Terror and Wonder: God’s world in the Book of Job

Choral Evensong, Sunday 11the July 2021 - Angela Tilby

Job 4.1: 5.6-end 

Words from our first reading: ‘Human beings are born to trouble, just as sparks fly upward’.  

When I was teaching at Westcott House in Cambridge we had a visiting Archdeacon from one of the world’s most thriving Anglican provinces. He had come for a time of reflection. After a few weeks he began to tell his painful story. His wife had been driving with their five children when a lorry sheared over and hit the car killing them all. He was, not surprisingly, numb with grief. But what had driven him to despair was the spiritual counsel offered by some of his fellow clergy, who had told him that the accident was his fault. It surely would not have happened if he had been right with God. He should examine his conscience and repent. But the effort had broken him. So he had come to get away in a place where he would not feel judged.  

I don’t know happened next except that I believe he stayed in England and continued his ministry here.  

His story raises huge questions. Is God just? Why do the innocent suffer? Does God rule the universe by the principle that you get what you deserve? Often the Bible seems to suggest that he does. If we do our bit, God will do his. If you obey God’s commandments you will prosper. If you don’t, you will be punished, perhaps not immediately, but in the end. Your sins will always find you out. This applies to God’s people and to other nations as much as to individuals and you can find versions of it all over the Bible: in Deuteronomy, Exodus, the prophets and psalms and in parts of the New Testament as well. The message seems so deeply embedded in scripture that Christians as far apart as in the United States, Asia, Africa and Latin America have come to belief in what has been called The Prosperity Gospel which can be summed up as God rewards those who trust in him. Often financially.  

So what does it mean when things go wrong? If trusting God brings prosperity; what does adversity mean? It can surely only mean that you are not trusting God or that you have not obeyed God’s commandments, or that God in some inscrutable and terrifying way God is not pleased with you. This was the problem my Archdeacon faced. His friends insisted that he must have sinned because if he hadn’t his family would surely have survived.  

There is a logical instinct behind such a point of view: a belief in moral cause and effect. We want to believe that God does indeed reward the just and that the wicked get their comeuppance. The book of Job is extraordinary because it is part of scripture, and yet it is written to challenge that deep scriptural belief. It forces us to acknowledge the real problem of unjust suffering, the terrible things that happen to innocent people. How are these compatible with the goodness of God? Tonight’s reading came from a speech from Eliphaz the Temanite, one of three of Job’s friends who were sent to comfort him when he, like my Archdeacon lost all his family along with his health and his wealth. All that was left was his wife, and she was a mixed blessing at best, because she nagged him. Eliphaz listens well, he makes some general, observations about the puzzling nature of life, and he advises Job to turn to God and trust him. All will be well.  

But this is a story with twists and turns. And we, the audience know something that Job does not know, something utterly shocking. Which is that Job’s sufferings are not the result of something evil that he has done, but because God has taken on a bet with Satan. Will Job go on trusting God if he loses everything? If he does, God wins. If he doesn’t Satan wins. In fact Job does neither. He doesn’t piously accept his lot and he doesn’t curse God and give up. Instead, outrageously and courageously ,he challenges God to explain himself.  

And this is a wind up for his pious friends. We have sat in church tonight tonight being edified by the wise spiritual counsel of Eliphaz. No harm in that, there is some good advice in his words. But in the end of the book, God rejects the counsel of Eliphaz and the other comforters, and vindicates the bitter, angry, desperate Job. So what do we draw from this?  

Well first, don’t be taken in by pious platitudes. Trusting God is not an insurance policy. Bad things happen.  

Second, God’s justice is not like human justice. The innocent do suffer, sometimes more than the guilty. And that is shocking and outrageous and there is no obvious answer to it.  

And third, that God can be challenged, but he remains beyond our comprehension. Job has a right to demand justice. If Job is at fault,  it is not because he has questioned God, but because he is, as a mere human, ignorant of the way the universe works. There is justice, but not the kind of justice that we understand, want or expect. God does not rule the universe according to the principle of just deserts, of retributive justice. Those who believe in the Prosperity Gospel, who claim all human suffering is a result of sin, have got it wrong.  

In reality this is a universe where chaos and destruction have their place. It is complex and beautiful, and terrifying. Here the wise and the foolish, the weak and the strong, even the comic and the controlled are all in some way bound up together. A world of wonder. There is a moral balance of the world but it hinges not simply on evil being punished and good being rewarded, but on something much more subtle and more unexpected. God holds evil within bounds, and himself pays the price of risk, of human malice, of inexplicable accident, and calls us to share this intimate burden with him. In this world both good and evil fall on the just and the unjust. But the evil which falls on the just is evil which can potentially be redeemed. Suffering in other words, can be creative, so can deep questioning of God. So can forgiveness of self and others, so can glimpsing joy through tears.  

These things are only hinted at in the book of Job, but they come into focus in the New Testament, in the cross, where the holiest being in the universe suffers the punishment of a criminal, bringing us a salvation we do not deserve. The point is that no one deserves a free ride in this life, just as no one deserves endless misery. To trust God and to keep his commandments is the nearest we get to happiness, because in the end it brings perspective and release from anxiety. Human beings are born to trouble even as the sparks fly upward. But the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, precisely because we do not get what we deserve. There is justice in that, and there is mercy too.