Hilton Head Island, SC – July 25, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Job 8:1-7, 11:1-6; Job 32-1-3, 36:12-16
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “He delivers the afflicted by their affliction, and opens their eyes by adversity.” – Job 36:15 (RSV)
Last Sunday we learned that Job’s three best friends came to console him after his world had suddenly been ripped entirely apart. However, all three of them insisted that Job must have done some terrible things for all those terrible things to happen to him.
For example, Eliphaz, the first of his friends to speak to him, said, “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?” But you know, and I know, and Job knew that sometimes the innocent do perish: babies or small children, noble people we have known, St. Sebastian with his hands tied to a post and shot with many arrows, and so on. And sometimes the upright are cut off from carefree and happy lives. Remember, the Book of Job is an ancient epic poem which addresses the perplexing problem of theodicy, the search for an explanation of suffering, and how or if God is involved in it. Eliphaz is as helpful in answering that question as an elephant that just stepped on a turtle on the path behind him. It looks back and asks, “How in the world did that happen?”
Job is beside himself to hear Eliphaz’s lame explanations. He cries out, “O that I might have my request, and that God would grant my desire, that it would please God to crush me, that he would let loose his hand and cut me off!” (6:8-9) Job’s fondest hope is to die. “In truth I have no help in me, and any resource is driven from me!” (6:13) Job is so miserable that he feels completely forsaken by God. And yet he still considers himself righteous, and in the general meaning of that word, he is righteous. Job says to God, “Teach me, and I will be silent; make me understand how I have erred. How forceful are honest words! But what does reproof from you” (Eliphaz) “reprove?” (6:24-25) Nothing you are saying is helping me, chum! says Job to Eliphaz.
Then Bildad the Shuhite steps in to try to set Job straight. “”Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right? If your children have sinned against him, he has delivered them into the power of their transgression” (8:3-4). Your sons and daughters must have been great sinners, Job; otherwise that house would not have collapsed in the great desert wind which blew them all away. “If you will seek God and make supplication to the Almighty,” says Bildad, “and if you are pure in heart, surely God then will rouse himself for you, and reward you with a rightful habitation” (8:5-6). Until you do that, Job old pal, you’re toast, says Bildad.
Job knows he is toast! In the boils all over his body, in the tortures he feels in his broken mind, heart, and spirit, he senses nothing but the wrath of a greatly angered God. But why? WHY? Why has God poured so much calamity on him?
So Bildad tells Job that all he has to do is to confess his sins, and everything he has lost will come back to him. Is it an affirmation of what Bildad says, or is it fierce desperation that causes Job to respond, “I know that it is so. But how can a man be just before God? If one wished to contend with him, one could not answer him once in a thousand times” (9:2-3). It’s like a recent cartoon in The New Yorker. A man is kneeling beside his bed, with uplifted clasped hands pointing toward heaven. He says, “And if you can’t answer my prayers, I’d still love some feedback. Thanks.”
Slowly Job seems to be coming around to the position that there may be no explanation for why anyone suffers; we just do. He’s not quite ready yet to concede, though. It’s like Julie Jordan saying of Billy Bigelow, her flawed husband, in Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Broadway musical Carousel, “What’s the use of wondering if he’s good or if he’s bad; he’s your fella and you love him --- that’s all there is to that.” Suffering comes in many forms, says Julie, and we may have no other choice than to bear it and to learn from it as best we can.
His third friend, Zophar, tries to tell Job how Job has totally misinterpreted the nature of the disasters which have descended on him. He declares that Job is complaining too much, and is not listening enough. “Should a multitude of words go unanswered, and a man full of talk be vindicated? Should your babble silence men, and when you mock, shall no one shame you? For you say, ‘My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in God’s eyes.’ But oh, that God would speak, and open his lips to you, and that he would tell you the secrets of wisdom! For he is manifold in understanding. Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves” (11:2-6).
Job says to himself, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” The three men keep trying to convince Job that he had to have committed some colossal sins for such colossal misfortunes to strike him. God would never punish anyone with such calamities unless the offender had spectacularly sinned. But Job knows he has not committed great sins. So, with sarcasm dripping from his every word, Job responds to his three detractors, “No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you. But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you. Who does not know such things as these? I am a laughingstock to my friends; I, who called upon God and he answered me, a just and blameless man, am a laughingstock. In the thought of one who is at ease there is contempt for misfortune; it is ready for those whose feet slip” (12:2-5).
Job is beside himself in trying to comprehend the reasons for the medley of misfortunes which have seized him. As if that were not bad enough, the men who are attempting to get him to see things the way they see them are only adding more agony onto his tortured soul. Will Job never find any solace from anyone?
For twenty more chapters Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar continue to pour burning coals onto poor Job’s head, hoping to break him of what they see as his obstinate disregard of how they think God works if chaos comes. Nobody gets it in the neck who doesn’t deserve it, they insist. But at last they refrain from trying to defeat Job with that wrong-headed notion, and they allow him to wallow in what they assume is self-righteous pity for himself.
Nowhere in this long poem is it ever stated that Job was unrighteous, even though his friends thought he had to be unrighteous, or otherwise the world would not have collapsed on him as it did. All along, the underlying issue is this: Why does Job think God had to have caused the tortuous string of events which have thrown him into such despair?
