So God and Satan agree upon a test. Satan will be allowed to take anything and everything away from Job except his life, and then they’ll find out if the goodness is about his possessions and his happiness or instead about his faith. It is one wicked opening to a book of scripture. Who wants to think of God this way? Making deals with the devil, being that fickle with humankind, allowing evil to run rampant over the good…

We have many ways of justifying this text to our own ears. Listen to what it says in the opening to this book in my study Bible, “The central theme of the book of Job is the possibility of disinterested righteousness. The author asks whether virtue depends on a universe that operates by the principle of reward and punishment. At stake is the very survival of religious faith. If people will serve God without thought of the carrot or the stick, then religion will outlast any eventuality. Even innocent suffering will not quench the fires of spiritual devotion. Job’s response to adversity in the prologue affirms such faith.” (Harper Collins Study Bible, p. 749) To me, this sounds like it was written by a very comfortable scholar more than a desperate person turning to the wisdom of scripture.

I would agree that in principle this book does work to dispel the myth that religion is a carrot dangled in front of us to make us stay on the right path, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s about our very human reactions in the midst of tragedy. This story itself may seem to be an exaggeration of Murphy’s Law – that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, but if you really talk to people who have lost everything, it may not seem so far from the truth. Job gets the news that everything is gone from the one person left in his neighborhood alive to tell him. Kids, gone. Homes, gone. Sheep, and oxen, and donkeys, gone. And not long after he gets this news, his health starts to deteriorate. That’s no surprise. His wife, bless her heart, turns to anger and says basically, “God must hate you, curse him and die. You’d be better off dead.” And she’s probably thinking, I’d be better off with you dead. You have to wonder how she made it through, because staying by him now seems like way too much bad luck.

However, Job has three good friends who come to check on him. Faithful people do that for each other. But they were shocked to see their friend in such a mess. After all, he had been so righteous and so fortunate up ‘til now. It was so bad that for seven days, they didn’t know what to say to him although they were eager to comfort and console him in his pain.

After that period, Job bemoans his misery, and his friend Eliphaz breaks the silence. We can’t help ourselves, can we? Our friend has lost it all, and we need a reason why. Eliphaz’s argument is much like one of the arguments we heard following the tragic losses of hurricane Katrina. Eliphaz tries to be careful not to offend his friend, but he points out that people with integrity don’t get zapped like this. “Those who plow iniquity,” he says, “reap what they sow.” Sinners don’t go unpunished. Must’ve been those waterfront casinos, or too much drinking and fun at your house Job. But Job knows that no one has purity before God. Even the angels make mistakes. This calamity may be only the result of bad weather and sheer dumb luck.

Next his friend Bildad Speaks. It’s a similar argument. Well if you’re so righteous, maybe it was your kids or your ancestors who cursed God. If you just repent, everything will go back to the way it was. God will not continue to take the hand of evildoers. But Job answers, “How can a mortal be just before God?” Can we really find a way of repenting of every detail in our lives, our kids’ lives, or ancestors’ lives? God will see through it right away.

Job is still miserable. His wife wasn’t helping, his friends aren’t helping. The last friend Zophar tries one more time to get him to plead his case before God. One more time, he’s told that it’s his fault. We know the world’s ways – good people and bad people get what they deserve accordingly. Forgiveness is only a phone call away. “Admit your guilt” is the theme here.

Job won’t do it. He’s aware that people may perish without ever knowing why. He’d rather be a laughingstock He’d rather let his friends think that he’d lost his mind, his hope, and his faith than turn on God. It’s one of the hardest positions to be in – to be faced with harshness all around and have your friends point out to you that no loving God would allow this to happen to one of his own. The friends keep pounding away at him to get off his tail and fix things. It’s not going to get any better unless he makes a deal either with God or the devil.

Job chooses to remain in his pain, to let it go unhelped by his friends’ arguments. He wants to find God. He still would like some answers why, but he refused to believe that God was punishing him. Ironic isn’t it that this all starts with God and Satan making a bet? It doesn’t fare well for the point of this story if the point is like the biblical scholar tells us to make the case that reward and punishment is not part of the system.

