Week 27 – Sitting on the Event Horizon of Despair
Job 1-5
I wonder how many things have been written in coffee shops. Papers and blogs and texts and Dear John letters and business plans and doctrinal statements and obituaries. I’m sitting on one right now just north of the church watching a guy across the street with day glow green gloves load stuff into a dumpster at the place which used to be one of my favorite pizza places but now is called the Millennium Lounge which I assume is some kind of a bar because no one is ever there before sunset.
Nearer to me is a blue Ford Focus wagon. I say blue but it looks more like a cornflower and an indigo crayon got into a heated argument about which one was blue and things got so intense that they melted together and that color is the color of the car. It is not a new car. Maybe the age of our son, a sophomore in college. Which I can appreciate. There is a certain pride at driving a car old enough to buy a beer. It has one of those “Coexist” bumper stickers on it. I’ve always liked the sentiment, like Rodney King pleading, “Can’t we all just get along?” in bumper sticker language. The cynical side of me just responds with, “It’s hard to coexist when some folks don’t want you to exist” but maybe that’s the point of the message.
Right in front of my face is maybe the tiniest little fly I have ever seen. He’s crawling on the inside of the window and his whole being could fit on the asterisk above the 8 on my keyboard. Amazing. He flits and lands and crawls with ceaseless tenacity. He is so tiny that I have to strain to stay focused on him and not lose focus onto something further out. He is a mote of a creature, yet with a will or at least an impulse to get outside, to fly toward the light. He exists as part of an ecosystem, a food chain, and while I don’t want to go all John Donne on you and say, “No bug is an island,” the truth is that creature was created. His infinitesimally minuscule existence is evidence that life is not a cosmic accident. And I kid you not, the second I wrote that sentence he landed on my computer screen right next to “Coexist”. Mercy. I am having myself a little moment with the Lord right here in this coffee shop as the afternoon sunlight makes dancing shadows of my fingertips clacking the keyboard. I need a minute.
Eliphaz mentions to Job that mortals cannot be more righteous than God, and that if God will even charge His angels with error, how much more we frail humans, “who are crushed more readily than a moth, between dawn and dusk they are broken to pieces, unnoticed, they perish forever” (4:19). Life crushed unnoticed. But someone did notice. I noticed that tiny gnat and worshipped his Creator when he flitted to my screen. Somehow that matters.
Few books of the Bible are more misunderstood than Job. It is, by most scholars, considered the earliest book of the Bible, one where the events predate most of the others. As for when it was written and by whom, someone knows, God knows, but I do not. Job, whose name means, “hated, greatly persecuted” was evidentially not Jewish and wherever the land of Uz is, it’s not in the Promised Land because this man represents all humans as they suffer. Job takes what is one of the hardest questions humans wrestle with and wrestles with it for 42 chapters. Job requires patience, which we generally lack, and it requires time, which we have but often spend on silly things.
That question, in case you were curious, is this: Why do bad things happen to good people? Phillip Yancy, in a book written after the Sandy Hook elementary shooting, reduced it beautifully in his book The question that never goes away, to the simple question, “Why?”
“Why, God?”
It is the question humans ask when suffering rolls over us like a tsunami, drowning everything we thought we understood in the muffled undulations of grief and washing out the very foundations of our capacity to process life. Humans suffer. We must wrestle with this reality. Job deepens the quandary by adding that righteous humans suffer. Righteousness is not a get out of suffering card that we can slap down in the middle of the game board when we get a bad roll. And Job adds yet more complexity, almost overwhelming fractal complexity, that sometimes, righteous people suffer more because they are righteous. Job would never have suffered like he did if he were a bad man. Satan would have roamed right past him, nodding approvingly at his debauchery.
But Job was a righteous man. A good man. Job 1:1 says “that man was blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil.
The word translated “blameless” means both an orderly, quiet sort of person and one who is morally innocent and ethically pure. And it makes Satan hate him. Job was also straightforward, level, proper. His life stood up straight in a world bent to brokenness. He delighted in awestruck wonder at the majesty of God. Because of that, he turned away from evil. Job left evil undone. He saw the opportunity to do evil and turned away from that and instead did good. Job was the kind of man any reasonable person would love to have as a friend.
He had 10 kids, 7 boys and 3 girls, and they all gathered at each other’s houses for dinner parties. Every parent dreams of this: that their children grow up and delight in each other. And when they partied a little too much, Job interceded for them as their priest, rising with the dawn to make sure his kids were right with God. Job was also staggeringly wealthy. He was, in our parlance, blessed. Job walked every day in a garden of prosperity and then the Lord pointed him out to Satan and directed him to test an exceptionally good man by burning his garden to the ground.
Chapter 1 ends with a triple wave of devastation: His wealth, stolen, his servants, murdered by roving marauders. And we can make sense of that, at least in part: evil men doing evil things. But then a great wind rises from the wilderness and crushes his children. Nature itself destroys what matters most. And God is sovereign over the wind. Job’s does not shake his fist and curse his Maker. He stands, tearing the very fabric on his body, a visible picture of the invisible rupture as his very heart is torn in two. He shaves his head, even the covering of his hair to protect his tender scalp was gone. And then, then what does Job do?
Job worships.
“The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
It’s an incredible, almost unbelievable response to tragedy.
If that were not enough, God then permits Satan to take away Job’s health, afflicting him with agonizing sores from the top of his now bald head to the very soles of his feet. Every step burns. Movement is pain. Yet he walks to the place where garbage is burned and sits among the ashes of his once beautiful life and scrapes his sores with a broken shard of pottery. A broken man with broken skin on broken piles of a broken life. Job is no longer worshipping. Job is grieving. Job is suffering. Hurting.
He is lament.
And from here, from the top of the smoldering heap of desolation, Job decrescendos into silence. His friends, hearing the distant thundering echo of his life collapsing into ruin, come to sit and weep with him for seven days in silence. None speak. The gravity of grief pulling all words and light and laughter across the event horizon of despair.
This is where we begin to wrestle.
Do not turn away from the task.
Do not take the easy path.
Sit with Job on the ash heap of suffering and ask the question: “Why, God?
Because in 33 chapters, God will answer. And by the time we finally arrive, I think we may be ready to listen.
