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Rector's Reflection – 19 Pentecost, Proper 23
October 11, 2009
We've fast-forwarded from last week's reading from Job that told of the onset of Job's suffering.
In the intervening chapters, his friends have all anted up some reasons to explain Job's wretched state.
Job HAD to have been a sinner. Why else would this be happening to him? Repent, Job. God will
redeem you, Job.
Today, Job speaks, and what he says, in a nutshell, is "where's God?" "Wait a minute," Job
might be thinking, "Didn't God see what was happening to his children in Israel and didn't he deliver
them? Doesn't God want us to take care of widows and orphans and strangers? Isn't God a lover
of justice? So... where is the justice for me? Where is deliverance for me? Where are YOU?"
I always want to brush past this issue of the absence of God in the face of evil by saying that evil
is, after all, a human construct... a result of sinful, fallen people doing really bad things. And isn't God
always with the victims to uphold and comfort them? There's nothing incorrect about either hypothesis,
but they sure do allow me to evade the painful contradiction between the God of love and justice that
the Bible affirms and the God who's seemingly absent from Job.
I think it's safe to say that most Christian churches, at least in this part of the world, are
structured around optimism, mission, and success. We talk about bringing people to God. The
underlying assumption, then, is that we know where God is. But Job has had no luck finding God. He
wants to lay out his case. He wants to argue the fine points of his righteousness. How could God help
but give heed to Job's presentation? How could God not acquit Job? There's a problem, however, with
Job's desire for his day in court as he laments, "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."
The passage ends in darkness – Job's desire for it and our hearing it.
This part of Job presents some challenges that are always guaranteed to make my hair hurt. Job
believes in the core of his sore-covered being that he has been treated shabbily by God who, at least right
now, seems indifferent to injustice. And yet Job passionately believes that God is a just judge who can
be argued into making things right. Talk about a conundrum!
Job's story is startling, and even offensive, for some folks who treat God as the kindly giver of
all things bright and beautiful. But Job's story is comforting, at least to me, because, as Martin Buber
so nicely puts it, "Job's faith in justice is not broken down. But he is no longer able to have a singlefaith in God and in justice... He believes now in justice in spite of believing in God, and he believes in
God in spite of believing in justice. But he cannot forego his claim that they will again be united
somewhere, sometime although he has no idea in his mind how this will be achieved."
Job's steadfastness has been lived out by countless numbers of people through the ages who have
experienced the vilest of evils. It would have been easy – or at least understandable – for Job to dismiss
God as an illusion. It would have been easy – or at least understandable – for the early persecuted
Christians to dismiss God as an illusion. The faith of Job is the model for the defiant post-Holocaust
faith laid out in many of the works of Elie Wiesel, and it certainly would be understandable if Holocaust
survivors dismissed God as an illusion.
What I always end up taking away from the Job story is its absolute framing of the human
experience. I have heard folks, in the midst of awful tragedy, say "it must be God's will." I have known
people who simply abandoned their faith in the midst of tragedy. But Job shows me a third way. He
refused to suffer passively and he refused to walk away from God. He even proposed arguing with
God... something that may be healthy for all of us now and again. But most of all Job shows me that life,
from early on in the Garden, has always been a series of ups and downs and that God's justice delayed
is not God's justice denied.
Susan+
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