From out of nowhere, another character suddenly appears in the story. He is a younger man whose name is Elihu. The Hebrew name Elihu means “God Himself.” In the six uninterrupted chapters of what Elihu has to say, he speaks almost as though he is God Himself, except that we know he only a man, identified as “Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the family of Ram” (32:2). An unusual name, with unusual other identifiers. Is Elihu just a Buzite, buzzing around as God’s emissary to wounded hearts and minds?
Coincidentally, we had a visiting professor in seminary whose name was Elihu S. Howland. He was a psychiatrist who came several times to speak to us in our class on pastoral psychology. He was a kindly, gentle soul, the very epitome of someone meant to be in a helping vocation. I can only imagine that his parents were evangelical Protestants who wanted to distinguish their son from everyone else by giving him a singular biblical name. He certainly is the only Elihu I ever encountered personally.
In the Book of Job, Elihu’s main purpose seems to be to disabuse Job of his desire to find an answer for why his life appeared to have culminated in dust and ashes. “Why do you contend against (God), saying, ‘He will answer none of my words?’” (33:13) Elihu implies that though God may appear to be silent in the face of enormous disaster, it doesn’t mean He is not present with us. In fact, we may experience him most uniquely because of the agony and sorrow we feel. “Behold,” says Elihu, “God does all these things with a man twice, three times, to bring back his soul from the Pit, that he may see the light of life” (33:29-30). Then he declares, “(God) delivers the afflicted by their affliction, and and opens their ear by adversity” (36:25).
The Book of Job is filled with ambivalence. I suspect it is deliberate, because life is filled with ambivalence. Many different kinds of things happen to us for which there is no explanation, but Elihu (our alter-ego, God Himself) is there, and God, Himself, is also there. It is when things are the most traumatic that we may suddenly perceive God more powerfully than we ever did before. It isn’t that God caused the trauma to envelop us. It is rather that God uses the emotional tornado of the trauma to reach us, because we might never perceive Him when all is well and the world is our oyster, as Shakespeare said.
God is God, and humans are mere humans. We cannot know what God knows. After Elihu comes and speaks to Job, God Himself comes – not Elihu, but God, Himself. Instead of explaining anything to Job, God asks questions of Job. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements – surely you know! (38:4-5) …Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place, that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? (36:12-13) Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?” (38:31) Do you know how to direct the stars in their constellations, Job? The poetry is so wonderful, and the imagery is so poetically translucent!
God is not meaning to belittle Job, to demean him. He just wants him to know that there is an inevitable gulf between the Creator and the created, and that the created cannot know everything they want to know, nor shall they ever know it. But nevertheless God is saying, “I’m here, Job; I’m here! I’m with you! You thought I had abandoned you, but I will never forsake you: ever. You are my son! I made you, Job; you are mine! I will never leave you. Only now have you fully grasped The One Than Whom There Is None Higher. Sometimes you can encounter me most fully only in those instances when you are certain you shall never encounter me.”
When the worst things happen, God may be the most evident. When we are certain He has become the Deus Absconditus, the Hidden God, in that moment He may become the most transparent. It is not that He causes terrible things to happen. Rather terrible things happen, and He uses them to make Himself known to us more completely than through any other means.
Felix Mendelssohn composed an oratorio about the biblical prophet Elijah. Elijah happened to be living in the northern kingdom of Israel at the same time as the wicked king Ahab and his equally awful queen, Jezebel. The great nineteenth century German composer used many of the scenes from the Book of I Kings to portray the life of the great ninth century BCE prophet. There is much Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) in the various choruses, recitatives, and arias, but at one point, when the chorus and Elijah himself have been singing loudly in a fever pitch in the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel, it is uncertain whether Elijah shall ever be able defeat his Canaanite rivals.
But then, after a fortissimo climax, the next section is a quartet of four angels. By a marvelous coincidence they happen to be a soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. Their entrance is very soft, and it continues that way throughout the short piece. They answer the uncertainty of the booming chorus with these words: “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He will sustain thee/ He never will suffer the righteous to fall/ He is at thy right hand/ Thy mercy, Lord, is great/ and far above the heavens/ Let none be made asham-ed/ that wait upon thee.”
Job never gave up on God, and God certainly never gave up on Job. In everything he said and did, Job was waiting to hear God in the depths of his despair.
A number of years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a best-selling book. Its title was When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He was very careful to point out that his book was not Why Bad Things Happen to Good People; he had no answer for that, he said. But he had much wise advice for what to do when bad things happen to good people.
When awful things happen, blame God, if you must. He can take it. But it is much more productive to move on without holding God accountable for any of our misfortunes. Good and bad things happen to us throughout our life’s journey, because that’s the way life is. Sometimes we think we know the reasons, but more often than not there is no “reason” to be found. God was in the multitude of questions which Job asked throughout the outstanding poem, but especially in those for which there could never be an answer.
When we can never discern why bad things happen, we are nonetheless confronted with a persistent and gnawing puzzle: How then do we play the cards that life deals us? That will be the question for the final one of the four sermons based on the Book of Job.