October 8, 2000
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
If you have been sick, or something bad happened to you, then you know firsthand what it’s like to have people try to comfort you. And people, wanting to say something helpful, sometimes ending up saying the wrong things. Trying to offer some comforting word, they say something that make you feel worst rather than better.
I’m sure I have done that in my ministry. And in the past few weeks with so many of our dear friends returning home to the Lord, in my attempt to comfort, I probably have said some words that made somebody feel worst.
Job suffered from the worst series of would-be comforters who ever tried to say something helpful to a friend in need. Some people have even coined a phrase, “Job’s comforters,” referring to people who say the wrong thing to somebody who is in need.
Job
The book of Job in the Old Testament is considered wisdom literature. Much of it is written in poetic form and tells a story about the meaning of suffering and God’s relationship to one who suffers unjustly.
The story tells of Job as a man who was blameless and upright. He feared God and turned away from evil. He was blessed with children, possessions, and a good family life. Job even went so far as to rise up in the morning to offer burnt offerings to God in case his own kids sinned and had not asked for forgiveness. Job was doing pretty well for himself and his family.
Then, there is trouble.
“Let’s see how faithful this Job is,” says Satan. “Take away all of his blessings, and he will curse you to your face.”
Through a couple of tests, Job remains faithful. He loses his oxen, donkeys, sheep, camels, scores of servants, and then even his sons and daughters were killed when a great wind came across the desert, struck the four-corners of the house and it fell on the young people. Through all these calamities, Job remained faithful and said,
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there;
the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Job held fast to his faith that these events, as terrible as they were, were part of some sort of divine plan and had some rationale behind them.
His wife was so mad at God that she scolded Job about his integrity, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.”
When he didn’t listen to his wife, three friends came over to console and comfort him: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. They found Job so distraught that they kept their distance not wanting to come too close. They didn’t even recognize him because he was so sad. They didn’t speak to Job because they saw that his suffering was very great. We can identify with his friends’ reaction. We’ve been in situations when the anguish was so great that we kept a distance and we couldn’t find words to say. They sat there with Job for seven days in silence.
Finally Job blurts out a harrowing curse of the day of his birth, “Let that day be darkness! May God above not seek it, or light shine on it.”
Once upon a time…
It was only a matter of time before Job curses the day of his birth. Job took seven days before he got mad and angry with God. For most of us, it takes only seven minutes before we curse the day that we were born when something tragic happens to us.
We can identify with Job from our own personal experiences. When our once placid lives are disrupted by the late-night phone call, the letter that was unexpected, those terrible words, “I have some bad news for you…” In those moments, everything seems to come unglued and we cry out. “Why? Why me?”
We have all grown up believing in Cinderella and Disneyland. We start off believing that our history begins with the phrase, “Once upon a time…” It’s a fairy tale. That’s how it was for Job too.
“There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was
blameless and upright.”
We expect good fortune, and prosperity, and blessings to always come our way.
But then suddenly, there’s trouble. Everything has been torn loose, and we are desperate to get some answers that will enable us to restore our life’s equilibrium.
When tragedy happens, this world of Cinderella and Disneyland is thrown out of kilter. The traditional world of what is right and wrong becomes unclear. What we thought to be the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story are now all mixed up and we are out of equilibrium. Somebody has taken away our blessings and we are not sure we can still believe.
So Job’s friends come to try to offer answers to his problems. Job and his friends argue with one another about what is going on in the world. The friends are defending the traditional understanding of what is expected. You must have done something wrong before and that’s the reason why you are suffering today. They believed in a fixed, cause-
and-effect view of the world. This tedious battle of words and argument takes all of 25 chapters.
Notice that these 25 chapters are in poetry. At the beginning of the book of Job, when we begin Job’s story, “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job…” the story is written in prose. But when we get to the part of Job cursing the day that he was born and his friends trying to convince him that the traditional view of the world is that “if something bad happens to you, that you deserved it somehow,” these arguments are in poetry.
In chaotic moral times, we return to proverbial definitive truths. In a time of chaos, we return to stories that confirm and conform to traditional values. We seek after reliable moral judgments that are based on such a secure, stable moral world that when you receive some misfortune, you can utter some time worn platitude. That’s the reason why for 25 chapters, Job’s friend attempt to comfort him with words like those we can find on Hallmark sympathy cards. We try to say comforting words in poetry thinking that the flowery words might make someone in need feel better.
Comforting Words
What do you say when a friend’s life has been torn apart? Like Job’s friends, we may sit beside a friend’s bed and offer various justifications for his pain. We are desperate to get the moral world put back together. I think one reason why lots of us find it difficult to be with people who have experienced some terrible calamity is that the misfortune of others threatens us by threatening our simplistic explanations for what’s going on in the world.
When one sneezes, we say, “God bless you” praying that no calamity happens. When we leave a funeral, we quickly throw away the white envelope, eat the sweet candy, and spend the money. We want to have our life return to that balanced moral world where the arithmetic adds up. If you do right, right will be done to you. If you do wrong, wrong will be done to you.
