5th Sunday God sustaining me through life

The readings today are all really good, I think.  That is fruitful.  All kinds of stuff can be said about all of them.  I'd like to focus on the first one because, as I said a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about the Book of Jonah, the Book of Job has a really odd but privileged place in the Bible. Some people think it's the most profound book in the Bible; both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Certainly, as literature, it is as good as any Shakespeare.  If you haven't read Job, you really ought to.

 

But what I want to talk about is the end of the Book of Job. Some background: the Jews had a tradition, embodied in their wisdom literature, which held this view of the world: that, if I am truly faithful to God, and not in some kind of self-seeking, "Let's make a deal" way, but honest to God, faithful to God, then God will sustain me through life in any of a number of ways.  Of course, at the time this book was written, that was very important because the Jews had no notion of anything happening after death.  They were convinced that when you died, you were dead and that was the end of it.  So, this business of God sustaining me through life had major significance.

But then, one smart Jew looked up and said: hey, it doesn't work that way. Life is not made any more pain-free, and certainly my path through life is not lubricated by my fidelity to God.  So, he cast around and found an old Babylonian legend about a good man who suffered all kinds of catastrophes and created a Jewish version of that story and that is the Book of Job. If you remember, Job was prosperous.  He had all kinds of kids, fields, livestock.  As the story is put out, Satan not the devil but rather someone who just kinds of pimps God arrives. God is looking at Job saying "Look at him.  Such a sweet fellow.  Job is so nice and good and faithful.”  And he was.  Not in some cheap way.  So to get this story underway, they had this Satan figure saying “yeah, but... Take away all his prosperity and see what happens.”  So what follows is this extraordinary set of disasters.  All his kids are killed, all his flocks are taken away, his fields are burned, and he is left there, ulcerated, sitting on a dung heap with his wife bitching at him saying "Curse God and die."

 

In other words, the author played this to the hilt.  They created the most grim possible alternative within which to confront the wisdom tradition. And then, three so called comforters come, Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, later joined by a fourth, Elihu. Basically what they say in a series of very long speeches to Job is that they feel very badly upon seeing him.  They come and at least have the good sense to keep their mouth shut for a week.  They sit and look at this man in misery, but then they start.  “Job your problem is....”  What they do in a great variety of ways, with a whole lot of words, is to roll out the old wisdom tradition.  “You have done something wrong.  There is something wrong with you Job.  Between you and God you have failed some place.” And Job, of course, protests and protests and protests.

 

But, Job is split.  This is both the beauty and the drama of the text.  Job buys the old wisdom tradition and yet his experience counters that.  Then, in an extraordinary set of two or three chapters, God appears and starts asking Job all sorts of questions.  About what? About nature.  About the rain and wild animals, etc.  Of course, Job is unable to answer any of the questions.  The point of that massive inquisition, which goes on for pages, is very simple.  Job if you don't know how the natural world in which you live works, then what makes you think you can understand human existence, and, above all, Me and my relationship with you.  You cannot put life into some kind of nice sort of category, where for everything there is some kind of moral calculus whereby everything squares off. 

So that's the Book of Job.  The part I want to focus on is one of the last six verses.  God comes up, then Job says “I repent ... I heard of you with my ears but now I see you.  See who you really are and now I change my mind.”  God is not at all disturbed with Job, although Job rants against his life.  He never sins against God in all this ranting.  The ones with whom God truly is angry are the comforters.  And this is of course, the crux of the matter today, for us. 

 

Why was God not angry with Job and why was God furious with these three men? Because, their ideas of how the world ought to go were so firmly in place, even their ideas of God, were so solid and so complete, that their ideas blinded them from seeing what was really going on.  It inured them from seeing Job, really, as he was, and from seeing God as She was.

 

It's a stunning, stunning thing.  One of the beauties of the Jews is that they are constantly ready to revise themselves in light of real life.  In other words, their ideas don't become so immutable, even their theological ones, let me point out, because that's what we are talking about.  This is theology versus theology.  They are so faithful to God, that they are ready to revise themselves, and put out this outrageous book which clearly contradicts pages and pages of the Book of Deuteronomy, of the Book of Psalms, of the Book of Proverbs, of the Book of Wisdom.... That's glorious, I think.  The God of the Jews is clearly the God of the truth.  No truncation or circumspection in regard to the truth, circumscription of the truth, will do.  No matter how brutal that truth may be.  That's where God is.  God is on the side of the truth.  God is on the side of our lived lives, not our lives that we are so out of touch with because we know too much, or think we do.  Of course, you have to keep in mind that the Jews chose to include this book.  This book was canonized by the Jews, which means they said... that's right.  That's good stuff.  That's what we're all about. That's what God's all about.

In other words, the Book of Job does not just stand as some great revisionist document for the whole of the Hebrew bible (it certainly does that) but it is clearly to stand for us Christians as a great cautionary tale as well. 

 

There were efforts at the Second Vatican Council precisely to de-ideologize Christianity by the Council’s emphasis on reading the signs of the times.  By being faithful to one's own world and one's own life and then seeking God out of that fidelity.  Let's face it folks.  That's the only place that God is going to be found.  Only in the truth.