We have all probably heard the expression, “so-and-so has the patience of Job.” Of all Job’s qualities that we could glean from the forty-two chapters in this oft-neglected book of the Bible, it’s rather interesting that patience comes to the fore in our colloquial parlance. A close reading of the Book of Job would reveal Job’s anger, frustration, doubt, confusion, and what some might call blasphemy. But I suppose there is some patience present.
Job is patient in the sense that after losing nearly everything except his own life and his wife, he waits thirty-seven chapters before hearing a direct response from God to his existential questions. Meanwhile, Job loses much that is of value to him. Job is stripped of his possessions, and his children perish. The Book of Job is even more sinister in that Job’s misfortunes stem from a disturbing arrangement made between God and the Satan. The Satan challenges God, who accepts: if Job is such a loyal follower of yours, then afflict him and see how he holds up. Here is Satan the tempter even before he met Jesus in the wilderness.
In the end, Job more or less holds up: he endures the self-righteous scolding of his friends, who claim that Job must have committed some kind of sin or else he would not be suffering so. In their worldview, sin and suffering are causally connected. And besides, just who does Job think he is to question God’s ways? In short, Job’s friends are immensely unhelpful, and annoyingly self-righteous. We can at least admire Job for his gritty honesty and unwillingness to settle for shallow answers to the ultimate existential question: why do bad things happen to good people?
And so, when we enter Job’s story today at chapter thirty-eight, God speaks directly to Job for the first time. God has made Job wait all this time, and so we are quietly hoping that God will finally show some mercy to him. Instead, what we hear is God’s rebuke of Job. God puts him in his place. It’s the classic justification of a power differential: who are you to question my behavior? God is God, and Job is not. How can Job, in his puny human wisdom, begin to fathom the mystery of God? Who is Job to question God’s ways and whine about his misfortune? God can do whatever he wishes, including putting limits on creation. And if Job’s own story is an example, he can even make a deal with the Satan to test Job.
This is not what we, as sympathetic readers, want to hear, nor is it what Job wants to hear. Job has all along been demanding answers, but God does not give him any. And we, like Job, want answers. If the statistics on growing religious denominations are any indication of that craving, then people are flocking to denominations that give them certitude, and they are fleeing those that are unwilling to venture too far into speaking for God. And two extremes emerge: we are left with pat answers and shallow faith, or no answers at all and low expectations for belief.
This bifurcation of belief need not be the end of the story. And can you really blame a desire for an answer to existential plights? Remember that God asks Job, where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Where were you when I contained the raging sea within its borders? And yet we might well volley the question back to God: where were you when the waters of the sea raged over the coast of Japan in a the tsunami? Where were you when my loved one died of a terminal cancer far too young? Where were you when over three and a half million people died of a virus in a year and a half?
If we cannot be honest about these questions, then something is amiss. If our religion cannot tolerate such questions, then it must be frightened of its own flaws. And if God is not big enough to handle our challenges and cries of anger, then this God is not the God in whom we believe, and to whom Scripture and tradition attest.
If there’s one image to describe this seemingly intractable scenario of faith, it is for me a game of Jenga. Jenga comes from the Swahili word that means “to build.” The game commences when a tower of wooden blocks has been constructed in a prescribed way. Each participant must then remove one wooden block from the middle of the stack and place it on top without dismantling the tower. The game ends, of course, when the tower, like that of Babel, comes crashing down.
When we consider Job and his questions, as well as our own questions about God’s role in the midst of darkness, evil, and trauma, it is tempting to imagine it as a game of Jenga. In our minds, God has constructed a world of order from that of chaos. God has built a marvelous tower of wooden blocks. And when the tower inevitably falls, time and again, we wonder why. Is God less skilled than we hope? Has God himself blown upon the tower to knock it down because we have messed up? Have humans rearranged the blocks too much, ending in the tower’s ultimate destruction? And if God is so powerful, why can’t the tower simply stand tall and erect without collapsing?
But perhaps this metaphor of a Jenga game is less about how God controls or doesn’t control the universe and more about how we imagine God. Think back to Job’s friends, who were not all that helpful to him. Job’s friends either tell him that he is too small in the grand scheme of things to question God’s actions or that he must have done something to deserve retribution. Job’s friends represent those of us who claim absolute certainty about God’s ways. In this worldview, there is a direct correlation between punishment and sin because it can neatly explain evil. If disaster occurs, God is punishing us. The other side of the argument is nothing short of a weak avoidance of challenging questions. All the bad things that happen to us and others are simply the result of our limited knowledge. And who are we to question God? In this colossal Jenga game of reckoning, our view of God’s providence and behavior is so tightly constructed that if one wooden block is removed, the tower comes crashing down, and with it, any confidence in God’s goodness. This Jenga tower is sturdy until it is blown by the wind of life’s greatest tragedies. The tower stands with confidence until it attempts to answer the unanswerable.
To preserve the peace and the stability of the tower, people of faith have gone to all extremes: inquisitions, scapegoating, orthodoxy hunts, and ultimately exclusion of those who those who push against their own towers of certainty.
But the reality is that, when confronted with innumerable questions about suffering and human destruction, this seemingly solid Jenga tower cannot stand forever. It will crash and burn. Job seems to sense this even when grilled by his friends. Job waits and waits and waits until God finally speaks, because Job hopes that if he can only hear from God himself, he might learn something.
Although God finally responds to Job, he doesn’t answer him. And yet at the end of the story, God does indeed bless Job. It’s not a blessing that affords Job any answers, but he comes to this realization: God can do anything for us, including great good, even if we do not understand why evil happens. It is Job’s self-righteous friends who get rebuked by God, because they have tried to equate God with a Jenga tower of their own making. Job may settle for not having the answer to the problem of evil, but unlike his pious friends, he maintains that he must be able to give full vent to his anguish before God. God can handle it.
This we know: the course of human history has provided ample evidence of human cruelty, of savage behavior done even in the name of God, and of the bewildering inconstancy of life. We will be tempted over and over to build our own Jenga towers as we try to conceptualize God, but these towers will always fail. Someone or something will nudge the wrong block, and the whole edifice will come crashing down. Whether it’s by the hand of God or by human error, we will never know.
But we also know something else: we know that Job’s story sits alongside another story that forms the basis of our belief, and that is the story of Jesus. And we know from that story that when God acts, it is not by force or by stampeding over the wrongs of life. When God acts, he is able to build something beautiful from the ruins of incomprehensible tragedy. And when things come crashing down, God always rebuilds. Maybe not in our own time, but in God’s time. The Gospel tells us that God makes no deals with the Satan, because a deal between God and Satan is simply one more Jenga tower constructed in our imagination to explain things away. The Gospel tells us that when our human towers of conceit, pride, and self-righteousness come crashing down, God will help us rebuild something better, block by block—a new creation to replace the old. It is not for us to know how. But it is for us to know that God will do it.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 20, 2021