God
Affirms Job’s Righteousness
Job 1:1-22
Pentecost 1 – June 7, 2020
5-week series on Job
Have all heard of Job, talk about someone with the patience of Job
· See that here in chapter 1
o Job presented as a righteous man – “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil…”
o And “blessed” beyond measure – 7 sons and 3 daughters, so many sheep and camels and oxen, donkeys, servants – “the greatest of all the people of the east”
o Material blessing as indication of God’s favor, in common thinking
· Yet despite his character, Job will suffer terrible loss and grief
o God with the heavenly court – and ha-satan – the title of “the Accuser” (not Satan as in the temptation of Jesus or “the devil” as we may now understand it…)
o Ha-satan questions whether Job will still be so righteous if everything is taken away from him, and God agrees to this experiment!
§ Important to recognize that this is not a historical account or biography
§ More of a folk tale (once upon a time…); Job as a mythic figure; Uz is not a geographic location we can pinpoint
§ This is setting the stage for exploration of undeserved suffering that comes in following chapters
· And so we see The Accuser causing terrible tragedy in Job’s life
o One loss after another, in such quick succession that Job can barely catch his breath
o Oxen and donkeys carried off and servants killed
o Sheep and servants burned up (lightning, aka fire of God)
o Camels carried off and servants killed
o And finally, the worst blow – the sudden death of all of his sons and all of his daughters
o (and chapter 2 finds Job afflicted in his own body – with sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head)
o And Job, “patient” Job, hears all of this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news
§ And he tears his robe and shaves his head – ritual signs of grief
§ And then falls on the ground and worships
· “In all this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing” (hence the reputation for patience and faithfulness in the face of terrible suffering)
Why do bad things happen to good people?
· One of the core questions in the book of Job – and in the human experience!
· In chapter 2, friends will come and sit in silence with Job in his suffering, for 7 days and 7 nights
o And then they’ll pull out their theology that good things happen to good people, and if bad things happen, that must mean that the person did something bad to deserve the bad things
So common for people to assume that suffering is somehow caused by the person who is suffering
· That if a person had only made different choices or acted differently, the outcome would be different
· We know this isn’t true when we stop to think about it, but sometimes that is an underlying, unexamined belief we carry around with us
· When undeserved suffering happens, there’s so often a part of us that looks for how the person was somehow responsible for it, there is an impulse to “blame the victim”
It’s been a hard year for the world, a Job kind of year
· So much has happened that I’m not sure I even remember it all – Australian wildfires, and then the COVID-19 pandemic spreading around the world, and the economy taking a nosedive – and then warnings of murder hornets (which seem to have subsided?) and then finally in recent weeks, delayed news of the killings Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, followed by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers – and the subsequent protests and uprising at the injustice of racism that pervades our country’s history and our present day reality
· That has left many of us unsettled and looking for someone, something to blame
· And I have to say, church, since I’m speaking to my own congregation and my own denomination that is predominantly white denomination – that as white people, when such things happen, we have a tendency to look for fault in the victim – if they had cooperated with police, etc., the situation wouldn’t have ended in their deaths
o There is such a thing as undeserved suffering, as innocent suffering – but we tend to have a retributive theology that says that good things happen to good people, and bad things only happen to bad people (even though we really do know that that is not the case! But it runs deep despite ourselves…)
o And we can find ourselves tempted to be like Job’s friends (as we’ll see a little bit in the coming weeks) – to accuse the suffering one, to encourage them to ‘fess up to what they did wrong so that healing can come
But what we see in this story of Job (not necessarily in just this introductory chapter, but in the book as a whole – so you gotta “come back” for the next 4 weeks to get the whole picture!) – is that ultimately, God affirms Job’s righteousness, Job’s integrity, Job’s innocence in this whole scenario
· That doesn’t even begin to get into the question of why God allows bad things to happen to good people
· But we will see that God does not fault Job for his honest expression of grief and anguish
o And as we move through these readings, we will see that God honors Job for crying out and questioning God and lamenting his situation, for the ways that he pushes back against the idea that he has somehow done something to deserve his suffering as punishment for some un-repented-for sin
And that is still true today – on a personal level or at the societal level that we see happening around us and on the nightly news
· There is a time and a place for people to cry out against undeserved, unjust suffering
· And we are experiencing that now as a nation – as people raise their voices against centuries of oppression and violence and injustice
o It is hard to witness, as we come face to face with the reality that the “system” is set up to privilege some at the very real suffering expense of others
· And yet God honors those who cry out in honesty, in struggle, in a desire for answers
And what we all long for in those moments of questioning and wrestling and struggling to understand is someone to come alongside us and just listen and to hear our stories, without advice or blame or constructive criticism about how we got ourselves into our messes and how we might get ourselves out
· The tearing of robes or shaving of heads or protesting on streets demanding justice and change are all ways of giving voice to deep grief and pain
· And God hears our cries; Ultimately, we know that God sends Jesus to be with us and with all those who suffer, to identify with us in our pain
· And God creates us with the ability to learn and grow and empathize with others in their pain, to sit in silence to listen and learn, to help each other know that we are not alone, even in the most painful of times
· May God use us in these times to share love and support and empathy with those whose suffering is too much to bear.
Amen.
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