http://eliotchapel.org/sermonDocs/job.htmThis is an interesting article about Job and his struggles. There are a few interesting points mentioned which gets me to question *sinning*. These days my faith has been on the decline as a Christian, and to think how and why God would do such a thing as to take on Satan's challenge and torture and test Job, his faithful and nearly flawless follower, is confusing me and making me wonder. Please, if any knowledgable Christians here can help interpret and put in some insight, it would be much appreciated.
*article pasted here so viewers don't have to click the link*
"JOB: MORE RIGHTEOUS THAN GOD?"
– A sermon given by the Reverend Peter Raible, STD,
interim lead minister of Eliot Unitarian Chapel,
on Sunday, November 4, 2001
Yahweh was having a soiree, what today we might call a party of the old boys up in heaven. To the gathering comes an infrequent visitor, Satan, so god welcomes him with these words: "Whence do you come?" and Satan is quick to answer, "From roaming in the earth and going to and fro therein." This perks Yahweh's interest, for he has a special pride down there, so he inquires of Satan, "Have you noticed my servant, Job?" and then he boasts, "There is none like him in the earth. A man perfect and upright, who fears God and shuns wickedness."
But Satan being Satan, does not allow goodness to be affirmed unchallenged. He taunts Yahweh: "Has Job feared God for nothing? Has thou not hedged him round about and his house and all that belongs to him? Thou blessed the labor of his hands; and his wealth has spread abroad in the land. But now put forth thy hand and touch whatsoever he has: He will curse thee to thy face."
God succumbs to his own vanity and declares,
"All that he has is in your power; only upon him you shall not lay a hand." Satan races off, and soon barbarians fall on Job's flocks and servants, and what wealth Job has left is next consumed in a lightning storm, and then a whirlwind kills his sons and daughters. Job observes the proper death rituals, but continues to praise God's name. Back in the heavenly kingdom, Yahweh delights in Job's faithfulness, but Satan scoffs and demands, "Skin for skin. Touch his bone and his flesh and Job will curse thee to thy face." God succumbs anew and allows Satan all power over Job except to take his life. Soon Job has leprosy all over his body and sits depressed on a dung pile silently suffering, so that his wife berates him and urges him to curse god and die."
These episodes are just the start of the biblical tale, which goes on and on with Job's former friends appearing repeatedly as supposed comforters to wax on and on about his confessing to his secret sins, because god never punishes the innocent. Job refuses to accept these arguments, but neither is he willing to decry god, even as he asks Yahweh to justify what he is doing to his faithful servant, Job, a guiltless being.
The story is devastatingly clear; Job has done nothing to deserve his fate; he has simply been turned into a gambling chip in a cruel bet between Satan and a capricious god, just to see if Job can remain faithful under the torture of loss and suffering.
The book of Job is generally deemed the most profound part of the entire bible for it confronts head on the toughest question of existence, "Why do the righteous suffer and the evil prosper?" Or as every innocent person has cried out over the ages, "What did I do to deserve this? Why did this have to happen to me?"
Biblical scholars have great fun musing about the text of the book of Job, what might have been added or taken away and who wrote the book originally and what was the author's intent. But however interesting such questions, they duck the story as it confronts us starkly: why should the innocent Job suffer? The biblical answer as we saw in our reading earlier never really deals with the "why." Instead at the end of the story with Job still faithful yet still demanding an answer to the why, god appears and simply lords it over poor Job. He tells his faithful follower that he is an upstart, who wasn't around when Yahweh formed the earth so how much can Job know about existence and what god intends with it? The wretched Job after all his bitter experience is further humbled and devastated by god's vehement denunciation and can only meekly reply "I am insignificant and I will question no more?" But Yahweh storms on asking significantly if Job will make God guilty so that he may be innocent? Job crushed says, "I have declared without understanding, things too wonderful for me…I retract in dust and ashes."
Now that Job has no fight left, Yahweh turns beneficent and hands back to Job everything he lost twice over and a long life to enjoy it, as though this largesse compensates for all that Job had suffered. The story completely ignores the unwarranted testing to which Job has been subject and the immorality of a god who without cause sends Job's children to a horrible fate as if their lives counted for nil. Job, who is good and faithful in every way, is put through a terrible ordeal for no apparent reason except god's ego need to win a contest with Satan. The only explanation a human is allowed is that god's power is overwhelming and his purposes are too great and mysterious for human understanding. Don't question; just accept; and god's purposes are not ours. As is oft said, "He works in strange and mysterious ways, His wonders to perform." That, of course, is the easy, straightforward FIRST possible conclusion we can draw from Job, and it is this answer that most orthodox Jews and traditional Christians take away from the story.
But let us toy for a moment with a possible quite different explanation for what the Book of Job might be all about. The Bible's second creation story in Genesis makes quite clear that human beings are formed in the image and likeness of god. When Adam and Eve disobey Yahweh, they lose their innocence by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This knowledge gives the human being divine powers; in fact the only superiority and uniqueness that god has left is the immortality of being divine; gods are deathless; human beings are not. Yahweh fears the human being will now venture to eat of the fruit of the tree of immortal life, and thus, as the Genesis story declares, become like god. If that happened, god would no longer be unique, so to prevent that the no longer innocent humans are kicked out of paradise and guards are set at the gate to prevent their return. This banishment removes their danger to god's superiority, but the threat remains.
