JOB, MEET JESUS

Job 1:1, 2:1-10; Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12

I want to be honest with you and tell you up front that I will be breaking some rules in this sermon. You may not be aware that preachers are supposed to follow certain rules. One of the rules is this: If you are a guest preacher, don't preempt the regular pastor. And that's the first rule I'm breaking today. I'm going to talk a little bit about Job. Meanwhile our pastor, Jeff Vamos, is currently co-teaching a seven-week Bible study about Job. But before you think I'm rude, stupid, or rebellious, I can tell you that Jeff has actually encouraged me to go ahead and preach an introduction to Job today. The other option was to preach from the gospel of Mark about divorce....

"There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job." To the ancient Israelites, that was like saying "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." It's a once-upon-a-time opening line, inviting the hearers into a shimmering, legendary world. In this seemingly fairy-tale world we meet Job, a blameless and upright man who feared God and turned away from evil. And Job has reaped the benefits of obedience, building tremendous wealth and virtue. Everything we learn about this character Job is almost too good to be true. Even God takes pride in Job, boasting in the heavenly court about the integrity of his servant Job. This man is the poster child for righteousness. So he deserves the blessings of a prosperous life, right?

Enter the Accuser. This is not the Satan portrayed centuries later as a fallen angel or a kind of anti-God. And here I'm going to break another rule, the one that says not to throw obscure foreign-language words into your sermon. But this one seems important. The Hebrew word here is ha'satan: the Accuser. Satan is not a personal name; it describes a role. In the story this Accuser is a strange servant of God, one who converses with God in heaven. And the Accuser lives up to his description! He accuses Job of trusting God only because he enjoys God's blessings. In the passage that Jill just read, the Accuser says that destroying Job's family and his possessions isn't a big enough test. "Make him suffer in his own body, and then he'll definitely curse you!" says the Accuser to God. Although God sounds reluctant about it, God allows the Accuser to destroy Job's health.

Here's where you and I can really feel Job's pain. He doesn't know anything about this heavenly banter going on somewhere far away. All he knows is that everything he once enjoyed has been wrenched away from him. All his joyful children. All his wealth. All his health. And Job knows that he did not invite all this trouble by sinning against God.

Doesn't it just irritate you? It feels like something has gone horribly wrong here. The story simply isn't fair! If you make good choices, you will find blessing. If you live in peace with God and your neighbor, peace will enter your life as well. If, on the other hand, you live a life of violence, greed, destruction, or even thoughtlessness, we have the idea that those actions will come back around and haunt you. How many times have we said, "Yeah, he had that coming to him"? This kind of morality is common sense. And it's like the eastern idea of karma, that the sum of everything you do ultimately has a positive or negative effect on yourself and on the world. The same idea is implicit in the golden rule. Treat others as you would have them treat you implies that the results of your actions will come back to you for good or ill.

We are a lot more comfortable if we can find reasons for suffering. And there's some truth in that perspective. Wisdom would teach us that living rightly brings about its own rewards. Isn't that what the book of Proverbs is all about? Most of the time we want to live in a moral universe, where good is rewarded and evil is punished. And much of the Bible points in that direction. God gives Israel the law in order to help them live righteously and bountifully. When they fail to keep the covenant, Israel drifts away from God and starts heading into disaster. Sometimes people do bring judgment and suffering upon themselves.

But here's Job, the most upright person imaginable. He trusts and respects God, and he scrupulously avoids hurting the people and things around him. And by the end of today's passage this blameless character Job is sitting in the ashes out at the town dump, scraping his sores because he's got a really nasty and scary skin disease. Whoever wrote the book of Job really puts a fine point on this problem of suffering. Job sits in the ashes refusing to curse God, but also refusing to accept that his suffering was punishment for something he had done. Job knows that a simple good=reward, bad=punishment worldview can't explain his predicament. His conscience is clean but his life is wildly painful. Throughout the book Job continues to demand an explanation from God.

Our moral wisdom reaches its limits when we encounter Job's predicament. What was God thinking to allow this to happen? How can it be that an innocent person should suffer so much? Why should I work so hard to be good if I might get punished anyway? And yet we also know how true this story is. We all know Job. We work with Job. Job lives three doors down the block. Job is always on the prayer list. I have a young friend who's the most Job-like person I know. Not long ago, within a span of just months, this man watched his car spontaneously burn up, he was diagnosed with cancer, he broke his neck in a car accident, he found out his wife had multiple sclerosis, he lost a close friend to suicide, and more. I'm not making this up. It sure reminded me of Job. My friend's suffering scared me, made me angry. My friend didn't deserve it! And it made absolutely no sense to me.

I have no doubt that each of you could tell stories about inexplicable suffering in your own life, or in the lives of people you love. Somehow God seems to allow this to happen in our world. Job's predicament might be one of our biggest fears. And there's no way to be safe from the possibility. I don't have an explanation for it. But with Job I do want to know this: Where is God when we are suffering? In Job's story, there is a big gulf between God's heavenly court and Job's earthly experience. For most of the book, God seems absent and silent while Job waits and defends himself to his friends.

One more rule of conventional wisdom for preachers is that you should pick one biblical text and preach on that. I'm about to break that rule, too. Because the Hebrews passage Rich read seems so relevant to this very question. What does the story of Jesus have to say to the story of Job?

I think it's this: Jesus is the one who bridges that tremendous gulf between God's reality and our reality. I picture Jesus walking to Job's ash heap and just sitting down with him. That's what Jesus does, after all: meets us where we are. Hebrews describes Jesus as "the exact imprint of God's very being." And Jesus brings God's very being right down into our unfair, suffering world: "for a little while [he] was made lower than the angels." In Jesus God speaks a word of personal, human revelation. God is with us. We can't see the future. We can't grasp how innocent suffering fits into the world. But Hebrews says "we do see Jesus"! Jesus, who was one of us.

The Accuser stands and asks if Job would still love God even after being stripped of everything. But what's most crucial to us isn't really whether Job can pass such a test. How about this test instead: Would God still love us if we humans stripped God of everything? The answer from the life of Jesus is yes. Hebrews preaches that God does not simply stand by in heaven and watch the suffering of God's people. Rather, through Jesus God actually takes part in the grief and shame of human brokenness. Jesus meets Job--and us--as a companion and fellow sufferer, someone who was made like us in every way, subject even to death. That's a God worth trusting and following. "Believers [can] not be expected to walk in the steps of one who [has] not walked in theirs" (Fred Craddock).

The two stories of Job and Jesus show the unbreaking bond of love between God and humanity. God loved Job enough to brag about him. When Job's life turned awful, there was no easy answer for him, and yet Job relentlessly trusted God. And when Jesus went through suffering and death, he did it for love of us. He became the pioneer of our salvation. Because of that act of love Jesus was crowned with glory and honor at God's right hand.

So the saddest thing in the world isn't when bad things happen to us inexplicably. That is sad, to be sure. But it would be sadder still if we stopped believing that God is there with us in our suffering. Sometimes we feel Jesus with us in the messy situations of our lives. Sometimes we don't. But we can always trust his promise that he is binding us into one family as sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ, all of us sustained by the overwhelming love of God our Father.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

 

October 8, 2006