by CCW | 15 September 2013 15:35
In the Sunday Office of Morning Prayer, we begin to read from The Book of Job. Job is the proverbial man of troubles. “All God’s children got troubles,” as the old gospel song puts it, but few have as many troubles as Job. Yet the point of The Book of Job is not simply the extent of his troubles. The point is more about the nature of Job’s dealing with his troubles, especially his faithfulness which takes the form of wrestling with God and for God.
The Book of Job is really a kind of play, a drama of the possibilities of salvation and grace which arise out of the awareness of our utter emptiness. Job, like Abraham, is put to the test. But unlike Abraham, with Job we get to see the inner struggle. We get to see how things look like from the inside of the man of troubles.
It is not about a whine, a whinge or a whimper. But neither is it about lying down and letting God, the world, and other people simply walk all over you. In short, it is not about our fatalistic surrender to the seemingly arbitrary and bitter pointlessness of life. If anything, The Book of Job is a resounding testimony to the justice of God which cannot be reduced to human calculation, whim and demand. For no matter how things appear God’s justice runs and moves through all things, including our hearts. As such The Book of Job is a radical affirmation of the doctrine of creation.
The book begins with a prologue in which Job is presented to us as wealthy, having many sheep, camels, oxen, and she-asses, and as well-regarded in the community. More importantly, is how he is regarded by God as “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil”. It appears from every point of view that he has it made. But in what does our goodness and truth actually consist? (It is a question which Plato, too, had raised in his dialogue, the Euthyphro.) Satan challenges God about Job, suggesting that his piety, his attitude towards God, is only because he enjoys the good things of life, a kind of fair-weather happiness, a good-time kind of holiness, as it were. Just let things get hard and difficult and “he will curse thee to thy face,” Satan says, playing here the role of the tempter, the one who puts to the test.
God lets Satan have his way with Job. He loses everything, the victim of a series of disasters that are truly biblical in proportion – property, family, everything is taken from him and he is also afflicted physically. There is a complete reversal of his situation and circumstance. Afflicted with boils, he sits forlornly but reflectively on the ash-heap of life, the paradigm of misery and suffering.
At the end of the book there is an epilogue in which Job gets it all back and in spades, but the real interest of the book is in what happens in between which is an exploration of things from the side of the one who is suffering and who holds onto the idea of the transcendent truth and justice of God. Job refuses to accept the conventional wisdom that his sufferings are a direct result of some particular sin and that his former wealth is therefore equally a testimony to his being right with God. Job rightly sees that this ties God’s justice to a very narrow and all-too-human perspective. He sees that the equation of wealth and happiness with being right with God is fundamentally false. The poor and those who suffer are not simply the cause of own their misfortunes. That is too simple and too simplistic an equation and ultimately does justice neither to God nor to human experience. Job proclaims: “Naked came I from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”. It is a profoundly religious and philosophical point of view.
Job refuses to give in to the perspective of the so-called “comforters” who equate material prosperity with righteousness and poverty and suffering with sinfulness; a perspective which is found in other Scriptural texts. Job holds on to the deeper and profounder perspective that God is to be honoured and praised in good times and in bad. In holding on to a larger view of the justice of God and actually in demanding from God an answer, Job is answered. The answer of God to Job is a salutary rebuke, “where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God asks, and proceeds to quote much of what Job himself had said about the created order. In other words, we are reminded of the justice of God in creation and we are reminded, as Job is, that the perspective of God is larger and greater than what we can see and know. We are reminded of the Word of God in creation which the Law both presupposes and upon which it depends.
The answer reminds us of the distance between God and man and the limits of human experience and knowing. In a way, we have to discover our own emptiness before we can be truly open to the wealth and richness of God for us in our lives, a wealth and a richness which cannot simply be measured in material and practical terms. Our real freedom and dignity comes from being open to the grace of God in creation, like Job, and so to the greater justice of God who seeks our healing and our salvation which is far more than the heaping up of material possessions or even public honours and forms of recognition. God sees the heart. This makes all the difference. “Have you considered my servant, Job?” God asks Satan but the question extends to us as well. We are invited to a very real and intimate view of the heart of Job in his wrestle and struggle with hardship and suffering, on the one hand, but, even more, with the mystery and grandeur of God, on the other hand.
But we are also invited to consider how God sees Job and how God sees us. In the Eucharistic gospel for today, everything turns on Christ’s looking upon the suffering widow of Nain. Like Job, she has lost everything, first, her husband, and, then, her only son. “When the Lord saw her,” Luke tells us, “he had compassion on her.” The result is the marvel of her only son being restored to life and handed back to his mother. Death and Resurrection; suffering and joy. I would like to suggest that the view of Job that God gives us in The Book of Job makes possible that compassionate gaze of Christ. It opens us out to who we truly are, namely, how we are seen in God’s eyes as his well-beloved. God’s question about Job is not merely rhetorical. In being asked to consider Job we are being challenged to see ourselves and one another as God sees us and in so doing to be opened out to the greater possibilities of our humanity than what can be measured in worldly terms.
The Book of Job recalls us to the radical meaning of creation. Nothing exists and has any meaning except in the knowing love of God. In a very real sense, who we are depends radically on the compassionate look of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 16, 2013
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