DOES JOB FEAR GOD FOR NOUGHT?
Dick Buchman
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
March 27, 2011

It is Friday afternoon, November 9, 875 BC. The Board of Directors has gathered in the boardroom for the monthly meeting of the corporation. It is, as usual, a heavenly day, and as the directors return from their assigned portions of the Planet Earth, the atmosphere in the boardroom grows more and more convivial. Within an hour, for these meetings are blissfully short, the directors will be on their way home, where they can discard their robes or togas or lion skins, change into something more comfortable, stretch their wings, pick up their harps, and enjoy a cup of nectar with the neighbors.

The Corporation is in excellent shape and the Chairman of the Board is in fine fettle. The chart on the wall behind his chair portrays graphically the uninterrupted upward swing of the Corporation’s success. One by one the directors are greeted by the Chairman who receives from them the optimistic reports, which he has been expecting. Finally, they are all in their assigned places at the long, polished table, briefcases open, and pencils at the ready. All, that is, except one, who stands alone in the corner of the room, staring out the window. “Satan, says the Chairman of the Board, “sit down here next to me and tell me where you have been keeping yourself.”

“I have been keeping myself, Sir, where you told me to keep myself. I have been going to and from on the earth and walking up and down on it. If you ask me, it’s all pretty dreary.”

“I didn’t ask you, Satan,” replies the Chairman, “but that’s besides the point. Tell me, in your goings to and fro, have you run across my friend, Job? Now there is a man, a living advertisement for our product. Not a day passes that I do not hear Job’s voice, praising me and confessing his dependence upon me, and thanking me for all the favors I have done him. Why, he hasn’t had a care in the world since he gave us his account. There is nobody like him, anywhere, and he is all ours.”

“Well,” says Satan, “he doesn’t impress me much. At last count he had ten children, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she-asses, not to mention a small army of servants and a barn full of money. He would be stupid to switch suppliers. He would never get the special considerations that you have given him.”

The boardroom is suddenly very quiet. All eyes have turned to the head of the table. The Chairman’s mood has also changed. The smile has left his face and in its place is a look of uncertainty. But he hesitates only a few seconds, and then speaks. “Do what you will to him, Satan, but spare his person. And mark my words, he will not leave us.”

Without another word, Satan leaves.

One month later, the meeting convenes again. Satan reports that Job has lost everything. His children are dead, his livestock and his property destroyed. “And what was his reaction?” asks the Chairman. Satan checks his notes and replies, “He said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I shall return; the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed is the Name of the Lord.’”

The Chairman looks at Satan and says, “You apparently remain unimpressed.” Satan replies, “I do. He still has his life and he still has his health and finally that is all that matters to him.”

The Chairman has gone too far to back down. He is being bluffed and he has no choice but to call that bluff. His words are tinged with sadness. “He is yours, Satan, but spare his life.”

On the next day, Job sits among the ashes, covered with loathsome sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. His wife comes to him and says, “Don’t be stupid. Curse God and die.”

“You speak like a foolish woman,” says Job. We receive good from the hands of God. Is it not reasonable that we shall also receive evil?”

Thus is the classical theological question raised by the Book of Job. Phrase it as you will: Why do good people suffer? Why does anyone suffer? Why does everyone suffer? From whence does evil come? How can a good God permit evil in a perfect creation?

The question is obvious and universal. We have always asked it and we always will. I doubt that anyone will ever ask it as beautifully as the unknown author or author of the Book of Job asked it, nor is it likely that anyone will ever answer it as well as they did. When I began my ministry in Scarsdale, New York, in 1959, the senior class at Scarsdale High School voted to remove the Book of Job from the English Literature reading list because they were dissatisfied with the answer they found in that book. That is as good a reason as I have every heard to raise the voting age to forty-five.

But we are going to have to wait awhile for the answer, because to understand that answer, and to be able to decide, for ourselves, if that answer is valid, we must first understand the context in which the Book of Job asks the question. That is why I described the meeting of the Board of Directors in such detail, and let me assure you that while I elaborated a bit on the setting of the story, I said nothing in that description that is not absolutely faithful to the Biblical account. Satan may not have been a member of the Board of Directors, but it is clear that he was not an independent contractor; he was not someone who could do what he wished to do when he wished to do it. He worked for the Lord, and although he saw himself as something of a Devil’s advocate, his authority and his power were from God and God alone. At each step in the persecution of Job, he had to seek the Lord’s permission to proceed, and he could not go beyond what the Lord allowed him to do.

You must understand that completely, and without any confusion, if you are to understand the problem of evil as it is laid out in the Book of Job. And lest you fail to understand that, I will put it as bluntly as I can. The book of Job is a Hebrew book, written by people who understood the world and their place in it in a particular way. Above all, they understood that there was one Creator, one Prime Mover, one Source of everything and every creature and every situation and every blessing and every problem known to mankind. Nothing, for them, existed that had not come for the hand of the Lord. Nothing!

Late in the 1960’s, on a day that I will never forget, I sat with several dozen clergymen at Temple Emanu’el and heard a rabbi say exactly what I have just said about the Holocaust. “We cannot,” he said, “simply blame that horror on a group of people who became temporarily insane. That would be too easy, much too easy. The alternative is awful, but we have no choice. We must ask, “Why?”

A good question, one, which Job, asked and asked and asked again. He asked it because he had done everything he could, in his lifetime, to be what God wanted him to be. The story makes it clear that he had succeeded, at least as much as anyone succeeds. He was, we are told, blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.

That is the second thing you must understand. Job was a good man, a very good man, a very, very good man. He was not a hypocrite. His first thoughts, every morning, were directed toward the Lord, and his last thoughts at night were directed toward the Lord, and between morning and night, he treated his family and his friends and his servants with generosity and with love.

In other words, the Book of Job asks the question as clearly as it can be asked. Why do horrible things happen to good people and why does God permit them to happen? No tricks, no fancy stuff, no loopholes, no excuses, no freewheeling devils, no misinterpretations, no psychological escapes. Job was good; he suffered as few people real or imagined have suffered, and he suffered with the full approval of the God from whom he loved.

On this Sunday in Lent we are moving, once again, toward the Cross. The death of Jesus on that cross forces us to ask the same question that the Book of Job asks, “Why?” It is generally agreed, after all, that Jesus did not deserve his fate, that whatever he did or did not do, whatever he did or did not say, his death was not called for. Those who consider Jesus to be just a man, however great, lay the blame for his death at the feet of those who actually killed him and claim that they, through ignorance or error, misused the freedom that was theirs. And those who call Jesus by some other name… the Son of God or what have you… have manufactured several theories to explain the necessity of his death, and they can rattle off those theories and spit out words such “substitutionary” with ease, convinced, I guess, that by doing so they have solved a problem. I think it better to wonder… and to weep.

The suffering of Job and the death of Jesus both force us to ask the question: “Why?” I want you to take that question home with you this week and think about it. And as you do, consider these words by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

You who keep account of crisis and transition in this life,
Set down the first time Nature says plain “No!”
To some “Yes” in you, and walks over you
In gorgeous sweeps of scorn. We all begin
By singing with the birds and running fast
With June days, hand in hand: but once, for all,
The birds must sing against us, and the sun
Strike down upon us like a friend’s sword caught
By an enemy to slay us, while we read
The dear name on the blade which bites at us!
We seldom doubt that something in the large
Smooth order of creation… has gone wrong.

Consider, too, these words of Job. “Shall we receive good from God and not evil?”

And these words of Jesus. “Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.”

Amen.