A sermon for Provoking Faith in a time of Isolation
The online gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
5th July 2020
Job 41.1-8; 42.1-17
Listen to the sermon here:
I’d like to start our engagement with the final chapters of
Job, by posing a question:
Do you
think that the ending of this story ruins it?
If you do, you’re not alone!
Many people find the ending of Job problematic.
After all the
suffering he’s has been through,
suddenly his fortune is restored,
he is reconciled to his family,
he has lots and lots of sheep,
camels, oxen and donkeys,
and ten further children
including
three daughters with amazing names.
Frankly, this could easily be read as a sell-out,
both
theologically and narratively.
After all, for the first forty-one chapters,
the book
has been doing logical and theological battle
with
the view of God that sees material success
as
a divine reward for righteousness;
and yet here,
right at the end,
the most righteous man of all gets
his reward
of family, friends, and an enormous
quantity of livestock.
It would be a bit like discovering Shakespeare originally
planned little extra scenes
for his great
tragedies of Romeo and Juliet or King Lear,
where
everyone comes back to life and does a little dance.
Except, the thing is… that is how they were originally played,
as anyone
who’s been to the Globe Theatre knows well.
The thing is, we’re all suckers for a happy ending,
and maybe
for the book of Job to function as a successful story
it simply
needs its happy ending?
Maybe it would have been too bleak
if Job had
just lived in righteous misery unto death?
But what are we to make of this?
How do we
reconcile Job’s happy ending
with the
theology of the rest of the book?
Well, let’s take a step back into our first reading,
and pick up
the narrative with God’s final speech to Job.
Here we find God once again using the language and imagery
of nature
to show Job
that there is a far wider perspective on life
than the
one he is currently, subjectively, experiencing.
I think that how you hear God’s words to Job
really
rather depends on the tone with which you choose to read them.
It could be read that God is simply beating Job over the
head with creation,
telling him
that he knows nothing so he should just shut up with his complaining.
But I think this is to do an injustice to what is going on
here,
which is
that God is offering Job an invitation
to a wider
way of understanding existence.
The thing is, and I’m sure many of us can relate to this,
when we
experience trauma in our lives
the natural
reaction is for us to ‘turn in’ on ourselves.
We, sometimes quite literally, ‘hunch over’ our own pain,
whether it
is physical or psychological,
and we find
it hard to focus on anything other than our suffering.
And initially, this is of course entirely appropriate;
it is a
survival strategy, that we prioritise ourselves and our immediate needs,
and the
rest of the world can go hang for a while.
We know this is true in our experiences of bereavement, or
sudden illness,
and it is something
we all do.
But if we are to live again, we cannot stay in such a place.
If we spend
the rest of our lives blaming or questioning ourselves,
or living in anger at how our world
has changed,
then we are
no longer really living.
And so, after forty chapters of focussing on his suffering,
questioning
the ‘whys and wherefores’ of his pain,
Job is challenged by God to open his eyes to a wider
perspective,
to see through
his pain to a world that is bigger, more beautiful,
and more
mysterious than he had previously realised.
God’s invitation to Job is to reorientate his worldview,
to learn
that despite how it feels for him,
he is not
the centre of the universe.
The temptation for all of us is, like Job, to view the world
subjectively,
to judge
the world according to our own pain, or our own joy,
to measure
the universe by our own failure, or our own success.
And as Job discovers, this is ultimately pointless,
because the
world doesn’t make sense from subjective point of view.
If all that matters is my suffering, my righteousness, and my
justice,
then the
world is an untenable place to live;
because the
world is not, ultimately, interested in me.
And God’s invitation to Job is to realise that his place in
the universe
is not predicated
on his own suffocating experiences;
and that lifting his head, looking around him,
and realising
that there is so much more to the world,
is an invitation to live, and to breathe again.
An inwardly-focussed existence
is
ultimately counter productive
to our own
continued existence.
But a glimpse of the wider perspective of creation in all
its mystery and majesty,
opens the
door for a new way through the pain and suffering of life.
Let me tell you a story, from my family.
I’ve told
it before, and I’m sure I’ll tell it again.
My grandma was married for only six weeks,
before her
childhood sweetheart was killed in action.
Then she realised she was pregnant with their child, who is my
mother.
So I think of Grandma, with all her hopes of family life dashed,
living in
poverty, a single mother in wartime,
reliant on
extended family for childcare.
In time, she found a way through her grief and loss,
and married
again, to the man I knew as my grandfather,
they had
further children, and grandchildren, and were very happy.
But my grandmother had to live with the memory of her grief
and suffering,
even
through the years of happiness and plenty that followed.
And she had to choose to re-marry,
even though
she knew the pain of losing a husband.
And she discovered what Job too would have had to learn,
which is
that even when a life of suffering opens out, in time,
to a life of happiness,
the
insights gained during the years of suffering are not lost.
And the vulnerability
to further loss and grief is always there.
And whilst it is certainly true that some people suffer unto
death;
many more
suffer for a while and then have a choice to make.
God’s invitation to Job is to choose life,
to open
himself to the possibility of new life beyond death.
And this, of course, is the hope that lies at the heart of
the Christian faith.
It is the
hope of resurrection.
It is the hope that death does not get the last word on
life;
that whether
it is the final experience of death
that we must all one day face;
or one of the
many smaller deaths:
of love, relationship, health, and
independence,
that blight our days on this earth;
it is the hope that whenever and however we experience loss
of life,
God is always inviting us to a new
experience of life,
challenging us to raise our eyes and
gain a new perspective.
In the 1980s, the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff
received a telephone
call on a sunny Sunday afternoon
that told
of his 25-year-old son Eric's death in a mountain-climbing accident.
He wrote the beautiful book, ‘Lament for a Son’
to express his
grief which is at once both unique and universal.
I’d like to read a short excerpt from the book now:
WHY DON’T YOU just scrap this God business,
says one of my bitter
suffering friends.
It’s a rotten world, you and I have been shafted, and that’s that.
I’m pinned down.
When I survey this gigantic intricate world,
I cannot believe that
it just came about.
I do not mean that I have some good arguments for its being made
and that I believe in
the arguments.
I mean that this conviction wells up irresistibly within me
when I contemplate the
world.
The experiment of trying to abolish it does not work.
When looking at the heavens,
I cannot manage to
believe that they do not declare the glory of God.
When looking at the earth,
I cannot bring off the
attempt to believe
that it does not
display his handiwork.
And when I read the New Testament and look into the material
surrounding it,
I am convinced that
the man Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead.
In that, I see the sign that he was more than a prophet.
He was the Son of God.
Faith is a footbridge that you don’t know will hold you up over the
chasm
until you’re forced to
walk out onto it.
I’m standing there now, over the chasm.
I inspect the bridge.
Am I deluded in believing that in God
the question shouted
out by the wounds of the world has its answer?
Am I deluded in believing that someday I will know the answer?
Am I deluded in believing that once I know the answer,
I will see that love
has conquered?
I cannot dispel the sense of conducting my inspection
in the presence of the
Creating/ Resurrecting One.
(Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Lament
for a Son (p. 76). Eerdmans.)
Or, as Job put it, from the depths of his suffering:
Job 19.25-26
For I know that my
Redeemer lives,
and that at
the last he will stand upon the earth;
26 and
after my skin has been thus destroyed,
then in my
flesh I shall see God.
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