The Lord Answered
Job 38:1-7, 34-41
Click here to view the full sermon video for October 17, 2021 entitled, "The Lord Answered."
For the past couple Sundays, the lectionary has invited us to listen in on Job as he wrestles to find meaning in his suffering and as he debates with his friends about the cause of it. This week, God finally speaks. And God has a lot to say. Four chapters of divine speeches pour forth, overflowing with imagery both beautiful and terrifying. This morning we don’t have time to hear all of the divine speeches, so for our reading this morning, listen to the beginning of God’s response in chapter 38:1-11, 34-41
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
2 “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
3 Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
7 when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings[a] shouted for joy?
8 “Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb?—
9 when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
10 and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
11 and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?
“Can you lift up your voice to the clouds,
so that a flood of waters may cover you?
35 Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go
and say to you, ‘Here we are’?
36 Who has put wisdom in the inward parts,[c]
or given understanding to the mind?[d]
37 Who has the wisdom to number the clouds?
Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens,
38 when the dust runs into a mass
and the clods cling together?
39 “Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
40 when they crouch in their dens,
or lie in wait in their covert?
41 Who provides for the raven its prey,
when its young ones cry to God,
and wander about for lack of food?
The early church father, Jerome, said of the book of Job that it is slippery like an eel – the harder you try to hold onto it, the faster it escapes. I’ve never tried to hold an eel, but I have seen my six-month-old try to hold a slice of avocado and I imagine it’s a similar concept. The more he tries to hold onto it, the more elusive it becomes.
The book of Job is framed with a narrative prologue and epilogue. It quite literally begins with a “once upon a time,” cluing the reader into the nature of this story which functions as a parable or folktale, the kind of story which holds a timeless lesson for those with ears to hear.
The prologue gives us the background to the story – it tells us all about what a wise, wealthy, righteous man Job was. It also tells us about something like a divine council meeting between God and various divine beings where a bet is made with a satan, with an accuser, who bets God that Job would not be so faithful if everything he has is taken away from him. And we know how the rest of the story goes for this righteous sufferer, who loses everything he has and plunges into despair.
The prose narration picks up again in the epilogue where God vindicates Job who has successfully passed this test and is doubly blessed with new family, wealth, and long healthy years and he lives happily ever after. The end!
If you were to just read the narrative bookends to this story, you’d get the impression that this ancient story is nice and tidy.
But the story of Job is 42 chapters long, not 3, and between the nice and tidy prologue and epilogue, we find 39 chapters of poetry that do a very nice job of muddying the waters. And this feels a lot more like real life, doesn’t it? Life is not made up of once-upon-a-times and happily-ever-afters. Anyone who is human knows it’s much messier than that.
The middle part of Job’s story helps us to hear how absurd it is to pretend that life and faith are so simple and straightforward. The poetry of Job filters that ‘once-upon-a-time story’ through the lens of real, lived experience.
Job makes us sit in the tension between what we think life should be like and what it actually is.
Maybe, like me, you find this kind of honesty in our Scriptures inspiring and refreshing.
And so, this morning, we join Job right in the middle of the mess. We join Job right in the middle of his suffering, right in the middle of his questions.
“Why is this happening to me?”
“Does God even care?”
“Is there justice in the world?”
“Can God be trusted?”
“Is God good?”
We join Job as his friends say all the wrong things: “just repent and you’ll be blessed again,” “You must have sinned somehow” “Your children must have sinned,” “You just need to trust God”
In so many ways, Job’s friends still speak today whenever suffering is met with responses like these: “everything happens for a reason,” “God just needed another angel” “it’s all part of God’s plan”
Perhaps, like Job, you’ve received these unhelpful comments. Or perhaps like his friends, you’ve spoken them before. All of us on some level ache to make sense of the suffering in our world and are tempted to settle for easy answers, even when they’re insufficient.