Human beings throughout the Jewish scriptures seem ever prone to seize some way to get immortal life. They strive to build a tower of Babel up into the sky so they might enter the very gates of heaven itself; so Yahweh has to knock it down. The prophets keep talking about creating a world of milk and honey, where the lion and lamb should lie down together, peace would pervade the earth and none would be afraid. In such a perfect world, god would be superfluous, what role would be left for the divine?
The famed psychotherapist, Carl Jung, wrote a perceptive book entitled Answer to Job, in which Jung held that god was forced to call off the bet with Satan and then humiliate Job so that the human being would not realize that he has attained a higher morality than god. God throws Job into an unjust punishment for perverse reasons of pride, while Job, despite every temptation to do otherwise, remains steadily faithful in his promised love and service of the divine. If Job fully realized what he had accomplished, he would no longer need Yahweh; the divine would be obsolete. God's recourse is to use overwhelming power to humiliate Job and silence him. In short, blatant evil power becomes manifest to protect Yahweh's unique position on high. Jung's approach provides a SECOND interpretation of the Book of Job, one that certainly opens fertile furrows to plow in the human questing after ultimate answers in existence. Put succinctly, human evolution takes us to a place where the traditional god is dead; the concept of the all mighty, powerful ruler of the universe is no longer useful. Humans have attained the ability to quest for themselves.
Jung, however, does not strive to answer the basic underlying question of Job, namely why do the righteous suffer without cause. But every doubter of the doctrine that existence is managed by a just and merciful god will find the story of Job, as interpreted by Carl Jung, a powerful argument against a personal god caring for his human creation.
So, at length, let us push on to yet another THIRD view of the Job story, one propounded by Archibald MacLeish in his marvelous play, J.B. when it first appeared over 40 years ago. MacLeish in his play sets the problem right from the start: "If god is god, he is not good. If god is good, he is not god." In other words, if god is all powerful (that is, god is truly the god in charge of everything), then the divine cannot be good, given all the evil and suffering which pervades the world, when god has the power to choose to stop such suffering and evil. On the other hand, if god is good, then god is not the traditional god in charge of everything that happens. A good god must be limited in what the divine can achieve and thus a good god does not have unlimited power to erase suffering and establish the good. Therefore a good god is not all-powerful.
When we get to this point of accepting a limited god, I believe we get pushed toward one of two possible explanations, if we seek to make any sense at all of the divine.
One explanation propounded sees god as not all-powerful, but a creative force which also suffers and depends on human beings. The divine needs life forces to be empowered on this earth. Famed philosopher Josiah Royce put the matter simply -- in us god also suffers, precisely as we do, and as we grieve, so does god, and together human beings and god labor to abate suffering and make manifest the creative. Human beings created in god's image are not perfect, because god was not made perfect in some initial creation. The righteous suffer because god cannot prevent such suffering. God suffers with other suffering in creation, even as the divine is a creative force involved in continuous acts of bringing new possibilities and achievements into being.
Every human has the choice either to make manifest creative human possibilities or to turn aside from the creative and to allow failure, suffering, and destruction to hold sway. Human effort is summoned to venture in harmony along with god's possibilities for growth - god is evolving in creation; and on this earth god is dependent on life forms, particularly human beings, to work to further creation as creation becomes manifest in new acts of meaning. The divine cooperates with human activity, which labors to further the quality of life - in such ways as efforts against disease, starvation, and destructive acts.
In the play, J.B., Archibald MacLeish agrees that god is limited, but in comparison with the theological notions about a limited, creative god, MacLeish takes us in a different direction. MacLeish presents in his play the Job figure, J,B., after the capricious suffering is over and god is about to restore Job to his former wealth and status, twice over. In the J.B. drama, one character urges Job to reject this buy off from god declaring:
Job won't take it! Job won't touch it! Job will fling it in God's face with half his guts to make it spatter! He's rather suffocate in dung - choke in ordure -
In short, Job should shout rebellious defiance, the triumph of the human being over a god who believes he can buy off the righteous for a price, but J.B. is not content with some victory of justification over the divine. Instead in the final scene, J.B. is reunited with his spouse, Sara, who had left him in the final period of his former suffering. When J.B. challenges her as to why she left, Sara responds simply:
I loved you. I couldn't help you any more. You wanted justice and there was none - only love. (God does not love) but we do. That's the wonder. (When), I left you, I thought there was a way away.
She discovered there was no way for her apart. Then after a bit, Sarah declares it is too dark to see, but we can still blow on the coal of the heart -- that is, strive, whatever else, to create the redemption of love.
She says quietly:
Blow on the coal of the heart, my darling. It's all the light now… Blow on the coal of the heart. The candles in churches are out. The lights have gone out in the sky. Blow on the coal of the heart and we'll see by and by.
MacLeish does not take the theologian's gambit of saying trust god's love, but rather takes his stand on human love. The only possibility is love, says MacLeish, as he explains in written comment about his play:
(The human), the scientists say, is the animal that thinks. They are wrong. (The human) is the animal that loves. It is in (human) love that the world's injustice is resolved. To hold together in one thought those terrible opposites of good and evil which struggle in the world is to be capable of life, and only love will hold them so. Our labor always like Job's labor is to learn through suffering to love… to love even that which lets us suffer.
The gospel, thus proclaimed, is too stark for many, perhaps most. Such love declares we have no guarantees; we cannot always avoid suffering and abate injustice but we can use our power of love. Love will not always succeed, but it is the way of redemption, of genuine, fuller humanness, of continuing creation. For we venture ever with love, not so much love proclaimed as love practiced in our daily acts in which we strive to have life and to have life more abundantly.