“Job: Literally Down in the Dumps”

Job 2:1-10

Job 2:9-10 [The Message]: [Job’s] wife said, “Still holding onto your precious integrity, are you? Curse God and be done with it!” He told her, “You’re talking like an empty-headed fool. We take the good days from God – why not also the bad days?” Not once through all this did Joseph sin. He said nothing against God.

Mark 10:9: Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

[prayer]

A couple of observations: (One) Job’s wife has gotten a bad rap over the years. Her suggestion to Job that he curse God and die isn’t as cynical and heartless as we’ve come to believe. We forget that she was suffering too. Job wasn’t the only one to lose everything. Simply because she was married to Job she had also lost her family and fortune.

The Hebrew can be a bit tricky here. There are sources that translate a particular word as blessing rather than curse. Maybe she was telling Job to bless God and die. Whatever, in the midst of her own pain she was somewhat compassionately urging Job to do whatever was necessary to escape his suffering. Bless God and then quietly surrender to death, or curse God and invite God’s deadly wrath upon himself.

(Two) Preaching from the lectionary sometimes involves the dubious pleasure of finding some sort of relationship between texts that appear to have nothing in common. Our Old Testament text deals with Job’s final Devil-imposed affliction and his response to it. Our Gospel text contains Jesus’ teachings about divorce. Job wasn’t getting a divorce. He had other things on his mind!

But Job was wrestling with the issue of faithfulness. Would he or would he not maintain his relationship with God when the going got rough? Is not the question of divorce, especially the divorce of two professing Christians, who have been united in a covenant with their God, sometimes a matter of being willing to maintain the marital relationship during the bad times? Is that not a question of integrity?

Job’s integrity was certainly being tested. Was his going to turn out to be a fair weather faith? Satan was sure that it would. Job’s wife couldn’t understand how Job could maintain his integrity in the face of horrible physical suffering. Would he not at some point almost have to surrender to the temptation to give up on God? The Devil thought so. His wife essentially said so. In his place, most of us would have some serious doubts about the goodness of God.

However, as the text puts it, “Not once through all this did Job sin. He said nothing against God.” The remainder of the book details Job’s theological debates with well-intended but incorrect friends, and more importantly, his intense spiritual, emotional, and intellectual wrestling with God. Through it all Job struggles with God, and not always politely. But never, ever did he renounce God. Nor did he ever totally lose sight of God’s grace. Through absolutely no fault of his own his children were dead, his wealth was gone, and his body was covered with some sort of loathsome pox or boils. Yet he maintained his faith and his integrity.

He maintained them even though his life had literally and figuratively turned to garbage. As he took his place among what most translations simply call the ashes, he was actually exiling himself to the town dump. Hence the title, he literally was down in the dumps.

Listen to how Samuel Terrian describes it in his commentary from The Interpreters Bible, “… and there he sat, amid rubbish, rotting carcasses, playing urchins, homeless beggars, village idiots, and howling dogs. The respected prince was now an outcast, awaiting death, tormented by pain, and rent by mental anguish.” Job had gone about as far down as possible without dying.

Job is not an easy book to read – or teach – or preach. It leaves us with more questions than it does answers. But we still need to deal with Job. Why? The best answer may be the one I found in Mary Frances Owens’ introduction to her commentary on Job: “… [Job] narrates a man’s struggle with faith in the face of innocent suffering and unanswered questions. In that respect Job becomes the representative worshiper of every generation.”

We all deal with suffering. We all have our questions as to “why?” or “what have I done to deserve this?” Why does the rain fall on the just and the unjust? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do innocent school children have to die because some unhappy ding-dong refuses to commit suicide privately? Why do 3,000 innocent people die because some idiotic religious fanatic wants to make a political statement? Or why does one spouse, and usually the children, have to suffer the pain and indignity of a divorce that only the other spouse wants?

Tough questions. Questions lacking rational answers. As the bumper sticker puts it, in answer to such questions, “Stuff happens.” Or as my dear Aunt Arlene would say, “That’s just the way it is.”

Stuff does happen, some of it seemingly random. Sometimes we have to deal with the reality that whatever our situation might be, that is just the way it is. Sometimes we surrender to what is in helpless, hopeless silence. Sometimes we struggle mightily to fix the unfixable, banging our heads against walls of futility. Sometimes we are tempted to curse God and die, or just die. Sometimes we play poor pitiful me as we cling to our pity pot. Sometimes we angrily and begrudgingly accept what is and live from then onward in dark, sour bitterness.

I think the best approach is Job’s, one emulated by some of the psalmists. Job wasn’t quiet. Job wasn’t suicidal. Job didn’t cling to his pity pot. He confronted God with his anger, frustrations, and questions. He didn’t tiptoe before the throne and meekly ask for a moment of God’s time. He more or less looked to the heavens and demanded to know what in the blazes was going on!

God listened. Then God spoke. He did not explain himself. He didn’t try to give Job answers that would have been beyond human comprehension. Basically his answer to Job was, “I’m God and you’re not.”

And Job accepted it. He wasn’t necessarily happy about it, but by faith he accepted it. He accepted that God was God on God’s terms. As was said earlier he had struggled with God, but when push came to shove, he did not renounce God – or run away from God – or stop believing. Somehow in the midst of the mess that was his life he came to a place of acceptance.

Years ago a wonderful Christian therapist told me something that I have never forgotten: “Sometimes the only reconciliation possible is being reconciled to the reality that there will be no reconciliation.” Job wasn’t going through a divorce. As far as we know his wife hung in there with him. Job wasn’t even seeking a divorce from God. By faith he reconciled himself to the reality that his issues were irreconcilable with logical expectations, that his questions would be forever unanswerable in terms of human comprehension.

My wife tells me that I am much more patient and much less prone to anxiety than I used to be. Although I still have my moments, I’m very aware of how much less I whine and complain these days. I’m also finding that I don’t bang my head against brick walls nearly as much as I used to. And that often – not always, but often – I can accept those twin realities that stuff happens and that sometimes that’s just the way it is. I may not like what happens or the way that things may be, but I have learned to live with rather that protest reality.

Please understand that I’m still a long way from perfect. A papal proclamation of my sainthood is not waiting just around the corner. I still very much sin and fall short of the glory of God. I’m probably nowhere near the challenge for the Devil that Job was. But I am learning to accept – not like, but accept - the bad with the good. And I’m also discovering that one can indeed be joyful in Christ without being happy about life, and that one can accept the reality of God’s grace even when it might not be overtly evident.

Sometimes there are either no answers to our questions or none that we like. Sometimes all we have to hang on to is our faith in God and the integrity of our relationship with him. Sometimes we will find ourselves saying something like Jesus said in the garden when he asked his Father to take the cup of suffering away from him. Sometimes the best we can do is come to terms with the fact that God is God and we are not.

Hopefully at such times it can be said of us as it was said of Job, “Not once through all this did Job sin. He said nothing against God. Amen.