Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?

Sermon preached on 10th Sunday after Trinity,

by Canon Harriet (Canon Chancellor)

I suspect there comes a point for all of us in life when we start to question God. It might be brought on by the experience of a life-changing event – an illness or a tragedy, for example, something which will have forced us to our knees before God, or left us feeling angry and bitter and wanting to reject God and all that he stands for.

Perhaps for many of us though, questions and doubts bubble away under the surface of things, and often we try to keep them there, so that they don’t disturb our daily lives too much.

Whether we have experienced something dramatic, or we’re one of those people who let the questions simmer, it’s right that we ask some serious questions of our maker. ‘Why do bad things happen?’ being the obvious one. Why do innocent and helpless people die, why do good people suffer? Why do natural disasters and cancer and accidents blight our existence? Where is the plan in all of this, where is goodness and truth and wisdom. Where is God?

If you can come up with the answer to any of these questions, then you will have formulated what is known as a theodicy – an answer to the question of why God permits evil and suffering in this world.

There are not many people prepared to vindicate God on this matter.

But these questions about evil and suffering bring us up close to the story of Job.

Job is an innocent and kindly man – we are told at the very start of the book that he is upright and blameless, that he feared God and turned away from evil – this is Biblical code for saying that Job is a wise man.

Job has a family – a wife and children – and he treats his servants well. And then one day Satan decides to pick on him, to work on him – with God’s permission.

As unfathomable as it sounds, God allows Satan to destroy Job (knowingly ultimately that Job will prove his righteousness) until Job is at rock bottom – he loses his children, his wife despises him, his friends – who are in constant dialogue with him throughout the book – drive him to distraction, trying to uncover what sin he must have committed to deserve all this – he is covered in sores, he is desperate – and by chapter 3, Job is crying, ‘Let the day perish on which I was born, let that day be darkness, may God above not see it, or light shine on it.’

The curious thing about Job, however, is that throughout his ordeal, he refuses to give up on God; he searches God, he questions God, he is determined to get to the bottom of what is going on – he’s angry and wretched, and he utterly despises his life – but he won’t give up. Throughout the agony and confusion of his suffering his relationship with God is sustained.

Not just, or not even, to get his life back – but to reach forward into God. He will not accept the idea of a God who deals out retribution, or a God who acts arbitrarily. He seeks something more, something beyond what his tradition, his friends, and his own human reasoning might suggest of God.

And we see this in the way he tackles God – calling God to account for what is happening to him. He uses God’s word against God, for example – he undoes the story of creation, by telling God of all the things that scandalise any idea of a good creation; he unpicks God’s promises of restoration and redemption in the scriptures, and highlights what he thinks are the loopholes and the flaws in God’s plan; and he takes the Psalms that most express our potential for closeness and intimacy with God, and turns them into songs of scorn and shame.

And we see it too in Job’s persistent longing to be with God face to face, even as he realises that God might be against him – ‘he will kill me’, says Job, ‘I have no hope, but I will defend my ways to his face…and this will be my salvation.’ Job will not settle for less than God. And as one commentator suggests, Job never gives up reaching out to God for more – ‘even when the more is his own crying out.’

And so Job is the embodiment of wisdom – one who has already feared God and turned away from evil – but who, when his terrible ordeal begins, is drawn by wisdom into wrestling with the realities of his predicament, and with God and God’s purposes.

So by the time we get to Chapter 28, which was this evening’s OT reading, we’ve been through a lot with Job and we’ve seen how passionately he is engaged with God.

Chapter 28 sits right in the middle of the book of Job and it reads like a poem. It gives us a kind of exposition of Wisdom and, as we heard, it contains a refrain that summarises Job’s particular quest – ‘Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding?’

The first half of the Chapter 28 poem is built around the image of a mine, and tells of the dangerous work of the miners who dig deep shafts into the earth, and sway suspended underground as they extract its metals. More important here is not what the miners search for, but the process they undertake. These miners open up spaces previously unknown and work far away from human habitation. The message is clear – Job is one such miner – he has gone further than his fellow humans in his challenging of God’s ways, he has gone far from the beaten track in his desire to confront God face to face. Like a miner, he has dared to put his hand to the flinty rock beneath the earth and in doing so has overturned a mountain – he has questioned God’s motives and mechanisms; he has probed so far and so deep that he has found wisdom itself – he has uncovered it, and brought it to light.

Wisdom, this poem tells us, cannot be bought like ordinary goods. Instead it is found in the searching and the testing, the probing and refining. Wisdom is not the prize at the end of the enquiry but the enquiry itself. The process not the product. To be wise is to probe the depths and darknesses of human nature, the world and of God.

The second half of Chapter 28 turns from man to God and we’re told in a final refrain that ‘God understands the way to wisdom, he knows its place.’ God understands wisdom because he too probes and tests, and in his dealings with us, opens up spaces and worlds hitherto unknown.

The example we’re given is God’s great act of creation: ‘When he gave to the wind its weight, and measured out the waters; when he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the thunderbolt; then he saw wisdom and declared it; he established it, he searched it out.’

Towards the end of the book, God takes his turn in searching and questioning Job. Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? Here – in Job’s search for God and in God’s searching of Job: in the midst of trial and test, where new ground is being broken, new depths brought to light.

The book of Job doesn’t give us any clear or easy answers to the problem of suffering and the human condition. Instead it encourages us to grow wise in the process of discovery. To think of wisdom as an action rather than an answer.

To ask serious questions of God, and in turn to be searched by God in his wisdom.

Perhaps we might find that our search for truth and understanding is in fact God’s own wisdom working within us – leading us through the circumstances of our lives and the challenges they bring, to new insights and understanding, new depths of knowledge and of love, as we journey deeper into the life of God who is always more than we can fully comprehend or imagine.

‘Truly the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is understanding’.