We see this in Job. For 25 chapters, we see that Job and his friends attempt to make sense of the world. At first, complaining to God is invigorating, but then it begins to be tiresome by the second round. Then by the third round, it becomes excruciatingly tedious. The redundancy and length for 25 chapters in the book of Job is meant to impress on us the failure of comforting words to resolve the deepest of our questions about suffering, pain, injustice, and fairness.
Sometimes I fear that we in the church are guilty of responding to people’s pain with words, words from Scripture, words from tradition, slogans, sermons. If you have been in pain and have been the recipient of this sort of concern, you can probably testify that words alone really don’t speak to the depth of the questions, the threatening questions that trouble makes us ask.
We find ourselves left with time worn platitudes that try to return us to that traditional moral world of “Once upon a time…”
Better than Answers
Our questions are not fully answered because there are no satisfactory answers to these questions about suffering, pain, injustice, and fairness. Finally God answers Job by posing a long series of questions…none of which seems to respond to the matters at hand.
God doesn’t answer why bad things happen to good people. God doesn’t explain why a blameless and righteous man like Job suffered and lost everything even his own children. God answers Job by posing a long series of rhetorical questions:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place?
Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have seen the storehouses of the hail?
Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you?
Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Who has let the wild ass go free or let the ostrich’s wings flap wildly?
Do you give the horse its might? Do you clothe its neck with mane?”
The God whom Job wants to question becomes the questioner. God never addresses the issues that Job so eloquently raised with his friends. Ultimately, the result of God’s speech of rhetorical questions is to end Job’s speech.
“I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer twice.”
At the end, in chapter 42, Job replies to God beginning with his own words, but ends by quoting God’s words:
“Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me,
which I did not know…I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my
eye sees you.”
After hearing God’s replies to Job of where were you when I did all of these things, Job stops subverting the words of God as he did in the beginning, when he cursed the day of his birth. Now he speaks the words from God.
What God is saying to us is to look at the world, just for a moment, as God looks at creation. There are wonders here beyond human comprehension. God brags about the words of creation, the mysteries, the wonders. God boasts of his handiworks, of all the animals God offers as evidence of divine creative genius, some of them are not of any earthly use to humanity. What can you do with a wild ass or an ostrich? Moreover, when bragging about the wonderful animals, God fails to mention pride at the creation of humanity. It’s a big creation out there; humanity is only a small part of its wonder.
Job had demanded answers. What Job gets is a vision, a wide view of the world. At the end, Job says, “I had heard of you by hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” Previously, Job had only heard words about God who sets the world in motion, who creates out of chaos; now Job sees.
Job had lived in a rather narrow world where the good gets the jelly beans and the bad gets punished. But then comes the contradictions, and the questions, and the demand for answers that might help him patch his world back together again. Job suffers. Was he guilty? Is God fair?
His friends try to explain, but fail. “Surely you must have done something to deserve this,” they say in various ways, in 25 chapters!
A minister tells a story of a woman from his church who said to him, while standing in a hospital corridor, “If my daughter dies, I will never play the piano in church again.” The daughter died; the mother kept her word. When our world of cause-effect morality crumbles, then we are devastated. Our world has been dismantled. And we wonder if anything can take its place.
When tragedies hit our family, my mother was devastated. She wondered about God’s will. To survive, she searched in vain for some explanation that caused tragedies to happen in our family. Her world of cause-effect morality crumbled and her life was never the same again.
In Job, he is given a glimpse of the wide world, of the deep mysteries. He isn’t given answers. He is given God. God speaks to Job. It may not be the words or answers Job expected. But maybe what Job gets is even better than words. Job gets God.
Seeing Jesus
The writer of Hebrews in the New Testament was a pastor trying to encourage a struggling congregation. The writer is honest that things are far from perfect in this world, in this life. Christ reigns, having defeated powers of sin and death, but not yet, not in fullness. In Hebrews 2:8, “We do not yet see everything in subjection.” admits the writer. There is still work for Jesus to do.
But in Hebrews 2:9, the writer says, “But we do see Jesus” as our hope. Just as not everything was explained and made right for Job, by the end of the book of Job, so not everything is set right, fixed, perfected by the work of Jesus. We may not see the complete subjection of all things under the right of God. Yet we do see Jesus.
We see the one who suffered, as we must suffer, who died as we must die, who triumphed as we will triumph too. And that vision of Jesus, the one who suffered terribly yet rose triumphantly, that vision keeps us going. We do see Jesus.
Sometimes, as in the case of Job, God does not always give us answers to the questions that life makes us ask. Sometimes God gives us something even better than explanations. God gives us a vision. God gives us God’s very self, present among us in Jesus. We get to see Christ. And that, despite the sufferings of this present time, can be enough to keep us going.
Let us pray. Almighty God, friend of all who are in trouble. Hear us as we pray for those who are going through times of great difficulty, particularly for those who suffer from illness and disease. Let your love surround those who are in pain. Be especially near to those whose suffering has caused them to doubt your love and goodness and the meaning of this life. Bless us all to know that to see Jesus is better than any answers we are seeking for our questions. Amen.