GOD’S ANSWER TO JOB
(Preached on Sunday, October 19, 2003)
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
-Job 38:1
Poor Job.
All he wants is a bit of clarity.
“What have I done to deserve all this?”
And God lays down a verbal tour de force which leaves the poor many shaking in his boots.
God’s speech ought to be done with megaphone in hand, shouting, overpowering.
However, while on the surface even the tone seems a bit harsh, in truth there is much more to God’s speech than just a display of authoritarian power.
God’s speech is a remarkable vision of the cosmos
Why is there undeserved suffering in the world?
Injustice? Heartache?
I’ll tell you why, says God.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me,... Have you commanded the morning since your days began? ... Do you know when the mountain goats bring forth? ... Who has let the wild ass go free? ... Is the wild ox willing to serve you? ... The wings of the ostrich wave proudly; but are they the pinions and plumage of love? ... Behold the Hippopotamus, which I made as I made you; ... Can you draw out the crocodile with a fishhook, or press down his tongue with a cord?”
What does all this have to do with Job’s questions?
God goes on like this for four chapters!
What do you make of it?
Wild ass! Hippopotamus? Ostrich feathers?
Isn’t that just like the Bible.
At last we have gotten down to some really good, really contemporary questions, only to have them shouted down by irrelevant, swaggering nonsense.
Why do innocent people suffer?
If God is good, why is there injustice?
Can you create an ostrich feather?
It isn’t an answer!
It’s an answer!
The rabbis note that, when God replies, God answers by parading past prime examples of wondrous, divine creativity that has absolutely no use to human beings.
I mean, what can you do with a hippopotamus or a crocodile?
We don’t know, said the rabbis?
We don’t know. Get the point?
We don’t know.
These utterly useless, impractical, apparently pointless creatures are evidence of the mysterious extravagance of God.
God only knows why God wanted mountain goats and giraffes.
Don’t ask me to explain unfairness, says God, to someone who doesn’t even know how to make a sunrise, much less an ostrich plume.
A big part of God’s reply to Job is to remind him, through this expansive vision, of just how marvelous, huge, complex, intricate, and interdependently related the cosmos is.
And if we are going to understand matters like suffering, pain, sickness, as well as, evil, tragedy, and death, then we must be able to understand the inner workings, and interconnections, of the created order.
For instance, the universe we inhabit is very special.
Now scientists do not like things to be special; they prefer to talk about things in general rather than to discuss them in terms of the particular.
Yet, when it comes to the cosmos itself we have come to recognize that we live in a very special universe, whose laws of nature are “fine-tuned” to the possibility of its evolving carbon-based life.
Life on earth has been able to develop because our local star, the Sun, has been shining more or less steadily for about five billion years, producing the energy that has fueled the evolution of life on our planet.
We understand what allows stars to burn for billions of years in that reliable fashion, and it depends on a very delicate balance between two of the forces of nature (gravity and electromagnetism).
If that balance were different from the way it is in our world, by even the smallest fraction, the stars would either burn too feebly to produce much energy or burn so intensely that they would rapidly burn themselves out.
This is an example of what is meant by “fine-tuning,” the balance is just right to produce stars that are long-lived sources of energy.
But even with know that, we do not know exactly how or why they achieved just that “perfect” balance.
The stars also have a second indispensable role to play in the coming to be of life, for the chemical elements that are the basis of life are only made in the interior nuclear furnaces of the stars.
The chemistry of life is the chemistry of carbon and every atom of carbon in our bodies was once inside a star.
We are literally people of stardust.
Once again, these chemical raw materials for life would not be around in any old universe.
Making them in the stars depends upon the laws of nuclear physics being fine-tuned to accommodate this possibility.
Yes, yes, the world is a marvelous, amazing place.
But we could still do without many of the bad things that happen to good people and not the bad people.
We still tend to believe that with a little tweaking, the world would be a better place.
Okay, what would you like to do away with?
Perhaps hurricanes? Many of us remember how horrible they can be.
But, remember what happens in Florida and other tropical regions when we have light storms years: the rains are less and drought conditions usually follow.
Want to get rid of snakes and creepy crawlies like caterpillars? That also means doing away with butterflies and living with more mice, rats and other rodents.
It’s all very complex.
We live in an evolving universe.
Theologically, this can be understood as reflecting the fact that God did not create a ready-made world but did something cleverer than that in creating a world that could make itself. Theologically that is what evolution means.
Such a creation is a great good, but it has a necessary cost.
Biochemists tell us that the same processes that enable some cells to mutate and produce new forms of life (the very process that has produced the fruitfulness of our Earth), will necessarily allow other cells to mutate and become malignant.
In other words, the existence of cancer is not gratuitous, but the cost of a creation allowed to make itself.
Of course, this insight does not remove all our perplexity and anguish about the painfulness of creation, but perhaps it begins to help.
We all tend to think, and that includes Job, that had we been in charge of creation, we would have done it better.
We would have kept the flowers and the sunsets and got rid of diseases and disasters.
The more science understands the process of the world, the more it seems to be an interlaced package deal, only possible in its integrated totality.
That is the first thing God wanted Job to begin to understand in answer to his questions: that the universe is infinitely complex, finely-tuned, and interrelated and there are not easy answers.
But, there is something else God wanted Job to understand.
For us to understand it we do best to turn to the work of a poet-theologian, Frederick Buechner. Consider what he has said about this passage: “Maybe the reason that God doesn’t explain to Job why terrible things happen is that he knows what Job needs isn’t an explanation. Suppose that God did explain ... the reason ... the children [were] killed was thus and so ... Job would have his explanation. And then what? Understanding in terms of the divine economy why his children had to die, Job would still have to face their empty chairs at breakfast every morning ... God doesn’t reveal his grand design. He reveals himself ... Even covered with sores and ashes, [Job] looks oddly like a man who has asked for a crust and has been given the whole loaf.”
Following Buechner’s path, we see that the point of the display of divine power from the whirlwind is not to browbeat Job into submission.
The point is to reveal the power that is at work for our benefit even in the harshness of the world we know.
In the end, that is really what we want and what we need.
More than answers, we want to know that we are not alone.
We want to know that there is someone in charge and in control.
We want to know that that someone loves us, cares about us, and has our best interests at heart.
Job is given a glimpse of the wide world, of the deep mysteries.
He isn’t given answers.
He is given God.
God speaks to Job and reminds Job that the one he has been demanding answers of is the same one who hung the moon and stars, who calls forth lightning and rains, who formed hippopotami in the mud and makes the wild ass to bray.
And this is the same one who goes walking by our sides as we go forth into this universe and into this life.
And in the end, in our times of deepest distress, that presence of God standing beside us, is really what we most want, even more than words or answers.
Just God.