Out of the Whirlwind

Midweek Worship

Twenty-First Week after Pentecost 

A Reading from the Book of Job:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind:

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

“Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’? Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?

“Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert? Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Job is a meditation on theodicy; that is, the problem of evil. If God is all good, and God is all powerful, then why does He permit evil to occur? The easiest and most common solution to this particularly intractable pistachio is to assert that evil does not, in fact, happen: that evil, in other words, isn’t really evil at all, but rather justice. Or karma, if you prefer.

Do good, get good; do bad, get bad. Right? That cleans things up nicely, at least in theory. It’s a much more comforting thought than the random chaos of a fickle and volatile universe. If something bad happens, we want to know that it was supposed to happen, that it was actually good that it happened, because that way we can tell ourselves that it won’t happen to us. Sickness, illness, tragedy, loss—we want it all to make sense. Otherwise we live every day beneath the Sword of Damocles.

Job is a fictional character. Some would disagree, but that is both the scholarly and traditional consensus. He’s a very good man—the best man, in fact—who has everything taken away from him in a bet between God and Satan. God says, “Isn’t Job great?” And Satan says, “He’s only good because he benefits from it. Take away the rewards for righteous behavior, and watch him go as bad as everyone else.” So God allows Satan, the prosecuting attorney of the heavenly court, to test this theory, to test Job, which of course he does.

And throughout it all, throughout the loss of wealth, health, children, hearth, and home, Job refuses to curse God, and also refuses to lie. He isn’t perfect, sure, but he didn’t do anything to merit all this, all this tragedy, all this loss. Job wants to present his case before God, to appeal to the manufacturer of the universe, because the moral workings of the cosmos are out of joint. Good things are supposed to happen to good people. Bad things are only supposed to happen to bad people.

And his friends agree. Job’s companions share his mechanistic view of the world, yet come to a different conclusion. They’re sure that the flaw must lie with Job, and that the solution has to be repentance. Confess your sins, Job, and be restored. But this is evil, not justice; cruelty, not karma. Much of our suffering is self-inflicted, but this? This just came down like a ton of bricks, like the falling hammer of Satan. In pointing out injustice, our narrator tells us, Job is not wrong. Job does not sin.

Now, 38 chapters into the book, God at last shows up to answer Job’s complaint. After wallowing for so long in divine silence, Job hears God speak from the whirlwind. And God says, “Gird up your loins! Come, contend with Me!” And the narrative launches not into some courtroom drama, which is surely what Job, and all of us, really, were likely to expect, but instead waxes philosophical and wondrous on the complexities and Brobdingnagian scale of the universe!

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” God rhetorically asks. “On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” It is a Creation narrative, you see, one of several scattered throughout the Bible, and you’ll notice it differs rather from the familiar accounts of Genesis 1 and 2. This is not an account that emphasizes the importance of human beings.

God speaks of cosmic constructions, of angelic hosts, of primordial monsters of land and of sea. And He describes the laying of boundaries, the setting of borders. “Thus far and no farther,” decrees the Lord, to waters and mountains and lightnings and clouds. And God speaks of animals, ravens and lions, fed from His own holy hand. Here are wonders and intricacies and orders of magnitude that Job cannot begin to comprehend. And in the face of all of this, he is struck silent and in awe.

There’s an old gag whereby Job asks God, “Why did my family have to die?” and God retorts, “How dare you accuse the inventor of the hippopotamus!”—the joke here being that God does not appear to address Job’s concerns, to answer his questions. But that may well be the point. Job is not the only one who gives his grievance to God. Everyone from sea monsters through star-songs to Satan himself have petitioned the Throne throughout the course of this book. He is God and Lord of them all.

And only the Lord has the wisdom to balance competing complaints. Job fears there is no reason for his plight, but we’ve been given the reason from the start: to prove before the gods above, before the very council of heaven, that man can be good. Righteousness exists on earth even without a reward; even if the only wages received for the right are to suffer and never know why. For God has won the wager: Job never gave in to despair. He never wavered, never lied, never cursed God and died.

And what’s more, he was wrong. Job was wrong about God being deaf to his complaint. For though we now know everything with which God must contend, none the less, He never lost sight of Job. God loved him, and even protected him, from the very start of the story. And Job was also wrong about the world. It doesn’t work the way that we expect. It doesn’t only reward good to the good and evil to the wicked. There is wickedness, as we have seen, even in the heavens, even before the Throne of the Almighty God Himself. The rot has gone systemic.

This world is not a machine of moralistic mechanism. It has complexities, intricacies, that we could barely hope to fathom. And there is chaos in it too: chaos within bounds, chaos within limits. Yet how else could there be freedom, or balance, or growth? Despite all appearances to the contrary, God is here and God does care. That’s all we really want to know, isn’t it? We don’t necessarily need all the hows and the whys. We just want to know that God is with us, and understands us, and loves us. If we have that, we have everything.

The world, my friends, is broken. Or at least let’s say, it’s not yet complete. God is working toward an end, a culmination, a new Creation. We hear it hinted at all throughout the Book of Job: hopes of a Redeemer, hope of Resurrection. The message of Job, in the meantime, is faith: not naïveté, not willful ignorance, not brute fideism, but faith: a loving, steadfast trust in God—that God is good, and God is here, always.

Everything else is anitya. Everything else passes away.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.