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Sermon: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 28th August 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping Evensong 6pm
Readings: Psalm 45 Job 15:1-16 Mark 3:19b-end
There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.” With these words, the Bible introduces one of its most memorable characters. In the popular imagination Job is an icon, a symbol of the sufferer who endures the unendurable without complaint. Yet what many generations have tended to remember about Job is only one aspect of his story. The "patience of Job" has become a cliché that obscures the much more complex figure who appears in the biblical book. Although the book of Job begins with just such a depiction of Job the pious, patiently enduring calamity, that initial image serves as a foil for the contrasting representation of Job that follows:
Job the rebel, who debunks the piety of his friends and boldly accuses God of injustice. In contrast to the majority of Jewish and Christian interpreters over the centuries, who have often seemed somewhat embarrassed by Job's unrestrained blasphemies, many twentieth-century readers, reeling from a century of unparalleled horror, have been drawn to Job's anger as a voice of moral outrage against a God who could permit such atrocities.
The attempt to claim Job as the patron saint of religious rebellion, however, also encounters embarrassment, for at the end of the book, after God's speech from the whirlwind, Job withdraws his words against God. Neither the character nor the book of Job yields to an easy understanding. If we areis willing to forgo simplistic answers, however, the book offers a challenging exploration of religious issues of fundamental importance: the motivation for piety, the meaning of suffering, the nature of God, the place of justice in the world, and the relationship of order and chaos in God's design of creation.
The players in the drama are; God, Job, the Satan, Job’s three friends, who tradition has called Job’s comforters.
The initial theological question of the book is posed by the satan, who asks about the motives of piety. Why does Job, and by extension any person, reverence God? Is it a bargain for security and wellbeing, or is the relationship independent of circumstances? Traditional religion often talks about the blessings that come from piety and obedience to God, and the satans probing question asks whether such expectations subtly corrupt the relationship between human beings and God.
The story, taken by itself, describes Job's piety as unshaken by extreme and inexplicable misfortune, and so affirms the possibility of wholly unconditional love of God. As important as such a question is, the way in which it is treated in the book leaves a great deal unexplored. Should one serve God unconditionally and without question? What is the nature of the relationship between God and human beings? What is the character of God, and how does one have knowledge of that character?
Perhaps the most prominent issue in the dialogues is that of the proper conduct of a person in suffering. For the friends, suffering is an occasion for moral and religious self-examination and reflection. Although there is no single "meaning" for suffering, it is to be understood in some way as a communication from God. For the wicked, it is judgment; for the ethically unsteady, it is a warning; for the morally immature, it is a form of educational discipline; and for the righteous, it is simply something to be borne with the confidence that God will eventually restore well-being. In every case the proper response is to turn to God in humility, trust, and prayer. Implied in the friends' view is the assumption that God is always right and that it is the human being who must make use of the experience to learn what God is trying to communicate. Although Job does not engage the friends' arguments directly, his own stance toward God implies a very different understanding of the divine-human relationship. Rather than turning inward in self-examination, Job demands an explanation from God. For Job, God has no right to cause suffering to come upon a person unless that person deserves punishment. Job rejects the notion of unconditional piety, at least insofar as it would mean submission to a God who acts without regard to what is just.
The differences between Job and the friends on the matter of proper conduct in suffering also bring into focus the issue of the character of God and God's governance of the world. In contrast to the conventional views of the friends, which take God's goodness and justice to be obvious, Job often depicts God as a violator of justice who acts out of obsessive and malicious curiosity or in a spirit of rage. The world over which God exercises supposed "moral" governance is characterized by chaotic destruction, the prosperity of the wicked and the pervasive abuse of the poor. If Job is correct when he depicts God in these ways, then the very possibility of reverence for God is at an end, for God is a monster of cruelty. Job's speeches set up the theological issue in a more complex fashion, however, for Job's view of God's character is contradictory. He cannot give up the idea that, despite the evidence of his experience and his observations, God will ultimately be revealed as a God of justice. The power of the book is due in large measure to the apparently insoluble nature of this contradictory experience. Job is not unique in raising the problem of a just God and the existence of injustice in the world. What is unusual about Job is the way in which he attempts to pursue and ultimately resolve this dilemma.
Some of the most intriguing theological issues in the book are never raised to the level of explicit debate between Job and his friends. Job and his friends not only hold different positions about the nature of God, the moral order of the world, and the meaning of what has befallen Job, but they also authorize their claims on very different grounds. The friends appeal to common sense, what "everybody" knows. Consequently, they assume that Job, too, will share their understandings. Sometimes they argue deductively from what they consider to be universally agreed principles. At other times they cite hearsay evidence or even the fleeting authority of private revelation. Most important of all, however, is their reliance on the authority of tradition. Not only do they appeal explicitly to tradition, but by filling their speeches with the forms of traditional religious language, they also increase that authority. Job opposes this combination of common sense, rational argument, revelation and tradition because he knows that what the friends claim is inconsistent with his own experience.
Related to the conflict over the grounds for knowledge of truth is the book's exploration of the adequacy and limits of various kinds of religious language; appears to be their hypocrisy about the real nature of the divine-human relationship. Such forms of religious speech allow only mention of the goodness of God's transforming power, care for human beings, but exclude from view the terrible experiences that give rise to the crisis of religious doubt about the nature of God.
