"Tough Questions" - Pentecost 22C

Job 19:23-27a
Saint Luke 20:27-38

It would surprise me greatly if I found out that any of you were big time gamblers.

I just can see you down the street at the blackjack, roulette or poker tables of the Hollywood Casino.  I can’t imagine any of you wiling away hour after hour pumping quarters into the slot machines.

However, if you ever wanted to win a bar-bet I suggest you try this. Saunter up to somebody and say: “I’ll bet you that the verse of Scripture that says: “I know that my Redeemer lives” is in the Old and not the New Testament.

My guess is that more often than not your foil will take your bet not only because resurrection is such a dominant theme in the New Testament but because “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” from The Messiah will run through their head. 

It would have been impossible for them not to have heard Handel’s Messiah and, if they were really astute they would know this comes from the final section of the piece that speaks of Christ’s victory over death.  Must be in the New Testament would be their thinking as they took your bet and you came away with a small fortune.
This probably won’t happen.  I can’t imagine any of your - or anybody I know for that matter - approaching anybody in a bar and saying anything much less trying to place a bet on scripture.  The other person would probably back away slowly and try to turn the conversation to the Bears offence. 

However, it does strike me as strange that the most well-known affirmation of the resurrection comes not from the New Testament but from the Old and is found on the lips of a man whose life is a disaster.

It is important to remember that the book of Job is a sippur,  a story.  It was never intended to represent anything historical.  There may or may not have been a man named Job just as there may or may not have been a father who had two sons or a woman who lost one out of ten coins. 

To Jewish readers it was a story that had a moral or a teaching much like one of Jesus’ parables.

It is a story about a man who once had it all but then lost everything and what he, his family and friends did in the midst of that tragedy.

When we first meet Job he is exceeding wealthy, very pious, and the head of a happy prosperous family.  He is a good man in every sense of the word but his life is about to fall apart.
In his time all of his misfortune would be blamed on a demonic intervention.  Satan, the diabolical one, clearly has it in for Job tempting him to deny God and be unfaithful.

So, we are told, one dark day three messengers arrive.  The first tells him that all of his livestock have been wiped out.  The second tells him that all of his servants have been killed.  The third tells him that as all of his children were at dinner a great windstorm came and blew down the house.  There were no survivors.

Amid all of this tragedy Job utters what perhaps is his second most famous affirmation of faithfulness. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, And naked shall I return there. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.”1
 
Next Job is afflicted with sores from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.  He was such a sight that when his two friends came to comfort him they hardly recognized him.

It is at this point in the story his friends - three guys named Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar do one of the wisest things in all of scripture.  They just sit.  They don’t say anything, they just sit.  We are told: “Seven days and nights they sat there without saying a word. They could see how rotten he felt, how deeply he was suffering.”2

This could be our first take away from the story for our temptation, when we see someone is suffering, is to say something.  To try to find some words that will make it better.  But sometimes there are no words and maybe the best thing we can do in moments like this is not speak but keep silence.  To walk with the suffering person until they are willing or able to speak.

When Job speaks he curses the day he was born. 

The problem here is that his friends take his words as a sign that it is their turn and what they say is surprisingly unhelpful.

Eliphaz goes first and gives into the prevailing wisdom of his day and, to a certain extent, ours.  He speaks of his belief that righteous people seldom suffer, innocent people don’t perish, upright people don’t lose everything, it must have been something Job did.
 As many of you know I recently took a cruise through the Panama Canal. (Which now, because I mentioned it in a sermon, I can  take off on my taxes!)  It is hard to imagine as we cruised calmly through locks, Gallard Cut and the man made Gatun Lake that over 30,609 people died in building that passageway.

It is even harder to imagine that many of the time believed that “the odds of one’s survival were in direct proportion to the one’s moral fortitude.  The clean, blameless life was the secret to long life in the tropics.  Debauchery, sins of the flesh, moral or physical cowardice, were sure paths to ruin.”3

It was soon discovered that one’s demise from malaria or yellow fever had nothing to do one’s moral character and everything to do with whether or not you were bitten by a mosquito that carried the disease.

The rational for the individual disaster was the same: If Job or the innocents in Panama were morally upright they wouldn’t have suffered.

Job’s friend Eliphaz is more specific.  He says that it wasn’t just general immorality on Job’s part that has brought about his fate.  He says all that is happening to him in nothing less than a punishment from God.

