Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on 20 October, 2024, the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost.
Readings: Job 38:1-7 (34-41); Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37B; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45
Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? (Job 38: 36-37)
Three Sundays in a row now, we have heard readings from the Book of Job, which, as you may have noticed, I have been studiously ignoring. Partly I’ve been avoiding Job because the gospel readings, as beating heart of our faith, should command our attention. But, if I am honest, I’ve also been avoiding it because it is a difficult, even mysterious book of the Bible. Like God speaking from the whirlwind, the book of Job does not give up its secrets easily. Even so, what I hope to say to you today is that for all of its difficulty, Job encourages us with the promise that our lives, as painful and as incomprehensible as they may seem to us, are held in and surrounded by the divine love and wisdom of God
As I noted, the Book of Job is a difficult and challenging book. It begins with Job, a genuinely upstanding and good man whom God loves and even admires. However, God allows Job to be put into the hands of Satan, who appears to function here more as a courtier of God than as the demonic figure known to Christians. God allows Satan to test Job, thus introducing the mystery of why God allows good things to happen to bad people, a problem known as “theodicy”.
We all wonder how certain things can be allowed to happen, and not just war or famine. A beloved and dear person comes down with a terrible disease, or a sweet child is killed in an accident, and we naturally reach for the question, “what did they do to deserve that?"
That question hangs over the middle part of the book of Job. His three friends, while well-meaning, try to persuade Job that he has somehow done something wrong and is being punished by divine justice. Job stubbornly asserts his innocence, and insists that he has done nothing wrong. Last Sunday, we heard Job say that if only he could get to speak with God, then he could prove that there was some miscarriage of divine justice: “There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge” (Job 23 :1-9, 16-17). At the same time, Job doubts that he will ever get his day in court, because he does not know how to find God: “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!”
So the first thing we can say about today’s reading that is encouraging is that God shows up. God does speak to Job, although Job does not get the day in court because God says, in effect, that God does not owe Job an explanation. Essentially what follows is a longer version of what God says to the prophet Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, (neither are your ways my ways” (Isa 55:8-9). But, as they say, tone matters. While God begins by telling Job to “gird up your loins” (essentially telling him to buckle up), I think we could imagine God speaking to Job in several ways.
One way would be for us to imagine God speaking imperiously and arrogantly to Job, in the sense of “how dare you question me?” as if God was some toxic boss. We could, but that would validate images of God that aren’t helpful to our faith lives. Another way to imagine the voice from the whirlwind is to hear it as a voice that is challenging but also amused, perhaps even following phrases such as “Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements - surely you know!” with a gentle chuckle. Perhaps I have in mind some of the passages from CS Lewis’ Narnia book, where Aslan speaks in a way that is majestic but also kindly. And if Aslan does show up in Narnia when he is needed, so too does God show up. God has heard Job’s plea for an audience, but God is not going to give Job an easy or satisfying answer.
We ony get a sense of it in today’s first lesson, but God’s speech in these last chapters is replete with nature imagery. These chapters range from the stars in the heavens to the depths of the sea, to the calving of mountain goats and deer to the strength of horses and the farsightedness of hawks. There is even an entire chapter (Job 41) dedicated to Leviathan (whales), handiwork of which God is especially proud. Like our psalm today, the effect of these chapters is to celebrate the complexity of grandeur of creation. Forget for a moment that it is God who is speaking, and we could be listening to a nature documentary as narrated by a Carl Sagan or a David Suzuki.
But the difference between these last chapters of Job and a nature documentary is that here, God is the creator and the architect of all: from hawks and whales to stars and galaxies (as well acknowledge in our Eucharistic Prayer). In other words, nature is creation and creation is full of God’s presence, and we must trust that God is both present and benign. Note that God does not feel the need to explain Job’s current misfortune, any more than God needs to justify earthquakes and cancer cells. It is enough for Job, and perhaps for us, to know that we not are alone in a random and meaningless universe, where our cries go unheard and where our suffering can never be redeemed. At the end of the day, the consolation of the Book of Job is that God is present and God shows up.
Let me finish with some thoughts how the Book of Job speaks to us as Christians, and it’s simply this. If the God of the universe is present to Job in whirlwind, how much more present is Jesus, the Son of God, present to us? Take today’s gospel. James and John, who Jesus nicknamed the “Sons of Thunder” (Mk 3.17) want the God of the whirlwind. They want to be raised up in the whirlwind, to have seats in the heavens and to be masters of the unverse, something that Job never dreamed to asking for. And instead Jesus tells them that the way of God is to serve others.a message of humility that we could never reconcile with the God of the whirlwind.
Sometimes, mostly around Christmas, we talk of the Incarnation, the mystery of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Job invites us to consider that mystery from another angle, to think of God stepping out of the whirlwind and to sit with us and console us, as Job’s friends tried but failed to do. The God of the whirlwind felt no reason to explain human suffering. The Son of God comes to be with us, in a way that Job’s friends could never do for Job. In his humility the Son of God, the Son of the Whirlwind, accepts service and suffering on our behalf, so that he might save us.
The Book of Job is thus I think an important part of our Christian Trinitarian faith. it tells us that the God who made the heavens and the stars was also born under one star in Bethlehem for our sakes. It tells us that while the universe may seem vast and indifferent to our loneliness and suffering, we are not in fact alone. The universe is full of God, God is with us, and God loves us, for the God of the Whirlwind is also the Lamb of God.
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