Traditional prayer also, which the friends keep urging upon him, is inadequate for the kind of conversation Job seeks to have with God, because it has no means of imposing accountability on God. Job's speeches gradually explore the possibilities of a new religious language based on a radically different underlying metaphor of the divine-human relationship. Job imagines the relationship in legal categories, most concretely in terms of the possibility of a trial with God. The model shows a relationship of mutual accountability, undistorted by differences of power, in which both parties acknowledge common standards of justice as binding. Such a way of talking about God and with God would have radical implications for the nature of religion.
Job’s friends argue for the goodness of God, the moral order of the world, the meaning of suffering, and the importance of humble submission to God. Job questions the justice of God, describes the world as a moral chaos, depicts suffering in terms of victimization, and stakes his life on the possibility of legal confrontation with God.
Job and his friends disagree whether such justice is at work in the world or whether God should be called to account for failing to enforce such justice. The speeches of God from the whirlwind, however, challenge the understanding that both Job and the friends have taken for granted.
God’s speeches do not explicitly engage the particular arguments Job had made but implicitly call into question their fundamental assumptions. Job's final speech and the divine speeches shows, Job's theological categories had arisen from the social and moral assumptions that structured community life and social roles in his own experience. From these assumptions Job had argued his ideasconcerning God and the world. God's speeches, by beginning with the great structures of creation and speaking scarcely at all of the place of human beings in the cosmos, expose the limits of Job's human centred categories.
Similarly, Job's legal model for understanding divine-human relationships is also challenged. In Job's understanding, the fundamental categories are "right and wrong”. No place exists in such a world for the chaotic. Yet in God's speeches, the play between fundamental order and the restricted but still powerful forces of the chaotic is crucial for understanding the nature of reality. Through images of the sea, the criminal, the anarchic wild animals and finally the legendary beasts Behemoth and Leviathan, God confronts Job with things that his legal categories cannot possibly comprehend. The evocative but elusive language of the God’s speeches provides material for the reconstruction of language of a very different sort than that employed by Job and his friends, but God’s speeches do not do that work themselves, that remains a human task.
The challenge of God’s speeches brings us back to the original theological issue of the book: Why does one reverence God? What had been a question about the nature of human piety in the story was transformed in the debates into a question about the character of God. Job's reply suggests that the divine speeches have provided him with a transformed vision of God and thus a very different basis for reverence. If the author had made Job's interpretation of God’s speeches more explicit, then we would have been left with little to do beyond approving or disapproving of Job's response. By making Job's response so elusive, however, we are forced to grapple more directly with the meaning of the divine speeches and so encourage each of us to think through the consequences.
One last question remains: "Where can wisdom be found?" To which of the different voices in the book should we listen for the word of truth? We might reasonably assume that God’s speeches contain the essential truth of the book of Job. Not only does the voice of God carry overall authority, but the book up to that point seems to encourage such a judgment as well. The tale presents a moral perspective that is made to appear inadequate by the more literarily and theologically sophisticated dialogues. The friends' moral perspectives are shown to be inadequate by the compelling power of Job's words. The inadequacy of Job's perspective, however, is shown by the extraordinary speeches of God from the whirlwind. Surely we are supposed to adopt and endorse the perspective articulated by none other than God. Yet the book gives the last word to the tale. By having God declare that Job has spoken rightly and by having events turn out just as his friends had predicted, the book wryly affirms perspectives that had appeared to be superseded and rejected.
What gets challenged in this process is the very notion that discovering truth is a matter of choosing one perspective and rejecting all others, that the truth about a complex question can be contained in a single perspective. Each perspective in the book of Job, taken by itself, contains valid insights. When one looks back at the various views shown by the different voices in the text, one finds that they are not so much contradictory as of equal value.
It may be that the truth about a complex question can only be spoken by a number of voices that can never be merged into one, because they speak from different experiences and different perspectives. This is not to suggest that every position has equal validity or that with enough conversation consensus will be reached. As the book of Job illustrates, serious theological conversation places different voices in relationship precisely so that their limitations as well as their insights may be clearly identified. The truth that emerges from such a conversation is not to be found either in the triumph of one voice over the others or in an emerging consensus. It is to be found in the intersection of the various voices in their mutual interrogation. Such a perspective does not mean that one never gets beyond talk to decision.
On the contrary, every person must choose how to live. In terms of the issues posed by the book of Job, choosing how to live involves deciding about the character of God, the structure of creation, the place of suffering in the world, and the significance of the moral and pious life. What the structure of the book challenges, however, is the assumption that such a decision, once made, accounts for everything and resolves every question. Instead, the significance of a choice can be appreciated only when it is questioned from other perspectives and by persons who have made different choices. The book of Job shows a kind of theological inquiry in which multiple perspectives are not merely helpful but essential. By closing in a manner that frustrates closure, the book shows that the conversation it has begun about the nature of divine-human relations is not finished but requires to be continued by new communities of voices, including ours.
This sermon based upon material from the New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol IV, Abingdon Press, Nashville. 1996