Oh, That I Knew Where I Might Find Him
Sermon
Sermons on the First Readings
Series III, Cycle B
Object:
Then Job answered, "Today also is my complaint bitter." With those words, we go from the patience of Job to the bitterness of Job, from a docile Job to a defiant Job. Last week, Job was the model of submission. To him we owe the powerful proverbs: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away" (Job 1:21).
Last week, we left Job sitting in his ash heap, scraping away at his sores, and asking rhetorically, "Shall we receive the good at the hand of the God, and not receive the bad?" There, in the story, he demonstrates his stability, his steadfastness, or what the text calls his "integrity." He gives us a map of a moral world, which is so clear, so coherent, and so simple that it is impossible to get lost. All the paths lead to virtue.
However, Job's wife poses the question that challenges such a moral universe. "Do you still persist in your integrity? Why not curse God and die?" She offers the nihilistic option. Life is at best a burden and at worst an obscene joke. Certainly non-being is better than being. Just curse God and die!
Job, of course, does not choose that option. It says, "In all this Job did not sin with his lips" (2:10). The picture we have is one of the universe still intact through the heroic faith of a pious Job. He did not curse God with his lips; but the text says nothing about Job's heart.
Do you remember that, in the first presentation of Job, it said that he regularly made sacrifices on behalf of his children? Now, they had been presented as prosperous and content, so we assume that they were pious like Job. But Job offers sacrifices for them just in case they had "sinned and cursed God in their hearts" (1:5). It may be that here, where it says Job does not curse God "with his lips," the narrative leaves just a little crack in Job's piety -- for example, what about his heart? Whether through the efforts of the storyteller who decides to complicate things, or, more likely, an editor who thinks there is more to say, suddenly Job becomes the desperate, defiant Job of our text. Into that crack in the story gets inserted 39 chapters of debate.
First, although Job does not curse God, he does curse the day he was born. "Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, 'A man-child is conceived' " (3:3). In a deep and powerful expression of pain, Job spews curses left and right (3:3-10). Then he cries out the eternal question: Why? (Job 3:11, 12, 16, 20, 23).
Having gotten that off his chest, Job becomes the defender of his innocence. He will not buy the orthodox answers that his comforters give to the problem of suffering in the universe: perhaps it is only discipline? Happy is the one whom God reproves (5:17). Or maybe a warning not to presume on God's grace! But if it is punishment, bear it honestly. After all, "Can mortals be righteous before God? Can human beings be pure before their Maker?" (4:17). So bear it patiently, with the confidence that God will get it right in the end.
The Job of the narrative itself might accept these answers. The Job of the poetry will have none of it. No matter how much I groan, his hand is heavy upon me and I am tired of it (v. 2). I want to argue with him, I want to lay my case before him, I want to hear what he has to say. Job wants his day in court! We all know the burden of feeling that we have been judged unjustly. Whether it be a spat with a spouse, an argument over a traffic ticket, a debate over a course grade, a challenge to the IRS -- all we want is a hearing before a reasonable judge and, of course, we will be proven righteous.
Here, in Job's complaint, the legal language is everywhere. Job wants to plead his case (v. 4), fill his mouth with arguments, and contend with God. There it would be, in God's courtroom, that "an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted for ever by my judge" (v. 7).
The problem with Job's wish is not that he might be proven wrong in God's courtroom nor that the verdict might go against him. The problem is that the trial cannot even begin because God won't show up in the courtroom; God can't be pinned down like that. "Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!" (v. 3). But, "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" (vv. 8-9). In Hebrew, the four directions that one can go -- forward, backward, left, and right -- are the same words used for the four directions of the compass (north, south, east, and west). So, we could say, nowhere in the world is God to be found.
Such an inaccessible God seems strange for us who have been nourished on the idea of the availability of God. God is very near to us, Paul says, for in him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). People have always claimed to find God present in the created world (natural theology), in the common ordering of societies (natural law), or in the hidden recesses of the soul. In America, we are particularly fond of the image of God as our buddy, who, "though it makes him sad to see the way we live, he always says, 'I forgive.' "
Our text makes it clear, however, that things are not that simple. God is not at our beck and call. God does not show up in court just because Job wants to defend himself. In his wishful thinking, Job imagines that all would be made right if God would just explain himself. "I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me" (v. 5). (Job assumes that God would be a font of wisdom which would make sense of the world once again, if only he could learn from God.) Job is not afraid of a divine power play. "He would not batter me down in the greatness of his power. No! But he would just give heed to me so that we could get things straight" (v. 6 cf).
Just when we get used to a confident, rather defiant Job, suddenly he seems a desperate man who lives in dread. "God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me" (v. 16). Certainly that is an important observation about a God who lives in unapproachable light. The Old Testament is full of stories testifying to a dread of the almighty. One cannot look on the almighty and live! Whether it is Moses on the mountain, Elijah hiding in a cave, or Isaiah confronting God in a vision, clearly a God who is "wholly other," a God of majesty and might, ought to strike dread in our hearts. This is Martin Buber's Mysterium Tremendum.
