The Cause of Love [Proper 24B]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Job 38:1-7, 34-41
The Cause of Love
This is kinda like the Sermon on the Mount, this passage from
Job, if Jesus had a much more confrontational presentation style. Instead of “Look at the birds of the air; they
neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds
them” we get “Gird up your loins like a man and answer me this: who feeds the
raven its prey? I know: not you.” So like I said, similar but different.
Now I’m not going to assume that everyone here is an expert
on the book of Job. We’re dropped into
the 38th chapter today; 37 chapters worth of stuff has already
happened, leading us up to this point.
He’s the quick and dirty summary: Job is wealthy and righteous. He loses everything right at the beginning of
the book. Everything, that is, except
his wife, who urges him to curse God and die.
He doesn’t do that. Instead, he
sits in ashes and cries – given the circumstances, a very reasonable response. While doing that, his friends come over. And that sounds nice, but they are not really
there to comfort and support him. They
are there to argue theology, which is exactly what someone wants after their
house burns down and their children die.
What will make you feel better about this book is that it is
a poetic theological reflection, not a documentary. It begins, “Once upon a time” in a far away
land that doesn’t exist on real maps. It
is like a fairy tale – one that explores the nature of God and the problem of
pain. And so don’t be too hard on Job’s
friends; they were just written that way.
In the ancient world, and honestly, in the not-so-ancient
world, many people believed that you reap what you sow: good behavior is
rewarded, bad deeds are punished. The
book of Job challenges that notion by featuring a hero who is blameless and yet
experiences utter devastation. That’s
not supposed to happen, but also it does.
That doesn’t seem fair and so his friends don’t buy it – not because
they have experienced a naughty Job at any point in their friendship, but because
they can only see the world through this reward/punishment framework. That being the case, they only have one move:
convince Job to repent of whatever. They
cannot accept the possibility that bad things could happen to good people because
then the world would be out-of-control and so they cannot come to terms with
what the reader knows to be true from the very beginning of the book: that Job
is blameless and still tragedy strikes.
And like many of us, when bad things, unfair things,
heartbreaking things happen, Job wants to know why. He wants answers. Not from his friends with their stubborn
paradigms and their cold theology. He
wants answers directly from the source.
He wants to go toe-to-toe, face-to-face with God. And that is where we join this story already
in progress.
Job has questions in need of answers. God gives him more questions. Many, many questions; a barrage of
confrontational questions. Sometimes
when we get our wish, we wish we would have wished for something else. I imagine that might be how Job feels when
God shows up in a tornado and says, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words
without knowledge? Gird up your loins
like a man, I will question you, and you shall answer me.” So that is not exactly what Job prayed for.
This is a confrontation.
In fact, in those times, a man would gird his loins in preparation for
combat. So again, probably not what Job
was looking for.
But God does show up.
And while it was maybe a more aggressive entrance than Job would have preferred,
Job knows now that he is not alone in his pain.
God was not ignoring his plight.
God was not forever silent. God had
not forgotten him.
And after countless hours of conversation with his friends,
hearing their accusations, God offers a fresh perspective – a perspective
almost utterly alien to human theological or philosophical discussion: one that
is not anthropocentric.
All of the conversations in the book prior to God’s
appearance centered around the human individual. They were all about Job. What did he do to deserve the bad? What could he do to restore the good? And by extension, because this book is a folk
tale, what should we do to earn divine favor and what actions should we avoid
so that we do not reap divine punishment?
The book of Job was written specifically to challenge this theological
perspective. Because, if we are honest,
life tells us that it is simply not the case.
Sometimes bad things happen to good people and sometimes good things
happen to people who do terrible things.
Life is just not that simple.
The list of questions we get in today’s lectionary reading is
really just a small sampling. This goes
on for almost seventy verses. Each
question as unanswerable as the last.
Like Job, we can only stand silent before the mysteries of
God. We weren’t there when God spoke the
worlds into existence. We live for a
little while on this tiny rock floating in a vast sea of space. And then we are gone. And the Creation goes on. And while we grasp for knowledge, we find
that we always reach our limits, that the questions always outpace the answers.
Life happens, joy and heartbreak,
miracle and tragedy, and we don’t get to know why. If there are answers out there, they mostly
elude us. We are still left only with
questions.
Humankind has long tried to place our species at the center
of the universe, but it is God at the center.
And as much as we might hope to control God with our theological
systems, God is the freedom that is still creating the worlds into a fathomless
future. Gustavo Gutierrez suggests, “God
is free; God’s love is a cause, not an effect that is…handcuffed.”[1]
In the barrage of questions that Job faces, this whirlwind
God does allow a glimpse into the mystery.
God doesn’t answer Job’s question per say, but God does offer a new way
to look at the world. It is not about
what we deserve or don’t deserve; life is not distributed in rewards and
punishments. The world was not created for
us to possess; things not intended to possess us. But we get to live in a world possessed by
God. It is all gift. It is not about us; we are a part of it.
And that might make us feel small, like Job in the abyss of
tragedy, before the whirlwind of God. And
in the context of Creation we are small: each a speck in the billions of years
of God’s handiwork. And yet, like Job,
God notices us, knows us, hears our complaints, rejoices when we rejoice. God’s love is not the effect we cause. God’s love is the cause; we are because God
loves us.
Everything belongs to God.
God places us in the world of God’s great creative expression. Everything belongs to God, including us. We are a part of it all. We don’t own it. We can’t control it. It is a gift.
Everything is a gift. We are
simply stewards of mysteries far too ancient for us to grasp. And so we are called to live in this world
with loose hands and open hearts, reflecting the amazing generosity we can too
easily forget we experience in every breath God gifts us.
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