We may think this as foolish as the 19th century thought that illness was brought about by some general moral shortcoming.  However, those of us who were alive at the close of the 20th century can remember at the height of the HIV/AIDS crises televangelist and full-time fool, Jerry Fallwell Sr., actually said:  "Aids is not just God's punishment for homosexuals, it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."4

Not much changed in the years between Eliphaz’s fictional encounter with Job and the real words spoken by someone who was supposed to understand and represent the Gospel.

Bildad, Job’s third friend, suggests repentance.  This is Elizabeth- Kubler Ross’ bargaining phase of grief or loss.  

The bargaining stage is characterized by attempting to negotiate with a higher power... You may make promises to God in return for the painful situation not to occur or for things to go back to how they were before the loss or change. While these thoughts may help you begin to accept the loss or change by revealing the impact of the situation, [researchers warn] that these feelings can also lead to remorse and guilt that interfere with healing.5

Now we are talking about the present!  All of us have done this at one time or another.  It sends us off on the wild-goose chase of “if only.”  If only I had done this.  If only I had done that.  All of these “if only’s” get us nowhere. 

The problem for Job is that he can’t find anything to repent of.  As a matter of fact from the beginning he is described as somebody who “was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”6

Perhaps the worse advice Job receives comes from his wife who surveying his situation comes up with the ultimate solution.  “‘Still holding on to your precious integrity, are you?’ she asks.7  ‘Curse God and die.’”8

While Job’s friends are blaming him and Job’s wife is acting like there is going to be a huge insurance settlement or like she has her eyes on another hot man who still has a future and a fortune, Job turns to the one who really can help him.

Job wishes aloud for a witness of his integrity and affirms his belief in the existence of a vindicator who will affirm his honor.  Not every suffering person has done something bad to deserve suffering.  Job’s hope rests in the certainty that he has a ... redeemer.9

 Job’s hope has been realized for us in Jesus, our redeemer.  It is in his resurrection we place our trust, our hope.

Jesus can blow off the  Sadducees’ question about who will be married to who in the resurrection because he knows that in a zillion years he would never be able to explain it.

To some it may seem like pure lunacy but it speaks to the fundamental belief that for far too long the world has been in the grips of suffering.  The same unjust, unfair suffering that Job experienced.

Suffering and death have ruled the world through fear, violence, hatred and lies.

Suffering and death may cause us to take our eyes off God and become transfixed by those in our midst who are trying to gain or hold on to earthly power by any means possible.

Suffering and death may cause us to reel in horror of the death of an innocent family being caught in the cross-fire of a gang on their way to a wedding.

Suffering and death may even cause us to lash out at each other - looking for faults, shortcomings, moral failings, and scapegoats for our current crises.

Jesus calls us to remember that the “resurrection is not something that has meaning some day, one day, in some distant place called ‘heaven.’ The resurrection is God’s victorious intrusion into the world here, now.”

The resurrection affirms that God is Lord not of the dead only but for us who are living in the promise expressed by Job when he said:  

 But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and that he will stand upon the earth at last. And I know that after this body has decayed, this body shall see God!  Then he will be on my side! Yes, I shall see him, not as a stranger, but as a friend! What a glorious hope!”10

 That’s a hope that is surer than any bet you could ever make for it is a hope that sustains through all of this life and into the next.

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1.    Job 1:21.  (NKJV) [NKLV=The New King James Version]

2.   Job 2:13.  (MSG) [MSG=The Message]

3.  David MacCullough, The Path between the Seas: the Creation of Panama Canal, 1870-1914. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.

4.  Christopher Reed, “Obituary: The Rev Jerry Falwell.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, May 17, 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/may/17/broadcasting.guardianobituaries.
  
5.  Alexis Aiger, “The Bargaining Stage of Grief.” LIVESTRONG.COM. Leaf Group. Accessed November 9, 2019. https://www.livestrong.com/article/143100-the-bargaining-stage-grief/.

6.  Job 1:1.  (ESV) [ESV=The English Standard Version]

7.  Job 2:9a.  (MSG)

8.  Job 2:9b.  (ESV)

9.    Lydia Hernandez-Marcial,. “Job 19:23-27a. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture.” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship 3 (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2019), p 420–23.

10. Job 19:25-27.  (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]