Job 38:1–11
Psalm 107:1–3, 23–32
2 Corinthians 6:1–13
Mark 4:35–41
Year B
I.N.I.
No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that Rock I’m clinging.
Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,
how can I keep from singing?
--Robert Lowry, Evangelical Lutheran Worship 763
What a great song of faith, particularly as I imagine how it looks to cling to a rock! Do you lock arms with it in a bear hug embrace? Or do you struggle to find a craghold and as the adrenaline is pumping force the tips of your fingers into place?
Job is the everyman my high school English literature teacher taught me about. In this biblical fable, he is singled out by one called the Accuser (alternatively known as Satan) as one worth proving to God. The result is an elaborate morality tale that pits Job against his family and his closest friends, and in the end God’s very self. If everything was taken away from you, your job, your health, your family, would you still honor God? As the story unfolds, One-by-one tragedy finds poor Job, until he sat with rags draping his emaciated body and on top of an ash heap. This is the story not of rags to riches but the reverse, riches to rags. With no rock to cling to, Job is actually in free fall!
Three of Job’s friends offer advice, like a panel on Oprah. We hear first from Eliphaz the Temanite who begins by saying “you must have done something to deserve all this,” and getting so worked up later suggesting that “you must have been really wicked to be punished like this.” Then the second friend Bildad the Shuhite offers this: “because God is just than you must have screwed up somewhere. Just say you’re sorry, and God will restore to you your rightful place.” Finally, Zophar the Naamathite weighs in by saying “you’re getting off lightly for what you’ve apparently done.”
Job has responses to each three, all implying that they must be really stupid. I agree. I think that their initial intentions were quite honorable, but that they might have kept their mouths shut a little longer. For many who are in the storm of their lives, empathy goes a long way before advice. Before Job’s friends spoke, this is how the story describes their response to Job’s plight:
11Now when Job's three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home — Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. 12When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. 13They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. (Job 2:11-13)
Now that’s empathy!
Job, contrary to what you may think if you’ve never read the book, was not quietly sucking it up. He had choice words for God, like
I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint. I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know what you contend against me. Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked? (Job 10:1-3)
Here and in other places in the story, clearly Job has a point. Job lays waste the prevailing notion of reward and punishment. With countless others from time immemorial who suffer unjustly, who are innocent victims of civil war, who are labeled collateral damage in bombings, who lack access to water and food supplies because of government corruption and corporate greed, who in their right mind can argue that the poor and suffering deserve their lot? Who can argue that God intends or promotes this?
To Job, and others who like him who contend with God and God’s justice or injustice, out of the storm, finally, God has an answer. Unfortunately it doesn’t neatly zip up Job’s problems. It does not paint the issues of evil and suffering in black and white but adds grey and maybe brown, like mud. God takes Job on a magical mystery tour of the cosmos and describes the challenges inherent in the ecosystem. God fires back Job’s questions with machine gun-like questions of his own:
“Have you entered into the springs of the sea?”
“Where is the place to the dwelling of light?”
“Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew?”
“Can you hunt the prey for the lion?”
“Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?”
“Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?
“Can you draw out the crocodile with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord? Will you play with it as with a bird, or will you put it on leash for your girls?"
Whew! You might think this is a great boxing match, with Job and God punching it out, only to have God wear Job down. In the end, Job throws in the towel. He says, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know….I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:3b-6)
But what I really think is that God got Job and those of us overhearing to discard our unfounded way of thinking about God. The mystery of God and the world is bigger than a reward and punishment system, and the point, really the point is, that God cares more deeply about creation and the stuff of creation than we ever think, particularly when we ourselves are down for the count, or when we face squarely the issues of unjust suffering.
In the Gospel reading today, Jesus open his mouth after the disciples quiver and quake in a storm. He wakes up grumpy from his nap and tells the wind and the sea to SHUT UP! And they do. This connects the man from Nazareth with the God out of the whirlwind who contends with Job. This guy Jesus represents a shake-up of the world order. Already in the first four chapters of Mark he heals on the Sabbath, makes an unclean leper well, announces forgiveness to a paralytic, and picks produce on the Sabbath. It’s like he is above reward and punishment. In today’s stormy story as the disciples yell “don’t you care?” Jesus answers their question with his own questions: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” The point, really the point is that loyalty to Jesus and his ways are the lifeline to God’s ways. He is the rock, the stronghold, the one who demonstrates that mercy trumps justice, and who has power to turn the world upside down.
We can contend with God. Job certainly did, particularly in his weakest moments. We can cry out with others in the gospels, “Jesus, save us.”
We can offer our empathy to others, with tears, empathy, accompaniment, prayer, and actions that say we stand with you. We wish to do that for all who suffer and who live in poverty, for those in Liberia, those in Palestine, in Darfur, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and those close to us in this community who face their own storms.
And as the community of the baptized, who coming through the water cling to Christ and his power over the storms of life, we can also sing, as the Dutch writer Huub Oosterhuis suggests:
Singing is discovered and invented, it is born at time when there is no other possible way for people to express themselves—at the grave, for example, when four or five people with untrained, clumsy voices sing words that are greater and small than their faith and their experience (Prayers, Poems and Songs New York: Herder and Herder, 1970, pp 103-104, quoted in How Can I Keep from Singing? Thoughts about the Liturgy for Musicians by Gabe Huck Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1989, p 37)
No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that Rock I’m clinging.
Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,
how can I keep from singing?
--Robert Lowry, Evangelical Lutheran Worship 763
I.N.I.
The Rev. Timothy J. Keyl, Pastor
Christ the King Lutheran Church
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