Sunday 6th October 2024 – Pentecost 20 (Christ Church St. Lucia)
Readings: Job 1:1, 2: 1-10, Psalm 26, Hebrews 1: 1-4, 2: 5-12, Mark 10: 2-16
We’re introduced this morning to the Book of Job – and each Sunday this month the first reading will be from Job. In fact, if you’re doing morning prayer following the lectionary, you would have begun reading from Job during this past week. The Book of Job is a folk tale which none the less addresses squarely the problem, or issue of unmerited or unjust suffering and asks us to reflect on the universality of suffering. It’s an ancient tale, probably written in the late 6th or 5th century BC. Like some other stories of the Old Testament, Noah and the flood, for example, Job has some resemblances to other ancient stories from Egypt and Mesopotamia. There is an ancient Egyptian tale titled “A Dispute Between a Man and His Soul” for example. This perhaps illustrates how deeply this issue of suffering is woven into our human condition – and how a folk tale from two and a half thousand years ago can have something to say to us today. In our Bibles, Job follows the Book of Esther on which Shane preached last Sunday. There’s one significant difference between the two (apart from length – Esther has 10 chapters, Job has 41); and that is the part God plays. You may recall Shane mentioning that God doesn’t appear at all in Esther. In Job, God is there from the beginning. Indeed, the people who add these things up – or Bible browsers – tell us that in the Book of Job God is mentioned 143 times. The prologue, from which our reading comes this morning introduces us to Job. Then follow the dialogues between Job and his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar who visit him and accuse him of committing sin and tell him that his suffering was deserved as a result. Job responds and as he does radically restates the Israelite theology in the Hebrew Bible. He moves away from the pious attitude shown in the prologue and begins to berate God for the disproportionate wrath against him. He sees God as intrusive and suffocating; unforgiving and obsessed with destroying a human target; angry; fixated on punishment; and hostile and destructive.
The central issue in the Book of Job is ancient and modern at the same time. And that is how do we think about suffering that strikes without reason or warning, or seems unjust in some way? This is not just an intellectual question. It can be a deeply personal question as all of us will know. For Libbie and me, some time ago we faced the sudden deaths of our brother-in-law and his young daughter in a horrific road accident in New South Wales. We were dealing with our own grief, as well as that of the whole family as we arranged a memorial service which Libbie conducted. It can be a question for a community, or a faith community as we know all too well here at Christ Church as we journey with Shane and Janet in Shane’s illness – a ministry among us begun with great energy and hope is suddenly cut short. The central question in the Book of Job is “Does virtue or righteousness depend on a universe that operates by a principal of reward and punishment?” In Job’s world, it is assumed that the good will flourish and the evil suffer. This is at the heart of the Jewish theology that undergirds the Book of Job. Suddenly, everything is upside down. Job is good and he is suffering. Job has done everything right and should be receiving the bounties of divine promise, and yet he is destitute. The goodness-reward, evil-punishment, scheme of things isn’t working for Job, and it doesn’t work for many people today. Job we are told is a blameless and upright man who has done well in his life. He has a large family, and significant holdings of livestock. The actual numbers given in the verses not read this morning are over the top – they’re symbolic rather than actual. Job accepts all of this goodness as coming from God. Then he loses it all. However God decides to test him further (and the other question we don’t have time to go into today is how we square the depiction of God in the Book of Job with the depiction of God we have in the Gospel this morning; the God whose Son takes little children in his arms and blesses them – something for you to think about this week!). God sends Satan, or literally the Satan. Satan is not evil in the Book of Job, he is like a prosecutor or agent-provocateur, capriciously sewing discord. In answer to God’s question as to where he’s come from, Satan replies in all feigned innocence “From going to and fro upon the earth, and from walking up and down on it.”[1] You get the picture. Satan challenges God to test Job further, so Job is inflicted with a terrible skin disease. Job’s wife, angry and hurt, wants Job to curse God. “Do you still persist in your integrity?” she asks.[2] Well, Job does he takes the bad with the good, based on his belief that everything comes from the hand of God. Psalm 26 this morning highlights integrity which bookends the Psalm. Yet God seems totally uninterested in Job’s suffering – Job seems to be a pawn in a great game with God playing the part of a dispassionate observer. Is God really like this?