And so, increasingly frustrated by his friends’ unhelpful speeches, Job continues to insist on his innocence, to insist that his suffering is undeserved. The moral order he thought existed – that he had built his life upon - has crumbled beneath his feet…and now he needs answers because what he thought he once knew about God has turned to ash and blown away. He had always followed the rules and been blessed in turn, and now the math doesn’t add up anymore. the rules stopped working and nothing makes sense.
The next time you hear someone refer to the patience of Job, I hope it makes you scratch your head. Job was a lot of things but I don’t think patient is one of them. He curses the day he was born, then grows frustrated and combative until his initial tongue-in-cheek idea of suing God in a court of law becomes his actual game plan. Job wants to sue God. He wants to meet God face to face in a courtroom, for his case to be heard, for God to give a reason for all that has happened to him.
And probably much to his surprise, God responds! God does not respond in Job’s courtroom, however, but from the whirlwind. Out of a terrifying storm God speaks, and the questioner now becomes the questioned.
From this whirlwind, God takes Job on a tour of the creation. Dripping with sarcasm, God asks Job if he was there when the foundations of the earth were laid, if he knows its measurements, if he can control the weather or understand the natural world. It’s a striking speech full of breathtaking and fearful imagery.
I can’t decide if God’s response is beautiful or frustrating.
I’m not sure that when you’re in a place of deep suffering, it’s comforting to be reminded that you don’t know the size of the earth.
Moreover, as the reader, we know that there actually is a simple answer to Job’s suffering – God had made a bet. Why must Job be kept to suffer in the dark?
On the other hand, this story is about all suffering, not just Job’s, to which there does not exist a simple answer. and so perhaps there’s beauty in the invitation to simply stand in awe at the mystery of our world and our lives.
Is God’s speech beautiful or frustrating? I think the answer is yes. both. This is why Jerome called this book slippery like an eel, always eluding a single interpretation or response.
That being said, however, when we encounter this speech, I think it’s of central importance to notice that God moves the encounter from the courtroom to the cosmos. Job had wanted to engage God within the moral, legal world he thought he knew, where righteousness resulted in blessing and disobedience resulted in punishment. simple cause and effect. Within this logical world, Job had a solid case to argue.
But God moves the conversation into a different realm altogether. Here, Job’s complaints and questions are painted against the backdrop of all creation. Creation which contains both light and dark, prey and predator, small bird and fearsome sea monster, fruitful land and swirling waters.
Here, chaos certainly exists but so do boundaries and limits.
Here, God is in control of both the light and the darkness
God does not offer a simple, straightforward explanation to Job (or any of us) about suffering, but instead, God moves Job out of the courtroom of our judgment and into the expansive realm of the cosmos where there is space to sit with mystery and to be reminded that though there is chaos, there is yet an order to things even when we cannot comprehend it. It’s not the legal order of a courtroom, but the wild and mysterious order of creation.
As Biblical Scholar Carol Newsom says in her commentary on Job – that while God does not rebuild Job’s moral universe, “the divine speeches contain the lumber from which a new house of meaning can be built.”
“Where were you, when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God asks Job and each one of us who seek to build a new house of meaning
“Were you there when I set boundaries for the sea?” God asks us who seek order out of the chaos.
“Who has the wisdom to number the clouds?” God asks us who stand on the edge of all that remains unknown.
While we were not there from the beginning, the wisdom tradition in Scripture makes clear that wisdom herself was with God in the beginning, calling out in Proverbs, saying:
27 When God established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
28 when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
29 when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
30 then I was beside him, like a master worker; (Proverbs 8)
God responds to Job with wisdom instead of with answers. and those are two different things. Attending to this wisdom, Job might yet find ‘the lumber from which a new house of meaning can be built.’
So, this morning, may we hear this invitation to wisdom. May we be courageous and honest to face all that we cannot know and be comforted by a God who is big as the cosmos but close enough to hear our questions, and even our complaints. May we rejoice in a God who does not leave us alone in our suffering, but walks with us through every dark valley in Jesus Christ, who is the wisdom of God. Amen.