Psalm 131 has always been one of my favorite psalms. It’s very short. It goes like this:
O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time on and forevermore.
“I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” I’ve been occupying myself that way for my whole life. Do you do this? I know that there are things I am never going to figure out. Try as I might I am never going to figure out my IRS Form 1040, why God made mosquitoes, the rules to cricket, the Pythagorean theorem, why cats can never decide whether they want to be in or out, or women. But it doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try. I didn’t get a degree in philosophical theology for nothing! I would never have gotten that if I hadn’t occupied myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
I don’t think I’m being unbiblical when I do this, either. I admire the psalmist when she says this. I think that it is important that we calm ourselves…that we quiet our souls…that we retain a childlike trust in God. Every journey into the realm of thinking about things too great and too marvelous for us ought to end here – resting in God. But biblical characters do take on the big questions, too.
Think of Abraham who got wind of God’s plan to wipe out the people of Sodom because of the wickedness of the city. Abraham decides he must confront God – to intervene on behalf of the people. Would God really bring destruction on a whole city when there were innocent people inside? Abraham wants to ask God to relent to save the city, even if there are only ten righteous people in it. Genesis 18:27 shows us Abraham in midstream saying, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.”
Or think of Job, whose story we are returning to today. If there is a book that invites us to think about something too great and marvelous for us, it is Job, the Bible’s longest exploration of a problem that still plagues us all these centuries later: If God is good and just and powerful, then how do we explain the persistence of suffering and pain in this world? How do we make sense of the pain that we go through – that we see others go through? How should we respond when hard times come our way?
There is no straight line to an answer to these questions in Job. In fact, it seems to be a pretty conflicted book. Many people read it and come away with the idea that the book fails to answer any of these questions. Even Job himself is a conflicted character.
The book begins with a little deal being made in the courts of heaven. God and Satan are bargaining over the fate of Job who is described as a perfectly upright man – the kind of guy you could count on to do just the right thing in every situation. If you needed someone to be a witness in a case down at the city gate Job was your man. If you needed a trustee at church Job was the guy. If you needed a solid citizen for the Board of Supervisors you just might look to Job to do that. He was a man who feared God and turned away from evil. A pillar of the community, you might say.
Did I mention that he was also rich? He was as wealthy as a man could be in his day and this was taken as a sign of blessing. Seven sons and three daughters. 7,000 sheep. 3,000 camels. 500 yoke of oxen. 500 donkeys. 500 donkeys might not sound like a blessing to you, but believe me, that was big stuff in Job’s time. Bling looked a little different back in the day.
He was a faithful man, too. Job prayed for his children every day and offered burnt sacrifices on their behalf on the off chance that they might have cursed God, even inadvertently. It’s pretty clear that Job was a good guy.
So God and Satan decide to put this to the test. Satan’s job is to wander the earth seeing if people are living up to their potential and to accuse them if they aren’t. One day he shows up in the heavenly courts and God said, “Did you happen to check out my servant, Job, while you were out there? I know there are some pretty poor specimens upon the land, but there is nobody like Job. A perfectly upright man. Fears me. Turns away from evil. You’d have a hard time making a case against him.”
Satan takes up that challenge, though. He says, “Are you telling me that Job doesn’t have any weaknesses? Looks to me like he doesn’t have much reason to curse you. I bet if you took away some of that stuff he enjoys he’d be singing a different tune.”
So God agrees to this, disturbing though it is. The Satan was given a free hand and within a matter of hours Job’s blessed life was ruined. Fire fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and attending servants. Chaldean raiders took the camels and slaughtered the servants who were with them. A tornado hit a tent where all of his children were feasting and every one of them was killed. Even the donkeys were wiped out by a band of marauding Sabeans. Not even the donkeys were spared.
Job’s response was to tear his clothes, shave his head and fall down to worship God. He said, “I didn’t have anything when I came into this world and I won’t have anything when I leave it. God gives. God takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” That’s it! No wailing and gnashing of teeth. No lawsuits demanding compensatory damages. No tearful tirades against the injustice of the universe and God in particular broadcast internationally on CNN. Just “I was naked at birth, and I’ll be naked at death. Blessed be the Lord.”
A few days later the Satan showed up in the heavenly courts again. God asked, “Did you happen to check out my servant, Job, while you were out there? There is nobody like Job. A perfectly upright man. Fears me. Turns away from evil. And even now, after all that he’s lost, he still maintains his integrity. Not bad, huh?”
This irked the Satan. “Well, of course! You wouldn’t let me touch him. People can let go of a lot of stuff as long as it doesn’t get to their own skin. You let me afflict him personally and we’ll see how much longer he ‘maintains his integrity.’” Once again, God agreed to the terms with the restriction that the Satan could not kill Job.
Within minutes Job was suffering with evil sores over his entire body. So, he took a piece of an old broken pot, probably one broken in the disasters that had befallen him, and he went to sit on a heap of ashes, probably one left over from the feast tent that had burned, and he scraped his skin with the broken pottery.
Job’s wife came over to him. She looked at Job in his misery and said, “When will you give it up? How long will you maintain your integrity?” (Where have we heard those words before?) “Why don’t you just curse God and die?”
Job, however, is made of different stuff than most folks. He told his wife that she was talking like a fool and then he said, “God sends us good things and we receive them gladly. When God sends us evil how should we react?”
That’s the Job we get at the beginning of the book of Job. It’s the Job we think of when the book of James talks about “the patience of Job” [James 5:11]. This Job is faithful no matter what. He takes a licking and keeps on ticking. He stares down disaster and holds on to his faith. He praises God, even when he has every reason to curse God.
But that’s the Job of the early chapters of this book. In the middle of the book we get the angry, impatient Job. When his friends come to sit with him after the disasters that have befallen him they weep and then they sit in silence for seven days and then Job snaps. Job chapter 3, verse 1 says, “Job opened his mouth and cursed the day he was born.” He cries out to God, “Why didn’t I die at birth? Why should I suffer like this without understanding?” “Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” [Job 3:25-26].
Now this is more like it. This is a Job we can relate to. He’s not cursing God exactly, but he certainly has a lot of questions. And he wants answers.
His friends are not very sympathetic. They try to get him to accept their pat answers for why this suffering has come on him. It must have been something he did. He must have done something wrong. Somebody must have done something wrong. Surely his calamities are the sign that God was displeased with him. They started out right. They sat in silence for seven days. But when they opened their mouths they stopped being friends and started to add to Job’s woes.
Job turns on them, too. In chapter 19 of the book he lets it rip:
Have pity on me, have pity on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me! Why do you, like God, pursue me, never satisfied with my flesh? "O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. [Job 19:21-27]
You hear this verse, “I know that my Redeemer lives” and maybe you hear that old hymn by the same name. But what Job wants is an avenger – somebody who will stand in for him as an equal to God. The word in Hebrew is ‘goel’ and it means a blood-avenger – someone who will stand up for you when you are wronged and go after the offender. Job is saying that if there is any justice in this world then the last word to be said about his situation will not be his death, but his vindication before God. “At the end my goel will stand up for me and God will be on my side!”
Finally, God does appear in this book. Right after one of Job’s friends has made another speech saying that mortals cannot find God, there is God speaking from a whirlwind, and God is angry…mocking. “Who is this who obscures my intentions with his ignorant words,” God asks. “Stand up and answer like a man” [Job 38:1-2].
Then for four chapters God goes on to ask Job questions. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you send rain on the earth? Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you set the wild donkeys free? Can you comprehend the wonder of my creatures?” On and on God goes, finally appearing to Job and demanding a response from him.
When Job finally speaks, he is humbled. It’s the first part from our reading today. He has his audience with God. He has seen God in the flesh. But all of his anger and self-righteousness seems pointless now. “I have spoken about what I didn’t understand,” he says. “Things too wonderful for me, which I didn’t know…I am cast down like trash and repent in dust and ashes.” That’s it.
Why is Job content with this? Why does Job let God get away without an explanation? Maybe it’s because there is no answer that can satisfy the person for whom the whole world comes down to ‘what happens to me.’ There will always be some injustice to the world from my perspective. If God made it so I would never suffer cancer, then my hangnail would rise to the level of an existential question. If I never suffered grief, then the guy cutting me off on the road would make me question God’s goodness. There will always be something.
And maybe I never know this unless I enter into the mystery of pain and suffering and loss. Not that God wants us to suffer these things. I don’t believe that. But maybe we understand more about who we are and who God is when we endure the darkness of this world.
Scott Cairns wrote a book recently called The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain. In it he quotes the seventh-century Saint Isaac of Syria who said, “Blessed is the person who knows his own weakness, because awareness of this becomes for him the foundation and the beginning of all that is good and beautiful.” Cairns goes on to say, “Affliction seems to be our only reliable access to this kind of knowledge, this necessary confrontation with our own weaknesses…the only way we come to glimpse and thereafter to know our condition, to appreciate our vulnerability, and to live according to this new and chastening light.”[i]
There is a wisdom that can come through suffering. There is a knowledge that helps us to see the world, through all of its darkness, as a place of shattered light – a place where God’s goodness and beauty is breaking in on the world. I’m struck by the image of God asking Job whether he could comprehend what it means that God knows when the mountain goats and the deer give birth. “Do you know the time when they give birth, when they crouch to give birth to their offspring, and are delivered of their young? Their young ones become strong, they grow up in the open; they go forth, and do not return to them” [Job 39:2-4]. A God who cares even about the birth of a goat or a deer…who can delight in the details of their growth and development, surely cares about our pain. There is still beauty and wonder in this heaving world. The challenge for us is to see it.
Which brings us to the very surprising conclusion of Job. After the devastation. After the loss. After the cries to heaven and the fruitless rationalization of the friends. After the storm in which God appears to him and the final repentance of Job in dust and ashes. What happens then?
