Job died, old and full of days. Three men in
scripture are given this epitaph. Noah, Moses, and Job. Three men, set apart in
this way—Noah, the lone saint in the midst of a godless world who is given
charge of saving the earth’s creatures; Moses, the reluctant spokesperson who
leads Israel out of captivity in Egypt, again saving the “chosen people” from
slavery; and Job.
Now, Job might be the best of the best, like Noah, the
one whom God lifts up as an example for the rest to follow, but Job is also not
the figure of historical significance that Noah or Moses are. Instead, the
power of Job is in the way we see ourselves in him and his friends and the way
his words are our words, his frustrations our frustrations, his faith our
faith. Job is interesting because, unlike Noah or Moses, we could be Job; we
can see bits of ourselves in this person and we can hear our questions coming
from his mouth.
I’m just going to admit that I don’t quite know what to
do with the way that the book of Job ends. I mean, after all this back and
forth between Job and his friends and eventually God, where everybody is put in
their place and God finally emerges as the only one worthy in the whole story; still,
here in the end it seems that Job gets his way after all. A part of me likes
that; a part of me hates it. Because of the way the story ends, it’s tempting
to derive a really shallow moral to the story that doesn’t befit the entirety
of the book. I don’t think, having read all of Job, that the takeaway is simply
that God will provide double for everything you lose in this life. If anything,
I suppose the conclusion is a foretaste of something different—Job is provided
for above and beyond his expectations and so will we.
This is a dangerous story in one way because it’s easy to
make it about prosperity. I’m sure Joel Osteen loves this story. If I’m honest,
there’s a part of me that loves this story—that loves the idea that I will be
rewarded with the things I want if I’m a good God-follower. Sure, things will
be taken from me, but it’s all coming back, one way or another. This seems
great for about half a second… until we start asking the hard questions. Questions
like: Where is this resolution for Job’s servants, killed in the beginning of
the story? What about for Job’s children, again killed in the beginning of the
story? How does Job’s reward of wealth fill that hole not only in his life but
also in theirs, taken before their time, taken not because they were any more
bad than anyone else but, paradoxically, because Job was so good in the first
place. Where is their reward? How about the martyrs? Where is their earthly
reward?
I suppose a person could say that this isn’t their story;
it’s Job’s story, but isn’t that exactly the problem we have? We’re interested
in ourselves. We’re always interested in the subject of the story, whether it’s
us or a hero to whom we relate, and what happens to others in collateral damage
but doesn’t affect us so much. I saw a great example of this this week in
gizmodo, an online tech site, that was talking about the ethics of driverless
cars. It’s a crazy world we live in, but nowadays these are serious ethical
concerns, namely if you have a driverless car and it cannot avoid an accident,
should it ever be programmed to kill its own driver for the greater good—say,
if 10 pedestrians are crossing the street. And what about if one pedestrian is
crossing the street? These are tough questions. Now, what I found interesting
in this story and pertinent to our discussion of Job is that, when asked what
the car should do, the majority of people agreed the car should be programmed
to crash into a wall rather than plow through pedestrians—even one pedestrian,
since the person in the car would have a better chance of survival than the
pedestrian. But, here’s where this gets really interesting, when asked whether
they would feel the same way if they were in the driverless car the same people
paused and leaned toward the cars being programmed not to kill their drivers. When
it was a faceless, nameless somebody it was OK, but when it was you—your life,
your one and only life—self-preservation took over.
This
is what the Christian worldview is up against: self-preservation. We can live
as if our lives are the most important, but we still have a God in Jesus Christ
who is telling us to lay down our lives—to go to the least, to the margins, to the
last, the lowly, the little, the dead. He’s calling us to the ones in the story
we don’t see—the women neglected by a patriarchal society, the minorities, the
ones deemed spiritually unworthy because of ethnicity or class. Jesus takes the
Job stories of the world and turns everything upside down. This happens with
Mary, singing her Magnificat about the proud being humbled and the meek
uplifted; it happens when Jesus dines with tax collectors and sinners; it
happens when Jesus speaks the beatitudes—blessed are the meek, the humble, the
poor. It happens when Paul says that there is no longer slave or free, Jew or
Gentile, male or female, but rather we are all one in Christ.
The margins matter. In fact, you get the picture that the
margins are more important than the center, or why else would Jesus be talking
about leveling the mountains and raising the valleys. All lives matter, sure,
but which lives are being neglected, disenfranchised, forgotten? That’s where
Jesus is.
This is not the moral of the Job story, either, but it’s
where I find myself going because I can’t, for the life of me, see the
prosperity Gospel working for everyone. It’s incredible how God provides, but
we are more often not Job; we are more often the friends worthy of nothing but
death who receive something different—grace—because of the good work of someone
else—in our case, Jesus. Maybe this is the secret to the book of Job. You are
not Job, after all. At least a part of you is not Job, because we are always
trying to explain what cannot be explained, to rationalize things that need not
be rationalized; instead, we are given a simple task by God: To love God, to
love our neighbors. And to leave that other stuff behind.
Job’s fault was his self-centeredness. If there is a
cause-effect to the resolution where he receives things in return it has to be
his repentance and also his plea for the mercy of his friends, which seems to
change God’s mind about things. This is prayer. This is why we pray, because
sometimes the world does change through little acts of mercy and love.
Sometimes it doesn’t even matter what our attitude is to prayer or why we’re
doing what we’re doing, because God does acts of loving-kindness with even our
most odious intentions.
This is Job. It’s a God who redeems in spite of human
creatures who don’t deserve it. We don’t deserve it. And so we face the ramifications
of being unworthy. We will lose things in this life—things that matter dearly
to us. Our relationships will fail and we’ll look down on ourselves, wondering
what’s wrong with me. Our bodies will fail and we’ll look inside ourselves at
the cancer, the miscarriage, the broken bones, the depression and anxiety and
we’ll doubt our ability to be anything in this life; we’ll doubt any hope for a
future.
We will fail. You will fail. Job failed. Even Job failed.
But the grace of God is not dependent on your success. You can’t earn grace.
You can’t create mercy. You are as broken as you know you are, and yet we have
a God in Christ Jesus who loves broken things above all, who makes broken
things whole; a God who loves you in all the ways you cannot. You are loved.
You are cared for. You are redeemed—like Job, but more fully, so that you may
be full of days as well but not just 140 years; not just good years but that, when
death comes knocking as it will, you will be saved into eternal life—the only true
fullness of days.
We are Job; we are not Job. We are human beings,
struggling, doubting ourselves, hating ourselves, called by Jesus Christ to
love because that is the path toward happiness but, no matter our ability or
inability to love God and to love people, we have a God who loves us still. The
Gospel of Job is this: God will take you in your brokenness and make you whole
again.
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