Sunday, June 3, 2018

Looking Forward to June 10, 2018 -- Job Continues

The Scripture reading for this week is Job 3:1-10; 4:1-9; 7:11-21

The Sermon title is God is.....Just?

Early Thoughts:Job is losing his patience. Job is starting to look a bit more human.  Job is getting emotional. And ready to tell God about it.

Job has moved from accepting his fate to bemoaning it.  First he curses the day he was born.  After all if he had never been born these terrible things would never have happened to him.  I have to say that this seems to be a pretty natural reaction.

And then the "friends" of Job start to have their say. "What did you do?" they ask. "You must have done something to warrant such punishment." "God does not punish the innocent." Really Job's friends were much more helpful when they sat in silence for 7 days.

Job knows better. Job knows he is blameless (for the record the reader also knows that Job is blameless, God admitted as much in chapter 2). Job knows that, to the best of his knowledge, this is not just. And so he, continuing to be a man of integrity, insists that God let him know why he is being punished and asks that God "pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity".

Which brings us to one of the big questions of the book of Job.  Where is the justice in the story? IS there justice in this story? What does the book of Job have to say about God's understanding of justice?  To be honest after reading the whole book and then rereading some sections I am not sure this book has much of an answer.

Through out the Hebrew Scriptures there is a fairly straightforward understanding of God's justice.  Do good/live well and God will bless you. Live badly and God will punish you.  One of the places this is laid out most clearly is in Deuteronomy 30:15-20, which reads:
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. 
 This understanding of God's justice will be used by the prophets of Israel to explain the disaster of the Exile.  Because the people  failed to live as requested/required/agreed by the covenant between the people and God, because the people did not practice justice, because the people fell away from God's path God punished the people with defeat and devastation and exile.  Under this understanding of God's justice Job must have done something wrong.

But he did not. Job is, as we were told in chapters 1 and 2, blameless before God. No wonder Job insists that God answer for what God has done (or has allowed to happen).  Where is the justice?

There is no answer to Job at this point in the book. But I think the book, and Job's vehement self-defense, pushes us to ask what God's justice looks like. Is it that straightforward do good and be rewarded, do bad and be punished? OR is that a simplification?

While in exile the people will start to realize that even in their devastation God is with them. They have not been abandoned. There also develops a vision that God's justice has yet to be fulfilled, that God's justice is yet to be seen. And then centuries later a new message will come, building on the understanding of God we find in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Kingdom of God is one of justice. But it is not here yet. The Kingdom preached by Jesus tells of a God who forgives. One strong strand of traditional theology tells us of a God who suffers death so that justice may be done and also forgiveness and justification offered. And so I am not sure that we will ever see the justice of God as we have come to understand it in the book of Job. Because in the end, nothing in Job is about justice (which is why I find God a highly troubling character in this book). Job does not suffer as punishment, Job suffers because God was trying to prove a point to the Adversary. One strand of theology that takes seriously the Sovereignty and omnipotence of God would say Job suffers because God wills it (which raises all sorts of other issues -- but is a thread that arises later in the book when God finally answers Job). For those of us who have doubts that God is totally in charge and omnipotent the very best answer we can come up with is that Job suffers because s#%t happens.

Still as people of faith in a world that more and more shows that it is not the Kingdom (some days it is hard to even say the Kingdom is growing in our midst) we have to explore God's justice.  Because we are told that God is Just.  Is it true?
--Gord

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