Bad theology and the book of Job

Job 7:11-21

In preaching Job, especially these passages today, I think it’s incredibly important to point out that Job’s friend, Eliphaz, doesn’t understand God at all. It’s one of these challenges reading the Bible out of context when we pick up a chapter and read someone like Eliphaz saying, “Isn't your religion the source of your confidence; the integrity of your conduct, the source of your hope? Think! What innocent person has ever perished?” and it’s real tempting to think, “Well, that must be biblical wisdom!” The problem being that Eliphaz is simply wrong and Job, God, and the reader all know it.

            Job’s friends probably mean well. That might be me putting on my 8^th commandment hat and believing the best of them, but I’ll try it out here at least. Let’s say that Job’s friends actually believe that they are helping him; that Job has some terrible, secret sin that is the reason God took everything from him—never mind that we already know from the story that this isn’t true. If we can put the best light on Eliphaz, we might believe that his understanding of God is just as likely as Job’s. After all, none of us really have met God and been able to interrogate the divine about these matters of theology. Karma makes logical sense; so does an eye for an eye.

            But this story should demonstrate pretty clearly that all theology is not the same, and all of us do theology, whether we think we do or not. If you say, “God is love” then your understanding of what that means is theology; it is using a particular scripture to explain God’s relationship to us. Likewise, if you quote from John and say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and none come to the Father through me,” claiming that Christianity is the only faith that holds water in light of this verse, you are doing theology. Some theology is good; some is bad; much is unclear.

Racism, a pandemic, and the island of Job

Job 1

This week we begin five weeks on the book of Job. Five weeks on the story of a man who had an incredible series of calamities hit him all at once. It might feel a bit like 2020.

But before we see ourselves in Job too clearly—and before we make ourselves out to be blameless as Job was—we should be clear from the start that Job failed miserably at understanding God. For one thing, Job clearly felt that when tragedy strikes it is God who takes away. It’s that oft-quoted verse that I just read (1:21), “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised,” but the story itself reveals that this isn’t true.

It’s probably the most famous verse in all of Job, but 1:21 is clearly a failure of Job to do good theology. God didn’t take anything away from Job; Satan did. I mean God did allow Satan to test him—with conditions—so you could blame God, I suppose, and that is supposedly what Satan is testing, but God didn’t take away anything in this story. Furthermore, the idea that God gave Job what he had is not supported here either. This is one of those tricky sticking points of theology where the question of why some people have material blessings and some do not is not easily answered, and the implied answer about blessings following faithfulness can be extremely damaging and is most often simply a lie. In the real world, the poor are often more faithful than the rich. The moment we use our blessings to prop up ourselves as more faithful is the moment we have jumped the boat.

If you find it easy to place yourself in Job’s shoes, perhaps it’s because he represents the fears of those who have much. If you have a lot, you know a lot can be taken from you. Boy, are those fears poignant right now! As we struggle with an uncertain economy and our nation struggles to come to terms with our complicity in systemic racism, whose causes are so deeply embedded in our history that we hardly know where to start, it becomes easy to ascribe everything that happens to God—the good and the bad. Yet, God’s handiwork is not revealed in Job’s disasters. God has yet to play a role in the story. It’s coming! Oh boy, is God going to take a role in this story, but it’s not yet. God cries with Job; God does not rob Job of his loved ones.

After all, our faith is a faith about taking up our crosses. God doesn’t need to send crosses for us to bear; the world gives them to us! Racism is not something God created; it just happens. Poverty, disease—they happen ultimately because of sin—but God’s role lies further ahead.

We know this is true of God because Job had everything and he was faithful—blameless, the scripture says—but the mark of a God-follower is not how good we are to earn blessings but how we respond when it’s taken away—and it’s not that God is testing us; the world provides plenty of tests without God deciding it’s time to throw another lightning bolt from heaven. Through the next several weeks we will watch the rollercoaster that is Job’s response to tragedy. He begins down an impossible pathway of theological gymnastics to explain what happened to him, because as much as he resists his friends who argue he must have done something wrong, nevertheless Job continues to view the world as if God gives and takes away, and, ultimately, Job cannot get away from viewing wealth as evidence of doing something right. He can’t get past it.

In many ways, Job never stops to realize he is nothing special; that everything he has is a gift not because he is faithful but because God is. He never pauses to consider how the stacked deck benefited him to achieve what he did—just like we rarely pause to consider our own stacked deck. Thankfully, most of us haven’t lost everything, and we may still consider our own privileges more carefully right now.

We aren’t Job, but there are some things we can learn from Job’s story. One thing I take away from Job immediately is that there is no playbook for grief and no hierarchy of grief either. Job has quite a lot and loses everything; other folks start out with little and they, too, may lose everything, and both experience grief profoundly. All the possessions can be replaced, we imagine, but his sons and daughters cannot. When you lose loved ones, nothing else matters.

I think that’s actually a great place to begin, whether you are looking to understand Job, or a pandemic, or the effects of racism. When you lose something you can’t replace, nothing else matters. For too many in our nation, they have lost their dignity and their humanity and their lives because of their skin color. That cannot be replaced, and it is their grief they carry day by day.