Job is restored. At least as much as is possible. God gives Job twice as much as he had before. He had 7,000 sheep, now he has 14,000. 3,000 camels before, 6,000 camels after. 500 yoke of oxen, now 1,000. 500 donkeys, now 1,000. His brothers and sisters and all who had known him before come over to break bread with him. He has seven more sons and three more daughters – these more beautiful than any other women in the land. And Job lived for 140 more years and saw his children and his children’s children and their children, too.
Of all the disturbing things that happen in the book of Job, I think this is the most disturbing. Because it seems to say that if we just endure, God will bless us with every material blessing. If we just hold on and stay faithful, no matter what Satan can throw at us, we will have 1,000 donkeys! But you and I know that this is not so. We have seen faithful people, saints even!, endure unimaginable things and they never received their long life and riches. If we assume that Job’s fate is the fate of all the faithful who endure suffering, we will be disappointed.
When I was growing up, there was a little girl in our congregation, Susan, who was a few years younger than me. She was born with some chronic health conditions that meant she was always in pain and always unable to do what other children in the congregation could do. Her family ran up huge medical bills caring for her. Finally, when she was just a teenager, she died.
But Susan was a witness to our church. She always smiled and her family never complained. She had the sweetest spirit and she loved God. She loved God more than anybody I ever knew. She never “got over” her condition, but she certainly knew blessings. And she was a blessing to us.
We may not always get long-life and riches, but with the right eyes we can see hope even in the midst of suffering. With the right eyes we can see that God is right here among us, walking beside us, and the world is not a cruel trick being played on us – it is the theater of God’s glory.
I’ll close with another story. Mary Karr is one of my favorite writers. She is a poet who has written a series of autobiographical works about her life growing up in East Texas. Her third book, Lit, about her conversion to Christianity and her struggle with substance abuse, is coming out this month.
Mary Karr lived a rough life. Dysfunctional is not the word to use to describe her family. Her experiences are hard to read about and her writing is often profane, suiting her rough upbringing. But something vibrant and vital sustained her into adulthood and into her writing. In her book, Cherry, she describes a time as a teenager when she was so bored and distraught that she thought to commit suicide.
She put on a black dress that she had outgrown and took a number of pills she had found in the house. Her despair and hopelessness was so great that she thought this might get the attention of her parents, who had many problems of their own. The pills only made her sick and when her mother checked on her she just rocked her on her lap in a rocker, never knowing why she was sick.
She writes about the experience:
When Daddy comes in, he carries you to bed. Is there anything you feel like you could eat, Pokey? [That’s what he calls her.] Anything at all?
All you can imagine putting in your mouth is a cold plum, one with really tight skin on the outside but gum-shocking sweetness inside. And he and Mother discuss where he might find some this late in the season. Mother says…I don’t know. Further north, I guess.
The next morning, you wake up in your bed and sit up. Mother says, Pete, I think she’s up.
He hollers in, You ready for breakfast, Pokey? Then he comes in grinning, still in his work clothes from the night before. He’s holding a farm bushel. The plums he empties onto the bed river toward you through folds in the quilt. If you stacked them up they’d fill the deepest bin at the Piggly Wiggly.
[Heck] if I didn’t get the urge to drive up to Arkansas last night, he says.
Your mother stands behind him saying he’s pure USDA crazy.
Fort Smith, Arkansas. Found a roadside stand there with a feller selling plums. And I says, Buddy, I got a little girl sick back in Texas. She’s got a hanker for plums and ain’t nothing else gonna do.
...it’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin.
And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, no so long as there are plums to eat and somebody—anybody—who [cares] enough to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens or pinches, only rolling abundance. That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given.[ii]
There are no smidgens or pinches in love, only rolling abundance. How do we know this? Because God doles it out that way. When it seems like suffering and death and a cross are the only things real in this world…God’s love changes the equation. And you don’t earn it. It’s given. Like a juice from a plum given by a half-crazy father, that love flows downs and over us to remind us that whatever else this world may be – it is not God-forsaken. It is full of rolling abundance. Thanks be to God.
Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Then Job answered YHWH:
“I know that you can do all things and nothing you intend can be frustrated. You asked, ‘Who is this that conceals counsel without knowledge?’ Well, I have spoken about what I didn't understand, things too wonderful for me, which I didn't know.
“‘Listen now and I will ask things of you and you will teach me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of my ears, now I see with my eyes. So I am cast down like refuse and repent in dust and ashes.”
After YHWH had said these things to Job, YHWH spoke to Eliphaz the Temanite, "My nostrils burn in anger against you and your two companions for you have not spoken truthfully about me as my servant Job has."...
And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before. Then there came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and they ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money and a gold ring.
The LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job's daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. After this Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children's children, four generations. And Job died, old and full of days.
[i] Scott Cairns, The End of Suffering, [Paraclete Press, Brewster, MA, 2009], pp. 18-19.
[ii] Mary Karr, Cherry, [Penguin Books: New York, 2000], pp. 116-17.
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