Job 42

Those of you who have been following the lectionary will notice that I have, this week, abandoned the satisfying story of Hannah and Elkanah, who pray for a miracle and get it; in favor of revisiting the end of the book of Job, which we passed over several Sundays ago. In the book of Job, all the praying and sacrificing, all the careful attention to a faithful life does not, at first, net a miracle; but instead detours through a horrifying spiral of undeserved personal catastrophe characterized by worlds of hurt, and a universe of unanswered and unanswerable questions. Then, having raised some of the most profound questions a faith tradition can ask of itself and its God, the story inexplicably wraps up like a Hallmark movie-of-the-week, with Job installed in a shiny, picture-perfect new life: a “resolution” that, to most reasonably attentive observers of life-as-it-is, rings dismayingly false. It lets God off the hook, and us, too, when, in the end, Job receives not the answers his soul seeks but instead, more and better stuff, a second batch of children, a nicer house. I suppose the ending of Job should satisfy me: as surely our own culture is addicted to easy answers and quicky resolutions of insoluble problems….but I guess the ending of Job has always troubled me precisely because it seems to cater to the quick-fix mentality to which we are so susceptible. But does it?

After 41 chapters of striving, Job came to a place in his life where giving up and getting by seemed the only antidote to a world without answers, without meaning. He came to this ending after a long and weary struggle—but instead of dying there, he reached deep into the hidden places, into the still darkness of grief and the hard edges of not-knowing, and looked for something more. In an act of heroic, life-affirming courage, he set bitterness aside and said no to a life of scarcity, a life without hope. No, he said, I have spoken endlessly about those things I do not understand, and now I am ready to listen. I had heard of You before, but now I see you… and you are not the One I thought I knew. I am willing to try something new. Therefore, I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes.

I chose this morning to read again from the Jewish Publication Society’s translation of the book of Job, a translation whose meaning, I think, gets much closer to the heart of Job than does the traditional Protestant rendering of this text, which concludes: Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.

Much as I prefer the first—and I will address its meaning shortly—I suspect that the traditional Christian translations of this text get closer to the theology we have made Job’s story serve—an all-too-drearily familiar proclamation of crime and punishment, sin and redemption that, while downloading easily into our pocket-Palm theories of the way the world should work, don’t address the thorny problem of undeserved suffering, not by a long shot.

The problem is, when we let Job repent of his sin and “get saved” to a vision that his suffering was God’s just punishment, we’ve forgotten the point of the story: Job didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t deserve the catastrophes that befell him. And taking refuge in an epilogue that makes Job a sinner deserving punishment is a cheap out that destroys the astonishing integrity of this difficult, powerful piece; worse, it negates our own suffering and the suffering we see in the world. Job and we must not give up, but find a place where we can be “right” and God can be “right,” even if the answers we were seeking must wait. When there is no resolution we must look for other ways to live.

What can happen in our lives when we relent? Job doesn’t need to “repent,” if by repentance we mean admitting he was wrong. Job doesn’t need to “despise himself”—as too often, and so very sadly, victims of great suffering or sudden catastrophe devalue their experiences and themselves, turning to self-doubt and self-blame when no outside explanation can be grasped to make sense of what they have endured.

What needs to happen when we “repent” is not really about coming forward to the altar, weeping and feeling guilty, beaten down by the power and the silence of Almighty God. Rather, its best meaning is to be found in its Hebrew roots, in the word t’shuvah. To do t’shuvah, to repent, is simply to turn around and walk another way—to return.

It’s to say: this isn’t working. And if I don’t change, nothing will change.

When Job relented, he began to see God in a different way. He had heard of God—but he had never really needed a God who was not about answers, but was, instead, about relationship, even in the midst of the unanswerable. I had heard about you, he said, but now I see you. Now I feel you. Now I begin to sense what it might be like to be with you. Job relented about his insistence of who God had to be, and began then to experience God in a new way.

The story also tells us that Job’s relationship with his friends changed. Job saw God, and came to a new way of seeing himself. Participating in a world of the spirit that was marked the abundance of God, Job forgave his friends whose small values and smaller hearts caused them to fail in love, whose good intentions were overwhelmed by their fears, whose vision was dimmed by their failure to live in a spirit of generosity. They could not stay with Job where he was because they could not see God in his “distressing guise” of the poor, the suffering. Job had to: by necessity, he discovers that life is too short for judgment and not long enough to practice a quality of mercy that can transform even the worst of the world. So we witnessed when a Amish girl of twelve rose above the terror of being bound over to death and said kill me first, so that her friends might live. So we saw in the Amish families of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, who paused in the midst of their dreadful grief to inquire of an outsider about the wellbeing of the wife and children of the shooter, and to invite them into a fragile, emerging community of loss and redemption. Immersed in a life of thanksgiving that practices continually the rituals of God’s plenty, that suffering community had only few steps farther to fall into God with their anguish in order to begin to find their way home. Returning, we find a new way of being with those we love, and with those we ought to love.

Finally, the story tells us, when Job relented, when he acknowledged his losses and began to find a new way of being, God gave him twice as much as he had had before.

But what does that mean?

Think of someone who endures a profound loss, but who lives through it and into it, finding in trouble a more profound relationship with God and with others We look at their lives and marvel—how every new day is a gift to them. How a child born or brought to a couple after a long season of infertility and disappointment is twice as precious, it seems, than that child would have been before that struggle. A house burns to the ground with everything in it—and suddenly, each new possession is not merely a thing to be taken for granted, but a gift—twice as valuable as before. Job lost everything: and when he began to live again, he found life sweeter, and everything in that life, twice as good.

So rich was Job’s new life—with God, with his friends and family—that he was changed radically. Before he lost it all, he took what he had for granted, and accepted the status quo as the way things ought to be. But afterwards, he saw the world differently. On the way through suffering, Job learned that whatever he had lost, he still participated in the abundance of God. Having fallen into a life of scarcity he came to see that the way things were was not good enough, because life in the status quo does not reflect the abundance of a life in God. And so, the new Job made sure that the people whose lives he touched would have dignity and independence. Setting aside the custom and the law of his day, he learned about justice, and gave his girls—Jemimah, Keziah, and Kerenhappuch—imagine, girls who were named, and boys on the side!—gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. When we come through great suffering, and, relenting, find a new life, we see the world in a different way, and all our relationships are transformed.

In this room this morning, in our lives, there is deep loss, both known to us and secret—and in those losses, the knowledge that we are here for one another, God-with-us, we are going on for good into the abundance of God. In this room there is joy, and newness of life as we begin the gathering of kin and kindom for Thanksgiving.: there are babies to be born, marriages being made, lives being renewed, friendships emerging, new ways of living in the world to be learned and practiced. The gifts God gives us, after loss and grief, are twice as precious as before. The goodness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting for those who love God…. Let us pray:

It’s in every one of us to be wise

Warm your heart, open up both your eyes

We can all know everything without even asking why

It’s in every one of us…by and by.

So let it be. Amen.