Job 23
When something horrible happens,
like the mass shooting at the community college in Oregon last week or the
shooting in Charleston three months ago (or any shooting for that matter), one
of the first questions that people ask is why. Why did this happen to innocent
people? What were the motives of the
shooter? That is what I often find
myself preoccupied with, the motive of the shooter. I want so desperately to understand their
reason, what brought them to such a dark place.
But even when they leave a letter or a video, the reason is never
satisfying. It never makes me feel
better. However, there is something in
each one of us that craves reason. If
there is a reason, then we can wrap our head around it. Perhaps we can even
find a solution so that it won’t happen again.
Why do bad things happen to good
people? It is the question that never
goes away. Countless books have been
written on the subject, but there is no easy answer. There is no answer. When this question comes up, people often
turn to the Book of Job in the Old Testament.
Job is a classic story of really bad things happening to a good person
for no clear reason. In the beginning of
the Book of Job we hear that Job is a righteous man, basically one of God’s all
stars. He had 10 children and thousands
of livestock. He was wealthy and
successful.
Then in one day, it was all gone. All ten of his children were killed in a freak
wind storm, lightning struck his sheep and shepherds, and an enemy stole his
camels and oxen. That was all in one
day. The next day he woke to find
himself covered with boils from head to toe. He became so deformed that his
friends could no longer recognize him. He went from having everything, to
having virtually nothing. The rest of
the book comprises his rants toward God, long speeches, and conversations with
his three friends who liked to pontificate about the reasons for his
suffering.
The reading from today is Job’s response
to one of his friend’s speeches. In this
speech his friend suggested various sins that Job must have committed to
deserve such suffering. Surely he must
have done something truly evil to warrant this dramatic turn of events. This was a safe assumption in this time
period. It was common for people to
assume that if bad things were happening, it was because they had sinned in
some way. God rewarded the righteous and
punished the sinners. His friend
suggested that he repent and turn back to God. He needed to stop complaining
and submit to God’s authority. In other
words, stop fighting this!
It is rarely a good idea to lecture
someone who is suffering especially when the premise of the lecture is
wrong. Job was an upright and good
man. We know that from the beginning of
the book and surely his friends knew that as well. But much like we do today, his friends were
trying to find a reason for the suffering.
If they could find a reason, then they could find a solution. Job would not accept that rationale. To the end, he defended his innocence.
What Job wanted was an opportunity to
speak to God face to face. He felt that
if he could defend himself before God, then God would see that Job was a good
man who did not deserve such treatment.
What Job was struggling with were not the reasons why, but the lack of
response from God. God had been absent
for Job. Job’s search for God was
relentless, but also fruitless. “If I
go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he
hides and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.” Job
was searching for God and the harder he looked, the more distant God
appeared. Job was not asking “why.” He was asking “where.” Where is God when my life is falling to
pieces? Yet through his ranting and his raving, he never lost hope. Sometimes his words sounded as though he was
hopeless, but they were not, because they were still words that he was sharing
with God.
A poet named Wendell Berry wrote, “The
distinguishing characteristic of absolute despair is silence.” The poet went on to say that there is a
difference between someone who shares their despair with another person and a
person who can only admit it to themselves.
As long as Job kept ranting and raving, he held onto hope. You have all experienced that with yourselves
or another. When you stop hearing from
someone, that is when you worry. When
you find yourself withdrawing from others, that is when there is cause for
concern. While Job’s friends are often
criticized for their obnoxious lectures, at least they were present. They were there.
The last line of our reading is Job
saying, “If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my
face.” Many read this as Job giving up,
finally admitting defeat. He was asking
for death. Or….it was something
else. Job’s friend said that Job had
accused God of being cloaked in darkness, of hiding in the darkness. Perhaps what Job is saying here is that if
God is indeed in the darkness, then that is where he needs to go to find God. If the only way he can find God is by
vanishing into the darkness, than that is what he will do. Does that sound like giving up to you? It’s desperate, but it is not giving up. Hope and desperation have a lot more in
common that we can imagine.
Eventually God does appear to Job. That is our reading for next week and I don’t
want to spoil anything. But suffice it
to say, it turns out God was there the whole time and heard everything Job and
his friends were saying. That does not
come until chapter 38! All of the
horrible things happened to Job in chapter 1.
We can assume that Job did a lot of praying, pleading, whining, yelling,
begging, crying and moping during that time.
He had to go through a great deal before he could meet God face to face.
This past few months we have been
inundated with stories of shootings, children washing up dead on beaches,
historic flooding and droughts….just to name a few. There are reasons for some of these things,
but they are not necessarily reasons that we can agree on. Asking why won’t get us anywhere. What we need to start asking is where. Where is God in all of this? And if we can’t find God in these places of
heartbreak and heartache, that means we need to look harder. Not only that, we can become the signs of
God’s presence. We need to stand up and
let the world know that we are the hands and feet of God. God gave us this world for which we are
stewards. A steward takes care of the
land when the owner is away. We should
be taking care of this land and in doing so, we take care of one another.
The world is in darkness and we carry
the light. Perhaps the answer is not
what matters, as much as the question itself.
Because as long as we keep asking, we are searching and we are
caring. Job’s friends told him to stop searching
and arguing and give up. That was bad advice. God wants us to continue
to question injustice wherever we see it, to search for God in the rubbles of
the wars that we have waged. God wants
us to raise our voices and not be satisfied with platitudes and easy
answers. There are no easy answers. There are hard questions and when we stop
asking them, then we’ve really given up.
Now is not the time to give up.
If the darkness surrounds us, then we get our light and we wade into the
darkness. If enough of us do that, it
won’t be darkness for much longer.
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