There are a lot of superficial attempts and popular (or populist) explanations around to try to account in some way for the problem of suffering and evil. Here are some:[3]
1) Punishment for sin; “you deserve it”. This is often invoked when there is natural disaster. Various people invoke divine punishment following a cyclone, or flood, or tsunami. People deserve it because of their toleration of immorality; it’s a few years ago now but I clearly recall accounts of a so-called pastor invoking divine punishment for the floods that hit New Orleans during Hurricane Isaac - they deserved it because of their immortality and toleration of homosexuality, he suggested. I’ve heard some comments of a similar ilk following floods and cyclones in Queensland, or Papua New Guinea when we lived there. How do small children and the elderly, or anyone for that matter deserve this? Libbie and I have been flooded twice – I don’t think we deserved it.
2) “You chose it” – some new age philosophies suggest that “we create our own realities” – everything that happens to us is a result of our thinking either in this life or a previous lifetime. Do people really choose domestic violence or cancer by their attitudes? We’re all to tragically aware of the suffering resulting from intimate partner violence. Studies show it causes more illness, disability and death than any other risk factor for women aged 25-44. Do people really choose such things?
3) “Karma” or “acts-consequences” – there is an exact, unbending correlation between behaviours and outcomes that shape our lives, whether as result of previous lifetimes or current actions. We reap what we sow. In my first parish in Mackay I had as a parishioner a two year old boy who in the space of 48 hours found himself in the Children’s Cancer ward of a Brisbane Hospital. Nearly 20 years later in one of those “god-incidences” I ran into his father in a lift at another hospital in Brisbane. After years of remission, the cancer had returned. What had he sown that he and his family would reap this?
4) “Stuff happens” – evil and suffering are simply realities serving no purpose at all …the evils of life are purely random. “Stuff” comes equally to the righteous and unrighteous, and I think we have to accept that sometimes it does. But is it true that we are completely at the mercy of capricious forces? Can we do nothing to avoid or prevent suffering? Must we give in to fatalism?
5) “God’s will” – God determines everything in God’s own wisdom for the saved and unsaved, blessed and not blessed. All things flow from the hand of God. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad, as Job says? Does God will the awful suffering visited upon innocent people in Gaza, Israel, the West Bank and now Lebanon, Ukraine, and in the Sudan?
6) “Education and testing” – our sufferings strengthen us and show our true character. Maybe. There’s a verse from Romans 5 quoted (out of context I think) about this; “We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” [4] So why should parents who watch helplessly as children die of incurable diseases, or care for profoundly disabled children for years extending into adulthood have to take that particular test? Many do so with enormous courage and grace, but why them and not others?
All these issues are very complex and there’s often no clear answer, as much as we may long for one. I think we’re called to continue to wrestle with the issues, as Job does. The reality is that people suffer, often suddenly, without warning, without any identifiable reason. Are we able to cope with this without quenching or lessening our faith, and hoping, almost against hope sometimes to find an experience of grace and a deeper knowledge of God? It’s no accident that our Gospel reading this morning ends with an expression of grace – Jesus blessing the children. There are lots of questions this morning and not many answers, but in time we’ll come to see as we read from the Book of Job this month that it ends in a wonderful and moving expression of God’s grace. There are no guarantees, suffering can strike at random, but there is a God of mercy and love, who is faithful. A God who aches deep within his heart when human hearts are breaking under sorrow’s iron rod.[5] God’s love and grace, not suffering has the final word – and that’s worth hanging on to.
© The Reverend Bill Crossman.
[1] Job 2:2
[2] Job 2:9
[3] From Bruce G. Epperly at http://processandfaith.org/resources/lectionary-commentary/yearb/2012-10-07/proper-22
[4] Romans 5: 1-5
[5] Together in Song No 153 “God is love, let heaven adore him” v2