Where does that leave Job? The last verse of our text is ambiguous. Job's situation is characterized as one of deep darkness; but is he overcome by it? The NRSV reads, "If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness could cover my face!" It is a statement of despair, a death wish. The NIV, however, translates it, "Yet I am not silenced by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face."
Continued defiance or despair? Those seem to be the two places we have to stand if we pose the issue in terms of human perceptions of justice. As humans, it is natural for us to perceive reality as controlled by some principle of retributive justice. We heard the psalmist this morning crying out for a balance: "Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil" (Psalm 90:15). Ultimately, there must be a right and a wrong, and the wrong must be punished and the right rewarded. If not, what sense is there? The Old Testament wisdom literature is full of that challenge. The psalms of lament cry out, "How long, oh Lord, how long?" However, once we put God in the dock and seek to make God conform to our reality, we have a problem. In our modern age, Archibald MacLeish has framed it in a limerick: "If God is god, he is not good; if God is good, he is not God. Take the even, take the odd."1
There will be no answer to this conundrum as long as the categories proposed by human reason are justice/injustice. The book of Job cannot answer the question that way, nor can the church. (Theodicy -- the eternal attempt to justify the ways of God to man -- seldom works.) Our other lessons for this morning ask different questions and point us in different directions. First, the gospel offers a difficult challenge. Jesus says, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:25). "Then who can be saved?" the disciples ask. Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible!" (Mark 10:27).
It is a reminder of the total objectivity of grace. It comes to us, not as a reward for our piety, not as a "not-guilty verdict" in our legal case, not as an answer to our questions. Whether our goodness be imagined or real, it is beside the point. All is grace.
When Peter calls attention to the fact that the disciples have left everything to follow Jesus, Jesus promises that they will get it all back; but in a paradoxical way. We are reminded of the tale of Job, where, as we shall see, he gets it all back in a more simplistic way; an abundance of flocks, children, and servants. But the gospel complicates things. Jesus says, you will get "houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields," but he means that you get the church. The church will be your new family, your divine community. Yet, even then, he complicates it more: "with persecutions!"
So there is no justice, as we like to say. There is only faith in a God for whom all things are possible, the reality of the church, support in persecutions and, finally, the hope to come. You will get everything, with persecutions, "and in the age to come, eternal life." So, we might say, the resolution is only in God and in God's future. For now, we are left with the gift of grace, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of our Lord.
In the second lesson, Hebrews says: "Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need" (Hebrews 4:14-16). Amen.
____________
1. Archibald MacLeish, JB (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 14.
Last week, we left Job sitting in his ash heap, scraping away at his sores, and asking rhetorically, "Shall we receive the good at the hand of the God, and not receive the bad?" There, in the story, he demonstrates his stability, his steadfastness, or what the text calls his "integrity." He gives us a map of a moral world, which is so clear, so coherent, and so simple that it is impossible to get lost. All the paths lead to virtue.
However, Job's wife poses the question that challenges such a moral universe. "Do you still persist in your integrity? Why not curse God and die?" She offers the nihilistic option. Life is at best a burden and at worst an obscene joke. Certainly non-being is better than being. Just curse God and die!
Job, of course, does not choose that option. It says, "In all this Job did not sin with his lips" (2:10). The picture we have is one of the universe still intact through the heroic faith of a pious Job. He did not curse God with his lips; but the text says nothing about Job's heart.
Do you remember that, in the first presentation of Job, it said that he regularly made sacrifices on behalf of his children? Now, they had been presented as prosperous and content, so we assume that they were pious like Job. But Job offers sacrifices for them just in case they had "sinned and cursed God in their hearts" (1:5). It may be that here, where it says Job does not curse God "with his lips," the narrative leaves just a little crack in Job's piety -- for example, what about his heart? Whether through the efforts of the storyteller who decides to complicate things, or, more likely, an editor who thinks there is more to say, suddenly Job becomes the desperate, defiant Job of our text. Into that crack in the story gets inserted 39 chapters of debate.
First, although Job does not curse God, he does curse the day he was born. "Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, 'A man-child is conceived' " (3:3). In a deep and powerful expression of pain, Job spews curses left and right (3:3-10). Then he cries out the eternal question: Why? (Job 3:11, 12, 16, 20, 23).
Having gotten that off his chest, Job becomes the defender of his innocence. He will not buy the orthodox answers that his comforters give to the problem of suffering in the universe: perhaps it is only discipline? Happy is the one whom God reproves (5:17). Or maybe a warning not to presume on God's grace! But if it is punishment, bear it honestly. After all, "Can mortals be righteous before God? Can human beings be pure before their Maker?" (4:17). So bear it patiently, with the confidence that God will get it right in the end.
