Job’s Dilemma
by the Rev’d Dr Hugh Kempster (OS 5; 7th Feb 2021)
Job 7:1-4, 6-7; Ps 147; 1 Cor 9:16-19, 22-23; Mark 1:29-39
Job spoke to his friends: “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope. Remember that my life is a breath; my eye will never again see good” (Job 7:6-7)
Biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, writes that: “The book of Job lives – rhetorically and theologically – at the edge of the Old Testament” (p.293). The book of Job cuts across the grain of traditional understandings of faith and fairness. Job is a good man, indeed without blemish. He has fulfilled a life-long obedience to God’s will and God’s way. So why does he suffer so unbearably? Surely this is unjust; and yet the opening chapters make it crystal clear that God wills, or at least allows, the tragic misfortune that falls on Job.
Today’s reading comes from a section of the book (chapters 3-27) that follows the opening narrative of God’s seeming betrayal of righteous Job. Satan has been given free-reign by God to destroy Job’s life and see if he will remain righteous. His friends are shocked to find this formerly successful suave landowner destitute and covered in boils. The NRSV, that we read from today, translates from the Hebrew that Job “sat among the ashes” (2:8). Although using some poetic license, the fourth-century Latin Vulgate reads much more powerfully: sedates in sterquilinio. Job is "sitting on a dunghill” itching his open sores with a broken clay pot. The friends are stunned into silence, and sit with him without saying a word for seven days and seven nights.
The narrative then moves into poetry; how else could any words be found in this devastating scenario? Job curses the day he was born, and then his friends – Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar – attempt to comfort him and find a reason for his suffering. Today’s reading is part of Job’s response to Eliphaz. Anyone who has experienced insomnia might consider Job their patron saint: “When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I rise?’ But the night is long, and I am full of tossing until dawn” (v.4).
It may seem a hopeless text, but it is not. Spoiler alert: things work out for Job in the end. But the theology of the book of Job is so much more complex and real than a fairy-tale happy-ever-after ending. One of the great commentators on this difficult text is liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, in his book On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (NY: Orbis, 1987). In his writing Gutiérrez emphasises our Christian duty to prioritise the needs and injustices of the poor and oppressed, through active involvement in civic and political affairs; practicing what we preach. He writes: “The world of retribution … is not where God dwells; at most God visits it. The Lord is not prisoner of the ‘give to me and I will give to you’ mentality. Nothing, no human work however valuable, merits grace, for if it did, grace would cease to be grace. This is the heart of the message of the book of Job” (pp.88-9).
The lens of Job’s struggles gives clarity to our gospel reading today. Jesus is not diseased, sitting on a dung-heap, but he is surrounded by suffering and evil at every turn, it presses in on him day and night. Our Lord has called his first disciples to leave behind their work, their homes, their comfort, and to follow in this Christian way of self-sacrifice, living for others. It is the Sabbath. After preaching in the synagogue and healing a man with an unclean spirit, our Lord goes to Simon Peter’s home; his mother-in-law is sick. She too is healed, and by dusk word has spread far and wide. Mark writes: “the whole city was gathered around the door.” Imagine that. All the lepers, the paralysed, those with infectious diseases, haemorrhages, the psychologically ill, the demon possessed, are banging at the door demanding attention. It was overwhelming. Jesus and the disciples must have been working half the night to help who they could, but the people kept coming.
Like Job, with such suffering pressing in, our Lord could not sleep. He rises long before dawn, sneaks past the needy patients waiting for him to reopen the make-shift hospital, and goes out into the desert. It is too much. The suffering is too overwhelming, more than anyone could bear. Where is God in this, justice, goodness, let alone hope? Like Job, he pours out his heart, his complaints to God. Finally, after the sun has risen, Simon and his band of fledgling followers find him. Come back! Everyone is looking for you. No, he says. Our Lord sees the bigger picture: the neighbouring towns, Jerusalem, the Gentiles and the wider world await. “Let us go on” he says, “so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came to do” (v.38).
Jesus is confronted with Job’s dilemma. He cannot eradicate suffering. The disease and pain is endless. But the message is not a magic wand that will take away all evil and oppression. The message is the gospel of faith, hope and love in the midst of this unbearable suffering and injustice. That is truth. That is the divine gift of grace; God’s real presence in the mess and unfairness of life.
Our calling as Christians, as St Peterites, is the same as the disciples’ and Gustavo Gutiérrez’s. When faced with Job’s dilemma, we too must not give up, give in, prove Satan right. Suffering and injustice does not mean that God has gone. It means that God is here, in the cloud of unknowing, in the dissonance and hopelessness, by grace. That is our truth, our calling. Not into comfort and a nice club of people we like and can control, but into the messiness of truth, integrity, reality, healing, faith, hope and love.