Job 38.1-11; Mark 4.35-41
You’ve heard the expression ‘the patience of Job?’ Don’t believe it for a minute, not if by ‘patience’ you mean serenity or a sense of calm when things are falling apart, or of bearing trials and suffering without complaint. The phrase ‘patience of Job’ comes from some translations of the New Testament letter of James. There, James encourages Christians to remain steadfast in faith. “Be patient, my beloved, until the coming of the Lord. Think of how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the ground and is patient until it receives the early and late rain.” James then adds, “You have heard of the patience of Job.” But put ‘patience’ in quotation marks because in the book of Job, and for Job himself, you’d be hard pressed to find any sense of calm or even-tempered serenity in adversity.
Early in Job’s story, he faces suffering and loss beyond imagination. First, he loses his wealth and property. Then, his family is taken from him. Job can’t even take consolation in the old expression, ‘At least I’ve got my health,’ because by the middle of the second chapter, that’s gone too. Is Job serene and calm? Listen for yourself. “When I lie down, I think, ‘How long before I get up?’ The night drags on; I toss and turn.” At another point he says, “I despise my life. Leave me alone. My days are meaningless.” That’s not exactly ‘patience’ as we think of it. There’s more. Job expresses misgivings about God. “Even if I summoned God and he responded, I do not believe he would give me a hearing. He would crush me with a storm and multiply my wounds for no reason.”
And Job not only complains about God he takes his complaint directly to God, “Why have you made me your target? Have I become a burden to you?” Job is behaving in a way that some people might say is improper, that shows a lack of faith. Yet the biblical text says, “In all this Job did not sin.” In his suffering, Job asks questions that are as old as the Bible, as recent as today’s news, and as personal for us as they are for him. What kind of world is this? Where is God when we suffer? Why does anyone suffer to begin with? If Job’s ‘patience’ means anything, it’s his tenacity in grappling with God, the enduring expectation that God will act and can make a difference.
After Job loses everything, three of his friends stop by for a visit to try and comfort him. Now if Job’s ‘patience’ belongs in quotation marks, so do Job’s ‘friends.’ They make tedious speeches that go on for chapters at a time. They speak about God yet use theology to wound. In the middle of Job’s suffering and anger, in his doubts about God and his insistence that his suffering is unfair, Job’s friends insist that God doesn’t make mistakes and that the innocent don’t suffer. If Job is suffering the way he is, then Job must be guilty. One of the friends is Eliphaz. He asks Job to consider something. “Has a truly innocent person ever ended up on the scrap heap? Do genuinely upright people ever lose in the end? It’s my observation that those who plant trouble and cultivate evil will harvest trouble and evil.” In other words, Job, you must’ve done something wrong and your suffering is payback for it.
The other friends say the same sorts of things—moralistic, lacking grace, casting God in a role as ‘The Infinite Watchdog’ who oversees a system of scorekeeping and payback as though you can trace a direct link from past action to present suffering, that you reap what you sow. These friends also suggest that if you confess all your sins, and straighten up and fly right, everything will be good again: guaranteed.
Yet for people of faith whose stories are told in the pages of scripture, for people of faith whose lives are formed by those same scriptures, we know the world is fallen and deeply broken. Whether it’s wealth, health, or family, people who live well do not always do well. No amount of money or power, savvy or self-discipline can prevent illness, betrayal, disaster, grief, or any number of other troubles from touching our lives. Job is innocent, the story tells us that from the start, yet he suffers. Moralistic explanations about Job’s suffering must come to an end.
Our reading from Job this morning comes after Job and his friends have exhausted themselves with words. Now it’s God’s turn to speak. Throughout the book of Job, in all of Job’s speeches and prayers, he repeatedly expresses his desire to hear from God directly. And in today’s first reading, that desire is granted, but not in a way that Job expects. God appears to Job in a whirlwind and takes Job on a three-chapter-long tour of the cosmos, asks Job to consider creation in all its glory. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” the Lord asks. This isn’t a put-down as much as it is an invitation for Job to reconsider his life in the light of God’s majesty and faithfulness, an invitation to faith, to trust God. ‘Were you there?’ ‘Do you know?’
Instead of answering Job’s questions, God asks questions of his own, questions Job simply can’t answer because Job wasn’t there and doesn’t know. Job wasn’t there in the beginning at Genesis 1.1 when God spoke and chaos gave way to creation, darkness to light and life. There are some things none of us can fully grasp or understand. Faith includes a humble spirit, a modest approach in our ability to understand. God is God and we are not. This is not a put-down-but an invitation to faith, to trust when easy answers fall short.
In his lament, Job never curses God or gives up on faith in God. Now he certainly doesn’t hold back as he lays out his misgivings, asserts his innocence, or wonders why God, who once seemed like a friend, now seems like an enemy. There is a place for lament in the Bible; and for us as people of faith formed by the Bible. Job complains, but he complains to God. This is an act of faith. We don’t have to put on a happy face in suffering and say, ‘It’s all good’ when it’s not. We can pour out our souls to God just as Job does. And this is, astonishingly, how Job finds a deepened sense of God. When easy explanations to the question of suffering and evil prove inadequate, as they will, Job finds a deepened sense of God not in easy answers but in God’s faithfulness. God who, at the beginning of creation, brought order out of chaos, light out of darkness, and life out of nothing, is faithful through the chaos the threatens to do us in.
When it feels like we are losing our grip, all our times are in God’s hand. This is the very thing Jesus promises at one point in the gospels, ‘There is nothing that can snatch my people from my hand.’ It’s St Paul in the 8th chapter of Romans where he asks, “What can separate us from the love of God?” He names all sorts of things from suffering, distress, famine, peril, and sword. Then he says that nothing in life or death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Now this is not an easy answer to the question of suffering, but it is the steadfast presence of God with us in all suffering.
God who, in the beginning, laid the earth’s foundation is our sure foundation. And in Jesus the Son, the Lord of history entered history. Jesus knew weakness, lived a life filled with cries and tears, says the New Testament. He knew the suffering of rejection and betrayal, of disappointment and despair, of abuse, violence, and sorrow. On the cross, Jesus asks the question, ‘Why?’ “Has a truly innocent person ever ended up on the scrap heap?” asks Job’s friend Eliphaz. Yes. In Jesus the answer is yes—a truly innocent person who suffered. There is nothing in human experience that God has not suffered in Jesus the Son. God isn’t distant from human suffering, not remote from it, doesn’t look at us with pity in our hard times and say, ‘Well it’s really sad you’re going through that.’ No, God is love and, in love, comes alongside us, enters this world in the person of Jesus, and is with you in your fears and suffering. Just as Jesus, in today’s gospel, is with the disciples in the storm and speaks to their chaos, he says to any storms that threaten you, “Peace. Be still.” In Jesus, through all your questions and doubts, in darkness, suffering, and laments, you are given an endurance that not even Job, in his patience, could have known.
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