The Job of the narrative itself might accept these answers. The Job of the poetry will have none of it. No matter how much I groan, his hand is heavy upon me and I am tired of it (v. 2). I want to argue with him, I want to lay my case before him, I want to hear what he has to say. Job wants his day in court! We all know the burden of feeling that we have been judged unjustly. Whether it be a spat with a spouse, an argument over a traffic ticket, a debate over a course grade, a challenge to the IRS -- all we want is a hearing before a reasonable judge and, of course, we will be proven righteous.
Here, in Job's complaint, the legal language is everywhere. Job wants to plead his case (v. 4), fill his mouth with arguments, and contend with God. There it would be, in God's courtroom, that "an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted for ever by my judge" (v. 7).
The problem with Job's wish is not that he might be proven wrong in God's courtroom nor that the verdict might go against him. The problem is that the trial cannot even begin because God won't show up in the courtroom; God can't be pinned down like that. "Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!" (v. 3). But, "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" (vv. 8-9). In Hebrew, the four directions that one can go -- forward, backward, left, and right -- are the same words used for the four directions of the compass (north, south, east, and west). So, we could say, nowhere in the world is God to be found.
Such an inaccessible God seems strange for us who have been nourished on the idea of the availability of God. God is very near to us, Paul says, for in him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). People have always claimed to find God present in the created world (natural theology), in the common ordering of societies (natural law), or in the hidden recesses of the soul. In America, we are particularly fond of the image of God as our buddy, who, "though it makes him sad to see the way we live, he always says, 'I forgive.' "
Our text makes it clear, however, that things are not that simple. God is not at our beck and call. God does not show up in court just because Job wants to defend himself. In his wishful thinking, Job imagines that all would be made right if God would just explain himself. "I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me" (v. 5). (Job assumes that God would be a font of wisdom which would make sense of the world once again, if only he could learn from God.) Job is not afraid of a divine power play. "He would not batter me down in the greatness of his power. No! But he would just give heed to me so that we could get things straight" (v. 6 cf).
Just when we get used to a confident, rather defiant Job, suddenly he seems a desperate man who lives in dread. "God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me" (v. 16). Certainly that is an important observation about a God who lives in unapproachable light. The Old Testament is full of stories testifying to a dread of the almighty. One cannot look on the almighty and live! Whether it is Moses on the mountain, Elijah hiding in a cave, or Isaiah confronting God in a vision, clearly a God who is "wholly other," a God of majesty and might, ought to strike dread in our hearts. This is Martin Buber's Mysterium Tremendum.
Where does that leave Job? The last verse of our text is ambiguous. Job's situation is characterized as one of deep darkness; but is he overcome by it? The NRSV reads, "If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness could cover my face!" It is a statement of despair, a death wish. The NIV, however, translates it, "Yet I am not silenced by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face."
Continued defiance or despair? Those seem to be the two places we have to stand if we pose the issue in terms of human perceptions of justice. As humans, it is natural for us to perceive reality as controlled by some principle of retributive justice. We heard the psalmist this morning crying out for a balance: "Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil" (Psalm 90:15). Ultimately, there must be a right and a wrong, and the wrong must be punished and the right rewarded. If not, what sense is there? The Old Testament wisdom literature is full of that challenge. The psalms of lament cry out, "How long, oh Lord, how long?" However, once we put God in the dock and seek to make God conform to our reality, we have a problem. In our modern age, Archibald MacLeish has framed it in a limerick: "If God is god, he is not good; if God is good, he is not God. Take the even, take the odd."1
There will be no answer to this conundrum as long as the categories proposed by human reason are justice/injustice. The book of Job cannot answer the question that way, nor can the church. (Theodicy -- the eternal attempt to justify the ways of God to man -- seldom works.) Our other lessons for this morning ask different questions and point us in different directions. First, the gospel offers a difficult challenge. Jesus says, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:25). "Then who can be saved?" the disciples ask. Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible!" (Mark 10:27).
It is a reminder of the total objectivity of grace. It comes to us, not as a reward for our piety, not as a "not-guilty verdict" in our legal case, not as an answer to our questions. Whether our goodness be imagined or real, it is beside the point. All is grace.
When Peter calls attention to the fact that the disciples have left everything to follow Jesus, Jesus promises that they will get it all back; but in a paradoxical way. We are reminded of the tale of Job, where, as we shall see, he gets it all back in a more simplistic way; an abundance of flocks, children, and servants. But the gospel complicates things. Jesus says, you will get "houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields," but he means that you get the church. The church will be your new family, your divine community. Yet, even then, he complicates it more: "with persecutions!"
So there is no justice, as we like to say. There is only faith in a God for whom all things are possible, the reality of the church, support in persecutions and, finally, the hope to come. You will get everything, with persecutions, "and in the age to come, eternal life." So, we might say, the resolution is only in God and in God's future. For now, we are left with the gift of grace, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of our Lord.
In the second lesson, Hebrews says: "Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need" (Hebrews 4:14-16). Amen.
____________
1. Archibald MacLeish, JB (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 14.
