Somehow You Live
A Reading from the Book of Job:
Then Job answered the LORD:
“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before.
Then there came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and they ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money and a gold ring.
The LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job's daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers.
After this Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children's children, four generations. And Job died, old and full of days.
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.
The ending of the Book of Job strikes a discordant note with a lot of readers, for indeed the whole scope of the story has been an attempt to address the perennial question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” And last week we got about as close to a straight answer as God is likely to give us. The world, the cosmos, the multiverse—however vast Creation happens to be—is beyond the scale of our minds to comprehend, not only in size but in complexity.
And, according to this book at least, humans are not the center of this universe. That doesn’t mean that God cares for us any less; scale is only a problem for finite minds, whereas God’s attention and compassion are infinite. But it does mean that we are not the only children of God. There are angels and animals, sparrows and stars, quarks and galaxies; and God knows them each by name. Only God is wise enough, and loving enough, to balance their competing claims.
Furthermore, we as readers, we as listeners, have found that evil is not merely some human concern. The Satan, the Accuser, the instigator of all the tragedy of this entire book, stands before God and the sons of God within the council of heaven. The rot is systemic. Sin goes all the way up. And so there are often principalities and powers at work in a corrupted cosmos who barely deign to notice what we hairless apes do here below. We are the victims of unholy fallout, as it were.
Job may be a fictional character, but his critique of the morality of his day—the notion of a mechanistic moral universe where only good things happen to good people and bad things only happen to bad people—is quite real, and quite incisive. It is a fallen world, Job implies, a broken world, yearning for justice, yearning for more, yearning for a New Creation. Yet through it all, God is with us. He sees us, knows us, loves us, cares—and will never abandon us. We shall surely never be alone. And isn’t that what we really wanted to know all along? Isn’t that what truly matters?
Yet here at the end, we have the restoration of all that Job has lost. His fortunes are returned to him twofold, payment in double being the common penalty for theft. And he gets sheep and camels and oxen and donkeys, wealth beyond imagining. Even his family is restored to him—or at least, he gets a new family, new children, new heirs to his legacy, to keep his name alive. And he lives 140 years—beyond the biblical limit of 120 established in Genesis—to see four generations of his descendants. Way to go, Job. Way to hang in there to the end.
But doesn’t this undermine the whole message of the book? Doesn’t this, at the home stretch, reaffirm the mechanistic moral universe of “do good, get good; do bad, get bad”? Perhaps. Perhaps. We all do love a happy ending, don’t we? It’s so much more satisfying.
The lesson of Job is that God, as well as His Creation, is infinitely beyond us, infinitely beyond our understanding. Yet it affirms that God is good, and God is wise, and that while things may be a mess here below, God is working toward a good end. Or perhaps I should say a new beginning. As I mentioned last week, there are hints and hopes throughout the book, yearning for new birth, for life after death, for a Savior to set right all the wrongs of this benighted sphere.
Job never claimed that God was unjust. And God never claimed that Job was wrong. There is an implicit assertion here that God is ultimately in control, that God’s ways, while mysterious, while far different from our own, are benevolent and just. There is a sense in which Job assumes a happy outcome beyond a mysterious and far distant horizon. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, right? Transcendent good at the last erases temporal wrongs.
But there’s another way that we can take this ending, another lesson found within it. And that is simply this: Life goes on. Job’s family is not instantaneously restored to him. He goes on to have more children and watch them grow, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. This does not erase the losses he has suffered. Yet with the passage of time, we find so much more to life. The cycles of birth, death, and new generation roll on regardless of our concerns about justice or theology. And yes, there is terror. And yes, there is beauty. And yes, there is wonder in it all. All things pass away, be they good or ill.
It may seem that tragedy is far too great to bear, that we could never survive it, never get over it. But life goes on. Somehow you get up in the morning. Somehow you live.
So much in this world is anitya; which is to say, it is transitory, ephemeral. All our things, all our positions or possessions, our homes and our relationships and our personalities and our worldviews, they’re all fleeting, all changing, always in flux. Only God endures. Only God is eternal—only God, and creatures who are made in His Image: people and angels and animals, who can one and all pause, and wonder, and say, as does God, “I am that I am.” Beyond the body, beyond the mind, our spirit rests in God. And so shall we abide.
No good thing is ever truly lost in God. He endures. Love endures. All else passes away. But have no fear, little flock. For the God who called us forth from nothing shall call us forth again: forth in resurrection, forth in eternal life, forth to outlive death. Then shall every wound be healed, every tear wiped away, every child raised from the earth, and every injustice miraculously, impossibly, and finally set right.
This is the hope that sustains every Christian. This is the hope that sustains holy Job.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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