by CCW | 25 October 2009 21:06
“Have you considered my servant Job?” God asks. He has but have we? The Book of Job is a wonderful drama, almost a play, that bids us consider the relation of human suffering to the goodness of the created order and the goodness of God. Job has become proverbial for his sufferings, the so-called patience of Job. His sufferings, we might say, are ‘biblical’ in proportion. He suffers the loss of everything in terms of family and wealth and sits on a dung heap, afflicted by boils, on the one hand, and afflicted, too, it seems to me, by the so-called comforters, on the other hand. They have become as proverbial as Job’s patience.
The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them. There is the question, of course, about what it means to be a good person. For Christians there is no goodness in us apart from the goodness of God declared most fully in Jesus Christ. But the point is that the quality of the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. No. It is rather the setting in which virtue is shown and character is proved. The question is whether we will be defined by circumstances or defined by grace. By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us, come what may in the world around us.
One might think, for instance, of an Augustine, dying in his episcopal see of Hippo Regius in 430 A.D., even as the armies of the Vandals were besieging the city, about to obliterate the many years of work of theological and spiritual formation. It was the first of the invasions which would virtually obliterate any trace of North African Christianity. It would survive in the writings of its theologians, chief of which was Augustine, whose writings and thought continue to shape and challenge the Church.
Or one might think, perhaps, of a Dante, cast out of his beloved city of Florence and into the dark wood of exile. And yet, in spite of his exile – no, because of it – he produced the greatest epic of Christian pilgrimage, The Divine Comedy, “to lead those”, as he says, “in a state of misery to the state of felicity”.
The point, perhaps, is best summed up in Shakespeare’s As you like it, where the Duke, exiled to the forests of Arden, poignantly says:
Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
How hard and yet how necessary to know the “good in everything” and even more, that “sweet are the uses of adversity”. It was in the dark wood, Dante tells us, the dark wood of the world’s adversity and the soul’s perplexity, that “I learned a great good”.
The alarms and the adversities of our day rightly arrest our attention. The scholar Jerome, contemplating the sack of Rome in 410 A.D. by Alaric the Ostrogoth, wrote “the mind shudders at the thought of the ruin of our age”. The mind shudders. It is shaken into thought and reflection upon the greater mystery and wonder of God’s Providence.
To be defined by the circumstances of our day is to choose Fortuna – that ancient goddess of blind chance, Lady Luck. She, of course, goes merrily and gaily on her way, favouring first one and then another, but leaving so many more in the ruin of her train. You see, she doesn’t care. She goes merrily on her way. And if we choose to follow the revolving wheel of fortune and happenstance, ‘going with the flow’, as it is commonly said, then we shall be broken upon the wheel of her indifference. Broken as much inwardly as outwardly. And yet, perhaps, just perhaps, that might be the awakening of the mind to the Providence of God.
For God does care and, ultimately, even the adversities in our affairs belong to the lessons of his care. They may be learned from the pageant of history and from the parade of our own experiences. But they are best learned, I think, through the light of his Word illuminating a way of understanding. There is much that we can learn from Job, if we will consider him. Ultimately, we might come to see how God sees him and how he learns the greater goodness and grace of God which cannot simply be measured by the things which can and do happen to us outwardly.
In a way, The Book of Job explores the inner workings of the mind of Job in the face of the conventional wisdom about morality. It would be possible, I think, to see The Book of Job as the biblical counterpart to Plato’s Republic. There the question about justice only begins to be examined after we have seen the inadequacies of conventional views voiced by Cephalus and then Polemarchus and after the encounter with the sophistic Thrasymachus, whose opinion that justice is what is in the interest of the stronger, i.e., might equals right, undermines the possibilities of intellectual inquiry and is, as Plato has Socrates show, an incomplete and contradictory position. Rulers have to act in the interest or for the good of those over whom they rule.
Here in The Book of Job, the three comforters, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite represent the conventional morality which holds that if you do well you will be materially rewarded; if not then you will suffer misfortune. This is not only simplistic but wrong. It belongs to The Book of Job to challenge an older biblical perspective which is too simplistic and naïve and which ultimately does not do justice to God. The limitations of this view are very easy to grasp. For the corollary of the view that if you do well you will be rewarded is that being well off materially means that you must be right with God; and that if you aren’t well off materially, then you are not right with God. In either case, God’s goodness and justice is measured by our circumstances and situations.
The young man Elihu jumps into the argument much like Thrasymachus, full of a kind of angry energy but without much of an argument, just assertion.
I blame Milton. In his Paradise Lost, the claim is made about “justify[ing] the ways of God to men”. This understandable objective has the unfortunate consequence of somehow making God accountable to us. We forget and lose sight of the awesome otherness of God and of the larger dimensions of his justice which can never be simply equated with human justice. Leibniz’ Theodicy is a sophisticated attempt to negotiate those difficult straits between the goodness of God and the evidence of human suffering and evil in the world. And yet, it leaves itself wide open to Voltaire’s satire in Candide where the concept of philosophical optimism, expressed in the phrase “this is the best of all possible worlds”, leads to indifference about human suffering and injustice.
The real power of The Book of Job lies in Job’s wrestling with God and in his getting an answer. God speaks to him out of the whirlwind. And it is a marvelous answer that picks up on many of Job’s observations about the grandeur of God who cannot be measured by human considerations. God ultimately vindicates Job’s view that if he has done something wrong, that has to be named and shown as against the comforters who rest in the view that if you are suffering it is ipso facto because you are at fault. To consider my servant Job is to consider the tenacity of Job’s complaint and to see his humility when God responds. Even more, it is to gain a deeper perspective on the justice of God and the goodness of the created order. We learn, perhaps, the greater grace of God towards us in creation and in the Law without making the false step of collapsing God into his creation and into the Law itself.
“Where are you?” God’s first direct speech to us in The Book of Genesis is to ask a question to Adam and Eve. The question is asked to convict our conscience and to awaken us to the consciousness of our separation from God and the good order of his creation through our disobedience. God’s question alerts us to the long, sad and sorry tale of the human condition but in asking the question, it also alerts us to something which is greater than our own sins and follies. That something more is the grandeur of God and the justice of his will in creation and redemption. The challenge is to learn that truth. Job does. And again it is through God’s question. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
The marvelous litany of God’s will in creation that upholds and sustains the whole created order brings to Job’s awareness and ours that God cannot be held accountable to us and that his will in creation and for us is greater than what we can immediately know. In recognizing the limits of human knowing and human justice, Job stands on the threshold of the greater grace of God towards us made manifest in Jesus Christ. He becomes more, not less, teachable through the sufferings which he endures, sufferings which he does not simply accept but wrestles to understand. He is answered and humbled by God. And so can we, if we will consider Job.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor,
October 25th, 2009
Trinity XX, MP – 10:30am
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/10/25/sermon-for-the-twentieth-sunday-after-trinity-1030am-service/
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