We can’t help ourselves but to think that it is. Like Job’s friends, we are also quick to want to “fix” things even though we may not see the root cause as sin in the same way. We say things like: you need to eat better, exercise, talk to a therapist, get out more, work through it, etc. You know the ways we try to make it all about the person who’s hurting. We think we know how to fix what really can’t be fixed and that goes for any sense of loss. If it isn’t God’s ways, it certainly comes very close to our ways.

Just think about it, the pain comes and we want the painkiller right away. Perhaps during those seven days of silence we would have had our breaking point well before Job’s friends could hold their tongues no longer. We look to our family and friends to make things better when something goes wrong. We want people to agree with our opinion, feel our anxiety, and respond. That’s why we side up during conflicts. That’s why we make food or send flowers when there’s been a death. That’s why we try to gloss things over and start cracking jokes at the hospital. In a nation of having everything, we even have mood altering drugs – the legal ones – in which we can literally take a pill to reduce our anxious or depressed feelings.

Job keeps fending his friends off. He keeps reassuring himself that God is good. God is powerful. God has a plan even when we don’t. Sometimes bad things happen to good people or the reverse that good things happen to bad people. Even though Job’s mother told him not to expect life to be fair – to continue to have to justify that chapter after chapter seems exhausting.

The comfort, the one answer that God can give, comes in chapter 38 and doesn’t seem like much help at all. God says listen to me, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who determined its measurements?” and then we get a whole long list of the reasons God is God and we can’t possibly touch what it means to be God. It’s a wonderful chapter really if you want to feel how small and insignificant you really are. It’s not a pep talk. It’s not soothing in any way, saying you’ll make it through with God’s help. It’s not a condolence that the world really is fair in the end and people get what they deserve. It doesn’t fix a darn thing.

So I think this extended allegory, this piece of ancient wisdom, goes beyond tearing down any argument that life is fair and that God has a “naughty and nice” list like Santa Claus. It’s an open look of what we can and cannot do with the pain in our lives or in anyone else’s. Sure there are things we can do to show our affection and concern. Sure, it’s a God-send that there are medications to take when a person’s system goes well beyond the normal parameters of anxiety or depression. However, in the upside-down world of Reformed Theology which leans heavily on the book of Job, a little bit of feeling God’s sovereignty goes a long way. It somehow helps in the depths of our pain to look at how we fit into the bigger picture, to recognize that the world doesn’t revolve on our account. Sometimes we need to get out of that self-centered focus on our own hurts and realize that we didn’t put ourselves together with intellect and understanding. We are creatures, not the Creator.

God does not coddle Job or his friends. God speaks from a whirlwind and makes the divine presence known – which in the ancient world was a terrifying endeavor. With our emphasis on Jesus, our buddy, we rarely get this glimpse of God’s power and absolute might. It’s an important aspect of God that we neglect, especially when we’d prefer the Jesus who heals us and strengthens us and makes all things new. But sometimes, or maybe all the time, we need to watch out for becoming Job’s unhelpful friends who are always looking for a reason why and then the following solution to any of life’s problems.

Our pain and sense of loss are real – when we lose a loved one, when we lose our livelihood, when we lose our hope and fall into despair. Rushing through those feelings doesn’t help the situation. A sense of wonder at it all may be what it takes to put our thoughts into perspective. In the end, Job is praised for not letting his friends fix him, and the friends are scolded by God for trying to get Job fixed. It’s a tough lesson for caring church people. It’s an especially tough lesson for those of us who are successful and “solutions – oriented.” One of the hardest things we can do as a congregation is to walk with people in their pain instead of trying to make everything better. From this story, we begin to learn to live with the anxiety that God is more than we can ever understand, and we cannot presume to know God’s ways – especially when things get painful.

Imagine if we had to wait seven days to respond verbally to the hurting of your friend. Could you do it? Think about the unasked for advice that you’ve given or received. Does it help to remember that the world was not made just for you? These aren’t easy things. Pain is always difficult, but this is a community designed to welcome those who have experienced it and continue to feel it now.

Amen.