A Helene Homily

Sunday, October 6, 2024

R. Scott White+

“Shall we receive the Good at the hand of God and not the bad?” 

Job 1:1, 2:1-10

If God is responsible for anything this week, it’s for arranging the aftermath of one of the worst Hurricanes ever to coincide with a Sunday reading from the book of Job. 

You know of God’s servant, Job, don’t you? You don’t have to be a particularly avid bible reader to know about Job. Job is the righteous servant of God upon whom falls great calamity but who, in all things, does not turn away from God or "curse God." 

The Book of Job is filled with meaning. It gives us insight into many aspects of a relationship with God and raises many questions about that relationship. 

Yet, in the end, the Book of Job is about just that: a relationship with God. 

On the surface, Job's story demands much interpretation. Yet, in reality, it’s quite simple. Not simplistic, but simple. 

Oddly, we can learn everything we want to know about the story from today’s short opening passage. Maybe we can learn everything about Job from his name. Job likely means, “Where is the divine father?” Job’s name describes the character of an intimate relationship between the human and God. Job’s story is our story. 

Job is from the land of Uz. It seems that even the ancient Hebrews knew nothing about Uz or where it might be located. Uz may be like saying, “Long ago in a place far away.” And maybe such vagueness helps add to the story's purpose that at some point in life, every human being finds themselves in Job’s shoes, much like many of us have found ourselves this week, and many worse off than us. 

We are told that Job owes his birth and prosperity to God and that Job is particularly good at turning away from evil. He is called blameless, upright, and a man of integrity. 

Job is a powerful example of how the meaning of a biblical story is only sometimes found in the details, no matter how compelling they are. I am prone, for example, to endlessly wonder who exactly the heavenly beings are and why they were, together with Satan, granted access to the throne of God, but they are not the point of the story. 

The point comes when God says, “Have you considered my servant Job?” God's offering of Job is not some sadistic game. It is a vehicle to get the reader to see that the greater story is about the relationship between God and Job. It prepares the reader for the rest of the story, which is wholly about Job and God's relationship. 

The story is about God and Job and who or what is powerful enough to come between them. 

Remember, the definition of his name tells us that Job considers God his father; that is, Job’s relationship with God is intimate. 

So, the author brings out the worst of the worst, Satan. Quickly, the question becomes: Can the worst that the world has to throw against Job come between Job and God? And friends, that is the question of the story, and the suggestion is that it is a question for you and me. 

The details in the coming chapters will describe the worst of the worst, worse than the potsherd Job scrapes his sores within this portion of the story. 

Yet, unlike a modern novel, this story answers at the beginning and the end. When Job’s wife challenges his commitment to God, Job speaks the entire purpose of the story: “Shall we receive the Good at the hand of God and not the bad?” 

That is, do we seek a relationship with God only when we can get something from God? Or is a relationship with God worth it on its own merits, in the Good and bad times?

The text says, “In all this, Job did not curse God with his lips.” Or, "In all this, Job did not turn away from God." 

There it is: do we seek a relationship with God only when God has something good to give us? 

This is the sum total of Job's story: what is the foundation of our relationship with God? Does God love us, and even more, do we love God for the joy of the relationship or to get something out of it?

I suspect someone will say I’m being simplistic about the story of Job. I'm afraid I have to disagree. The mistake we often make in our bible reading is that we expect every story or parable to say everything there is to say about God. If that were so, there could be only one book of the Bible. The story of Job doesn’t say everything there is to say about the relationship between the human and the divine. Still, it says something foundational–God is worthy of our devotion because God is God, not because we get something out of God, not because God can cause everything to go our way. 

God is worthy of an intimate relationship because God is love, pure love, and love is the only way. We may never know why suffering is allowed to come our way, but suffering does not mean that God has abandoned us. Just as in this story, God does not abandon Job forever.

Can the worst that the world has to throw at us come between us and God? I suspect that the answer to that question depends on the day. And I suspect the answer to that question this week has been strained deeply. 

Yet maybe all we can do is hope that by the time this life comes to an end, it will look something like the spirit of Job’s, as told in the last two verses of the narrative: After this, Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children, four generations. And Job died, old and full of days.