not want to be saved At the price of the suffering of an innocent man. Her father kneels every Sunday in his church, Because what would you introduce in place of religion? Perhaps the idiotic rituals of the Party, Or football games ending in a brawl? …I raise above the alter bread and wine. Humbled, since my reason does not comprehend what I do. |