Wisdom on Trial

Midweek Worship

Nineteenth Week after Pentecost

A Reading from the Book of Job:

There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.

One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the LORD. The LORD said to Satan, "Where have you come from?" Satan answered the LORD, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it."

The LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason."

Then Satan answered the LORD, "Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face." The LORD said to Satan, "Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life."

So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.

Then his wife said to him, "Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die." But he said to her, "You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?" In all this Job did not sin with his lips.

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 Wisdom Literature of the Bible comes in many flavors, the most common being that of Proverbs. Proverbs tells us that if we live well, do well, think well, then good things will follow. Righteousness is rewarded and wickedness punished, if not by divine intervention then as the natural consequence of one’s choices and actions. Study hard, work hard, keep your nose clean, and opportunities should open up for you, yes? That’s what they teach us in school. That’s how our parents raised us. But act the fool and—well, mess around and find out.

There is truth to this, isn’t there? Moreover, we want it to be true; it ought to be true. Good should be rewarded, and evil punished. We have a whole justice system founded on that concept, if at times it functions more in theory than in fact. There are arguments, good ones, that fairness is hardwired into human beings, part of our primate inheritance. There are benefits, after all, to us evolving as social animals.

But then Job comes along and throws a monkey-wrench into the works. Because Job—epically, eruditely, beautifully—dares to state the simple yet uncomfortable truth that bad things happen to good people. You can do everything right and still fail. And that isn’t weakness; that’s just life. Hardly seems fair, does it?

Much of the suffering in our world is caused by selfishness, stupidity, wickedness, ignorance, and fear. We inflict a lot of damage on ourselves, and a whole lot more upon our neighbors. Yet there is suffering even beyond all this. There is undeserved suffering, irrational suffering, unjust suffering. And no amount of karma or positive thinking or stoic resolve can ever really explain it away.

Bad things happen to good people. We know that it’s wrong, and we want to know why. This too is necessary for wisdom.

Job is a weird book, a mysterious book. It is not a history. It is not to be taken literally. Which isn’t to say that it’s not true. Job is a long and heartfelt theological meditation presented to us as poetry—complex, beautiful, nuanced poetry—all set within a framing story taken out of folklore. There seems to have been some older tradition of someone named Job as a righteous man. And indeed there are other works of Mesopotamian literature in which a similar figure stays faithful to his god throughout prolonged suffering.

But the book as we have it, this masterful work of poetry set to explore the meaning of suffering, dates to the Persian period, to the Exile and Diaspora; written in Hebrew yet strongly influenced by the Aramaic which had become the lingua franca of its day. Jesus’ native language, you may recall, was Aramaic.

There are no Judeans in this Jewish book: no Israelites, no Hebrews. It is set in the time of the Patriarchs, the age of Abraham, before the Twelve Tribes were anything more than a glint in Jacob’s mischievous eye. Even so, all the characters are anachronistically monotheists. They’re all pagans, so to speak, who believe in the One God. And Job himself is an archetype: not one literal person, but an example of a good man, the best man, who does everything right, who prospers in all he pursues, yet who suddenly, violently, loses it all.

Job is someone who never was and always is. There are always good people who suffer to no discernable purpose. In every age, every generation, sleazeballs get ahead while decent folk get screwed. That’s Job in a nutshell; or he’s them in a nutshell. The story starts off with the Council of Heaven, a biblical image taken from earlier Mesopotamian mythology, in which the gods of the cosmos—what we would call angels—gather within the court of the Creator of us all.

One of these angels, or gods, or what-have-you, is identified as the Satan, who is just now emerging as a character of his own within the biblical corpus. One could say that the Persians made the Judeans more aware of malevolent powers in the heavens. But this Satan—which means “accuser”—is not yet the devil as we know him. Rather, an accuser was a prosecuting attorney, someone who brought a legal case against a defendant before the royal court.

And the Accuser’s accusation flips our wisdom on its head. It’s not that good things happen to good people, he argues, but that people are only good because they get good things. Why shouldn’t a healthy, wealthy person praise God for it? Take all that away from them—their health, their wealth, kith, kin, and kine—and watch them one and all curse God straight to His face! So God decides to prove Satan wrong by letting him work against Job. Will Job still be a good man and true, once you take from him all that he has?

Now, this is admittedly problematic, and we might be tempted just to dismiss it as a bit of mythological imagery, given that this is a poem and a work of fiction. Yet it gets to the deeper question, to the heart of the matter: Why does God allow this? Why does God permit bad things to happen to good people when we all know that it’s wrong? And most of this poem, most of the book of Job, is going to be people attempting to justify just that—to rationalize injustice, and to justify our suffering.

But Job will have none of it. And neither, it seems, will God. That, I suppose, is what is most important to us, that for which we yearn the most: not so much to see God as to be seen by God; to know that He sees us, understands us, and cares for us; to know, in short, that we are loved and we are not alone.

Such will be the focus of our Vespers, over these next four weeks of Job.

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