Looking at Lent and Easter Through the Eyes of Job

Scripture: James 5:7-11

Communion Meditation by George B. Wirth

Ash Wednesday

March 8, 2000

 

 

 

 

Introduction

In keeping with our theme for the church year, A Vision to Guide Us, our sermons over the next six weeks will focus on Looking at Lent and Easter Through the Eyes of Job. It is my personal hope and fervent prayer, that as we explore this ancient story about the suffering of a man whom the Bible calls good and plumb the depths of the mysteries of God, we will be led to face and endure our own pain and therein find a deeper faith than ever before in the One whom we call Savior and Lord.

 

Part 1

Back in 1981, a rabbi from Massachusetts named Harold Kushner, wrote a book that caught the attention of our entire nation. When Bad Things Happen to Good People was published four years after the death of Kushner’s 14-year old son, Aaron, a teenager who succumbed to the rare disease, Progeria, which turned that young boy’s body into the grotesque form of an old man.

 

Kushner and his wife Suzette were grief stricken, and out of their pain, the rabbi wrote a book which raised again the question humanity has been asking since the beginning of time: “Why? Why do bad things happen to good people”?

 

Through his reading and research for this volume, and in seeking some kind of comfort and healing for his own sorrow, Kushner re-discovered what he described as “the most profound and complete consideration of human suffering in the Bible, perhaps in all of literature - the book of Job.” And in chapter two, this is what the rabbi wrote:

 

About twenty-five hundred years ago, a man lived whose name we will never know, but who has enriched the minds and lives of human beings ever since. He was a sensitive man who saw good people getting sick and dying around him while proud and selfish people prospered. He heard all the learned, clever and pious attempts to explain life, and he was as dissatisfied with them as we are today. Because he was a person of rare literary and intellectual gifts, he wrote a long philosophical poem on the subject of why God lets bad things happen to good people. The poem appears in the Bible as the book of Job.

 

Time does not permit tonight to examine all of Kushner’s thoughts. We will return to some of them later in Lent. The heart of his thesis about Job which provided the rabbi with some degree of consolation and helped him face and finally accept the death of his own son, comes in a trilogy of propositions that sound something like this:

 

1. God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the world.

2. God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they deserve, so that

the good prosper and the wicked are punished.

3. Job is a good and faithful person.

 

Kushner says, “If God is both just and powerful then Job must be a sinner who deserves what is happening to him. If Job is good but God causes his suffering anyway, then God is not just. If Job deserved better and God did not send his suffering, then God is not all-powerful. We can see the argument of the book of Job as an argument over which of these three statements we are prepared to sacrifice, so that we can keep on believing in the other two.” (Pages 37-38)

 

The answer for Kushner is that God has limited His own power and therefore does not or cannot always intervene to avert tragedy, to protect us from pain or help us avoid the suffering, the sorrow and the strain that we bear. Kushner does affirm that God is with us in the valley of the shadow, as Psalm 23 declares, and leads us toward the light of hope.

 

Some Jewish scholars criticized this book when it was published for “doing away with God’s omnipotence,” (Rabbi Neil Gillman, Philosophy Professor at Jewish Theological Seminary, New York City, quoted in Time Magazine, July 19, 1982), and a number of Christian theologians dismissed the book because it has nothing to say about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even so, I must confess that Rabbi Kushner’s honest and soul-searching struggle to find meaning in the midst of his own, as well as Job’s suffering, was a revelation to me. And let me tell you, as I have ministered to people in their time of suffering and grief, and given them a copy of this book, it has helped them hold on to their faith in God and discover the hope they so desperately seek.

 

As we make our way this Lenten Season toward Jerusalem and Calvary’s Cross, let us remember and never forget that Christ cried out with a painful sense of loss, My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken Me? Christian friends, we are dealing here with the deep mysteries of God, and if our Lord Himself raised the question, “Why?” then so can we. If we have the courage to ask that question, just as Job and Jesus did, then I believe that our Father in heaven will come alongside us, to guide us and provide us with the help and hope and healing that we need.

 

Part 2

But, in order to ask that question, “Why?” we not only need courage, but also God’s permission, and that leads us to re-examine an age-old impression of Job. Ever since I was a little boy in Sunday school, I have heard about the patience of Job. Here was a man who, I was told, endured his suffering without complaining and never lost his faith in God.

 

In fact, as we read again the words of James in the New Testament lesson, Job is lifted up as the paragon of patience:

 

Be patient, therefore...until the coming of the Lord...establish your hearts and do not grumble...as an example of suffering and patience...you have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

(James 5:7-11)

 

All my life, I have heard those words about the patience of Job, and no doubt, so have you. But before we conclude this sermon tonight, I have to be honest and say I’m no longer certain that they are true, because, in preparation for this sermon series on Looking at Lent and Easter Through the Eyes of Job, I have gone back and again read all 42 chapters of this Old Testament story, and found that this ancient man in the Bible was not as patient as I had been told. Over and over and over again, he looks up toward heaven and shouts at God, asking not only “Why is this happening to me and those I love?” but also, “Where are you?” and “How could you allow such terrible things to be”?

 

We’ll talk more in a few weeks about the impatience of Job. Suffice it to say tonight that he was not like the quiet and sheepish man kneeling down in a New Yorker cartoon by his bedside, looking up toward heaven with his hands folded, saying:

 

Possibly due to a technical error, I seem to be getting someone else’s comeuppance.

 

No, this man, Job, was impatient with the Lord, upset with his friends and felt let down by his wife who advised him to “curse God and die.” And if you have ever been there, or if that is where you are now, then these sermons on Job during this Lenten Season are meant for you!

 

Perhaps, as our journey begins tonight, the best we can do is lift up that familiar, honest and encouraging prayer from Thomas Merton, and walk through the darkness, suffering and pain, looking for the light, which shines in the distance:

 

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

 

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen