19^th November 2012

Rev Clive Skewes, Assistant Minister at St John's UCA Mt Waverley Sunday 21 October 2012

Lessons - Job 38:1-7,34-41; Psalm 104:24-34; Hebrews 5:1-10;
Mark 10:35-45.

The book of Job is an extended conversation conducted over many days, introduced by a prologue. The conversation argues over the situation of Job, a righteous man who eschews evil, and his undeserved suffering. The conversation takes place in the dark or at best the half-light because neither Job nor his friends / comforters are privy to the events of the prologue.

Viktor Frankl, an eminent psychologist, studying the Holocaust, claimed that if people are to cope with suffering they need to be able to discern some meaning in their suffering. But neither Job nor his friends are ever told why he suffers. His friends offer analysis of his situation and well meant advice. But it is unhelpful because, as well as being unaware of the events of the prologue, they cannot accept that Job is a righteous man.
What hinders them is that they operate on the simple paradigm:

'God rewards the good and punishes the evil; therefore if a person enjoys the good things of life that means that one is blessed by God. On the other hand, if one suffers bad things that must be punishment for evil.'

What Job's comforters never realise is that in life there is a whole dimension of disproportionate and of undeserved suffering (Oswald Chambers). Because they believe that all suffering must be deserved and they refuse to grant that Job was a righteous man, the truths they put forward are only half-truths, a situation which usually results in the worst kind of advice. The best thing his friends ever did for Job was at the beginning when they sat beside him and kept silent and waited for him to speak.

Throughout the book Job insists that if only he could confront God and put to him his case he would be vindicated. But this seems an empty hope for he realises that he lacks the one essential: a mediator who can stand between him and God and vouch for him and articulate his complaint. But finally Job gets his wish: God answers him.

In a speech that takes a majestic stride through the glories of creation - stars, sea, snow, animals, birds and finally Leviathan itself - God hurls the whole universe at Job. But, what, we ask, is the whole point of that?
Is this one giant put-down of Job? No, because God actually vindicates Job and upholds his questions.

Remember in the prologue the issue between God and Satan was, 'Can a man / woman really love God?' Satan argued Job only loved God because of all the good things he experienced at God's hands, but take all those away and Job would be revealed in his true colours - as one who did not love God for his own sake.

However Job is revealed as a righteous man. That does not mean a sinless or a perfect man. A righteous person is a faithful person; one who is open with God and keeps short accounts with God, as evidenced in Job's regular sacrifices for himself and his family.

We understand the purpose of God's question to Job when we ask, 'What was Job's greatest fear?' His fear was that because his suffering was undeserved there might be some part of life that was outside the sovereignty of God. The parade through the glories of the universe is God's answer to this fear. There is not even a square millimetre of space that is outside God's control (CS Lewis). Yet, you will note, God does not let Job or his friends in on the information we have in the prologue. That is what a fairy tale would have done but Job is not a fairy tale; it is real life and in real life suffering and evil are never fully explained.

Instead we get something better. God's great question, which is unanswerable, is really a statement of why Job's question cannot be answered (NT Wright). It is a way of saying not only that God's ways are not our ways and that his thoughts are not our thoughts, but that our questions are not the right questions.

You have no doubt heard that piece of folk wisdom we pass on to grieving and suffering friends: 'One day all our questions will be answered.' Even some popular hymns offer that hope. But where does Scripture tell us that?
Instead of expecting all our questions to be answered we need to realise, like Job, that our questions are the wrong questions.

When we stand before the Lord and know him as he knows us, we will realise our questions are as foolish as a child asking 'What is the sound of yellow? How much does a sunbeam weigh? What is the smell of a thought?'
Instead our only hope is to build our lives on 'the strange wisdom by which the world was made' (NT Wright).

'From this point of view,' says Wright, 'it's not so much a matter, as some have said, of Jesus providing the answer to the questions of Job, though in some sense he did - especially in Job's wish for a mediator. It is rather, we might say, that Jesus became Job. As Hebrews starkly puts it "learning obedience through the things he suffered". But Jesus, shouting and weeping in prayer (an important and often ignored historical memory, presumably of Gethsemane), fought his way to costly submission to the Father's purpose, that purpose which was taking him through death and into the world of new creation. In his death and resurrection God was laying the foundations of the new earth, giving the morning stars a new song to
sing: taming Leviathan at last.'

Like Job, James and John come with the wrong question to Jesus. They were not there when God laid the foundations of the earth, or before that when the Father with the Son, in the counsels of the Trinity, determined the plan of salvation. 'And they will not be there when their Lord is crucified. They'll be hiding like rats in a hole, unable (for the moment at least) to drink the cup or share the baptism.' (Wright)

Their squabbles with the other disciples have one important similarity with Job's disputes with his friends: they simply keep the misunderstandings in circulation. They need to be silent before the unimagined, unlooked-for fresh revelation of the upside-down wisdom which was being offered also in the previous teachings of Jesus about becoming as little children.

The world goes about things in one way and trains us to think and behave accordingly. God does it differently. He calls us to align our lives with his truth: truth which is hidden but revealed, that is openly lived before us in Jesus Christ.

When Jesus explores the necessity of the cross he starts with a political point. Leviathan in the Old Testament represented some great sea monster.
The sea was itself a symbol of terror and death, so a monster from the sea was a doubly threatening image. It was a way of putting a name on people's greatest fears. Like our illnesses, when fears are named they are known and we are on the way to dealing with them.

Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, wrote in those times when English political experience had journeyed from absolute monarchy to republicanism then back to a more limited monarchy. He wrote the basic text on which modern, materialist political theories are based, titling his book by the designation he gave to the absolute political state, Leviathan. This was a very perceptive insight in the light of Old Testament usage.

Leviathan, whether the threatening monster of our imaginations, or political absolutism, or whatever, must be tamed. But 'only God, revealed in the suffering Son of Man, can tame Leviathan. Hobbes, not for the last time, needs to be corrected by Calvin' (Wright), whose own political theory put limitations on the state and called the state back to it proper function as a servant of God's justice.

Isaiah's vision of the Suffering Servant will be fulfilled in Jesus. He dies as our substitute, not as an arbitrary substitute but one provided by the Father as the atonement for our sinful souls. Because he, through the Spirit, is eternally one with the Father and one with us, God defeats the gods that have enslaved and threatened his people. God redeems his people, renews his covenant and creation itself.

Concerning the creation God asks Job, 'Were you there?' That is the question the Negro spiritual asks us about the crucifixion: 'Were you there?' To both questions we can only answer 'No' (Wright), but follow the path of Jesus and you will be.

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Oswald Chambers: My Utmost for his Highest, also Baffled to Fight Better.

NT Wright: Reflections on Bible Readings.