The Ferocious Faith of Job (Oct 6)

Reading, Job 1 and 2.
Image, Job, Antonio de Pereda
 
“There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.” So begins one of the more immense, provocative, and mysterious stories in Scripture. Job provides the Bible’s most detailed study on the question of suffering and evil. A question we will not satisfactorily solve in one (or even a handful) of sermons. Nonetheless, where might this story take us?
 
Well, in the first instance, it takes us to the land of fables. There was once a man in the land... This is the Hebrew Bible equivalent of “Once Upon a Time.” Indeed, it is the very phrase that the prophet Nathaniel employs in his fable or parable of the man who steals a lamb told to condemn King David.
 
This helps our reading (and perhaps our sanity). We do not have to reckon with this picture of God making wagers with Satan as a literal representation of what God is like, nor as a picture of what’s going on in the heavenly realms. Similarly, we don’t have to worry about the literal lives of these children of Job crushed to death. The elements of the story are not a journalistic account of happenings, they exist to provoke and illustrate, leading the reader to consider the deeper questions and crises of human existence.
 
This last point is important. The book of Job (especially in its early chapters) is far less interested with the character of God than with how humans respond to suffering beyond our comprehension and control. To say it another way, the scene with God and Satan is not there to furnace our doctrine of God, rather it poetically intensifies one of the book’s main theses: woe to the one presuming to know the mystery of God, or link external suffering to state of another’s heart. With this established, what can we learn from Job?
 
First, despite his prosperity, Job seems to live under a cloud of potential calamity due to the unbeknownst sin of others. We read that on the days his children were to feast he would rise early to offer burnt offerings just in case his children had cursed God in their hearts. While this detail may be there to heighten the exaggerated virtuousness of Job it also suggests a life defined by the insecurity of blessing. Of course, ironically, none of this actually helps. For it is not any human cursing that brings ruin, it is Job’s very blamelessness and uprightness that provokes God’s boasting and the Adversary’s challenge. Job’s unimpeachable record, far from preserving him and his children, becomes the cause of all that goes wrong.
 
But perhaps it is his acceptance of the provisionally of all good things, that allows Job to make his famous confessions when confronted with news of devastation. Messenger after messenger, hot on the heels of each other, lay increasingly exaggerated reports of ill-fortune at Job’s feet. Upon hearing this, Job says, Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord has given and the Lord has taken may the Lord’s name be blessed. Even with the rug pulled so swiftly out from under him, Job does not curse God, but recognises the freedom of his sovereign who brings sunshine and rain upon us all.
 
But again, ironically, his faithfulness is the cause of calamity. For when God draws attention to Job remaining unmoored, the Adversary heightens the wager, insisting Job will succumb if his body becomes the site of pain. Yet even covered with sores Job refuses to curse God. His wife, perhaps out of pity for his sufferings, grief for her own loss, or resignation that blessing or cursing, innocence or guilt, make no difference, appeals he let go, but Job retorts: Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?     
 
Job remains unwavering in his vision of the world as being under the sovereign power of God, while remaining in the dark as to why any of this is happening. God gives and so God must be allowed to take, such is the freedom of the Creator and the plight of the creation. And yet, we would do a disservice to Job if we took this as a sign that he is not determined to hold God to account. When Job’s friends insist on defending the validity of God’s justice and insist upon the secret sin Job must have committed to deserve this treatment, Job defends his faithfulness and cries aloud: Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me!
 
Job, while accepting the right of God to give and take, rejects his friends “account” of the situation, and insists that God front up and give testimony. There is a kind of ferocious determination in Job’s response. Through grief and gritted teeth, he will not allow calamity to prevail over his faith in God, while at the very same time, will not allow God to slip by without giving account. God is free to do this, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
 
The author Zvi Kolitz wrote a story about a fictional Jewish resistance fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto. The fighter, writes a testimony in 1943, speaking directly to God:
Here, then, are my last words to You, my angry God: None of this will avail You in the least! You have done everything to make me lose my faith in You, to make me cease to believe in You. But I die exactly as I have lived, an unshakable believer in You… Sh’ma Yisroel! Hear, Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Into your hands I commend my soul.*
 
Such is the ground Job stands upon. Nothing will prevail over his belief in God, and nothing will stop him charging God with the ills that have befallen him. The world is God’s so God needs to account for what has happened in the world. Job will not abandon the foundation of his faith, nor his very righteousness, rather these are what drives his charge: Oh, that I knew where to find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments.
 
I think of those immortal words of comfort Jesus offers his disciples: In my father’s house there are many dwelling places… I go and prepare a place for you. Read in conversation with Job, we see that there is more than one mood with which to enter the household of God. And one of them, very legitimately, is to come before the Most High with a litany of griefs and injustices. Those who have known senseless suffering, who have seen cataclysm and misery ruin lives, who have tasted the bitterness of grief, these are not things we must quietly bear for the sake of our deep faith in God or God’s reputation on the earth. No, we see with Job (no less than with Christ upon the cross) that it is from the deep well of our faith that we may lay the most emphatic charges at the feet of God and demand an answer to a question as profound as Job’s: why did you bring me forth from the womb?
 
The question of suffering is posed to all of us. The reality of evil and senselessness of loss cannot be skirted even for the upright and blameless. These early chapters of Job rest on such a premise, insisting that though we will know calamity, its causes often lie beyond our vision. What shall we do in this moment? How do we respond when everything falls apart? Job gives us one way with this strange dichotomy of blessing and charge, of confession and accusation. Job models what it might look like to hold on believing almost to spite the reasons for unbelief; to remain among the faithful in order to enter the dwelling of God and have it out face to face. I think there is good news here, that faith can look like this (it doesn’t have to, but it can). There’s good news in realising that this too is a Christian response to calamity and woe. We do not curse God when we challenge God. We do not abandon our faith when we rage against what has befallen us or our world. Paradoxically, as those called daily to take up our cross, is it not a fitting posture to pin ourselves to the wood to join voice with the world’s saviour crying, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me! Because perhaps, for more than just Job, this is the only way through to Sunday.

*Zvi Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, translated Carol Janeway, 1999. 24-25.