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Minister's Sermon
Oct 4,2009
What Did I Do to Deserve This?
(Text: Job 1:1; 2:1-10)
Heather Fraser
Fairview United Church
(4 October 2009)
For the past couple weeks, we have been looking at one kind of wisdom literature, the type of literature in the Hebrew Scriptures that teaches us that all we have to do is do things well and obey God and everything will go well for us. And all of you know that if you just follow the rules or the instructions that everything will go right for you, right? If that works for you, you haven’t been putting together the same easy to assemble pre-fabricated furniture that we have in our house!
The truth of the matter is that you can do everything exactly right and still have things go horribly wrong. We’ve all experienced that at one time or another, and not just when trying to follow assembly instructions written by someone whose fifth language is English. There are no money-back guarantees that come with life, no promises that being a good person will spare you from bad things happening to you. Sometimes, life just isn’t fair.
There is a second kind of wisdom literature in the Hebrew Scriptures that deals with this obvious fact that wisdom isn’t enough to save us from the bad things in life. If the first type is called positive wisdom, the second type is called negative wisdom, and struggles with the issue of how do we relate to God when things go badly and God seems very unfair.
Perhaps the most famous book in this tradition is the book of Job. We read the first part of the story today, which is probably an old folk tale, much older than the rest of the book of Job, or indeed the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures. The notion of God and Satan walking and making deals is a remnant of Israel’s polytheistic history. And don’t hear the devil here when you hear the word “Satan.” That image of Satan came many hundred years later. Satan, or ha-satan in Hebrew, literally means “The Advocate,” in the sense of a lawyer. Ha-satan was one of God’s divine council, and his job was to be the prosecuting attorney in the court of God’s justice to figure out which souls were righteous and which weren’t. When he accuses Job, it’s only to say that Job has never been tested, and so God has no idea whether Job would be righteous if every good thing he had was taken away from him.
The rest of the book of Job, which we’ll read from through the month of October, is a much later composition than the part we read today, and has very little in common with chapters one and two except for the main character’s name. In that part, Job’s friends come to visit him, and are so horrified by the sad state he’s sunk to that they tell him that he must have done something wrong in the eyes of God, for God rewards the righteous and punishes the wrongdoer. It would be easy for Job to cry out, “What did I do to deserve this?” But he never does. Instead, he keeps demanding that the God who did this to him must come down and answer Job’s accusations that God is unfair.
And while I know that many people find the story of God and ha-satan so casually destroying Job’s life to be a real challenge to understand, we have to let it be a product of its time. The ancient world was a harsh place, where crops failed and there was no food to be had anywhere, where disease could strike without warning and the only hope was prayer, where children died all the time and often without explanation, where a marauding army could come through your farm and destroy everything and there were no police to help you. People who saw such bad things struggled mightily with the question of how bad things could happen to good people. Sometimes they came up with stories like this to explain what had happened to them. It was better than believing the world was truly random.
What Did I Do to Deserve This? -- Page 2
But what is remarkable about the book, and so far ahead of its time, is that the book of Job insists that when bad things happen, the person didn’t do anything to deserve it. This is such an important point. We live in our culture by what a friend of mine calls the myth of safety: We act as though if we never make a mistake, then we will be perfectly safe. All you have to do is hang around a school and see how frantically they keep changing the rules to keep the children safe and you will understand how the myth of safety works. A lot of energy is wasted trying to prevent bad things that, history shows, ultimately can never be totally prevented.
In a week when bad weather news has dominated the news, with two earthquakes, two typhoons and a tsunami taking thousands of lives, the news teaches us that even if we do everything perfectly, nature still may not cooperate. Even in human-dominated news, such as the arrest of the former bishop of Antigonish, the victims of crimes did nothing to deserve what happened to them. To blame the victims for what happened to them is to victimize them again. To engage in the kind of navel-gazing that has been going on in the media this past week – we should have seen it coming and prevented it – is to drive ourselves mad trying to prevent what we don’t have the power to prevent.
Job isn’t a comforting book if you are looking for easy answers to the question of suffering, but at the very least it does release us from the bondage of blame for bad things. It also releases us from the frantic perfectionism that tells us that if only we work harder and do better, nothing bad will happen to us. God always calls us into freedom, and teaches us in this book that since we can’t make life totally safe, so we can let go of the attempt. Most of the time life will go well, and when things go badly, in faith we will find the support we need to get by, so let us also have the faith to enjoy life when things are going well.
As we come to the font and the table, we come not with a faith that God will protect us from all evil, but that whatever happens, God will walk with us on that way. Amen. |
Fairview United Church