When We Can't Stand the Silence: or, The Three Stooges Teach Theology
David C. Myers
May 18, 2008
Job 4:1, 7 - 9; 8:1, 4 - 6; 42:1 - 5
Luke 13:1 - 5
Text: "Only by report did I know of You then, but now I see You with my own eyes. Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes." . . . Job 42:5-6
Quick now. Who is the shortest person in the Bible?
Before you all answer Zacchaeus, I would remind you of the other, often neglected part of the Bible, referred to as the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible. For the answer, we are told by people in a relatively new field called biblical pun-ology, that it is one of Job's friends, Bildad the Shuhite. . . . Shoe-height - get it?
Pretty bad, huh? Let's hope that this sermon will be better; after all, after a pun like that, where can I go but up?
The world has been devastated these past few weeks by tornadoes and excessive flooding and rain in our own mid-Atlantic region; Cyclones in Myanmar, and a horrendous earthquake in China. The insurance parlance inappropriately calls them "acts of God". It makes my wife, Deb, who is an insurance broker, and an otherwise good an faithful Christian cringe every time she reads or hears that term. In the face of these tragedies, I thought it might be helpful to shift gears this week and try to discuss how our faith understands and helps us deal with such tragedies. I have turned to the book of Job for guidance; for the story of Job is the wisdom of the Hebrew's in how to deal with "when bad things happen to good people."
Job, we are told, is a faithful, upright man, pious and prosperous, of whom Yahweh is willing to offer as an example of faithfulness to Satan. In the deal struck between Yahweh and Satan, Yahweh tells Satan that he can tempt Job in any way he wants provided that he doesn't touch Job in anyway. Satan then causes sudden, devastating and total catastrophe to fall upon Job. Job loses all his children, his property and wealth and is afflicted by a repulsive disease. And then he is visited by his three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Nammathite. After remaining silent for seven days, Job's friends offer him "advice".
But, if you've ever been in a remotely similar position to that of Job, you know that it would be a stretch to call what Job's friends offer as "advice" - for the so-called "words of comfort" that Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar offer is essentially the populist religion of their day - namely, that God always rewards good and punishes evil, a sort of cause and effect linkage. And the popular religion of that day, somehow, is still the popular religion of our own day.
Since the three friends are a literary device employed by this ancient Hebrew version of a Rabbi Harold Kushner who wants to show that "bad things" sometimes happen to "good people", they represent the opposite view with impunity. From our perspective you might call this section of Job, "the three stooges teach theology."
Job's three so-called "friends" are a set-up - they come mouthing all the platitudes that were a part of populist religion of that time. And they are as frustrating to the reader as they were to Job because the reader is privileged to know the inside story and know that Job has done nothing to "deserve" all this unspeakable tragedy. And it is so frustrating that these "friends" (who make enemies superfluous) just keep saying, "Come on Job, you must have done something - why don't you just repent so all this will stop happening to you?"
And we'd love to choke them.
But Job's friends die slowly.
And how slowly it dies - this notion that sin and suffering are connected as cause and effect. It was present in Jesus' time. This morning's Gospel reading from Luke about the innocent Galileans who Pilate used for sacrifices or the 18 who died when the Tower of Siloam fell on them, finds Jesus telling the grieving crowd that those people had done nothing to deserve their fate. "Do you think these Galileans were worst sinners than all others because they suffered?" And of course, Jesus said a resounding "No!"
Oh, I suppose it's not too difficult to see why the notion dies so slowly in the first place, we do bring some suffering upon ourselves. To take an absurd example to make a point, if you rob banks at gun-point, you greatly increase your chances of lead poisoning. But that's quite different from saying that a God of love and compassion sends suffering (cyclones, tornadoes, or earthquakes or diseases or mass killings) as punishment.
And yet the theology Job's friends' offer isn't unlike that spoken often by the best intentioned people even in our own midst. They say to Job: "Since no one who is blameless has ever been punished by God, your children must have sinned against God and so God punished them as they deserved."
While I hope there is no one present who would not see the absurdity of that belief, we can, nonetheless, identify with Job's friends in their need to say something. To a lesser degree, we've all been in that situation, and we know something of the temptation to feel that we must have an answer - that somehow we must defend God in light of the awful tragic events that have transpired.
Because of my vocation, I've spent lots of times in funeral homes, and as people come to express their sympathy to a grieving family, they can say some pretty astounding things. We tend to forget that being present to those who grieve is one of the most important things that we can do. But when we come face to face with it we try desperately to find some reason for the death because a reason gives meaning and we cannot stand meaningless deaths.
But the harsh reality is that many deaths are without meaning. The deaths of the tens of thousands that died in Myanmar, or those who are homeless because of tornadoes and flooding in our own area, or the death toll in the China earthquake disaster was certainly not because "God wanted them to be with Him." The fact is that there is no meaning, no casual effect that would cause the death of those innocent people. They are victims of tragedies, pure and simple - but they are not victims of, in the language of insurance, "acts of God."
Even in the midst of these tragedies, often the only words of comfort people can muster are, "it must be God's will." Do you recall, about a year and a half to two years ago the tragedy when a murderer broke into the Amish school and murdered the innocent children? It is interesting that in the news coverage, it is not the Amish who said it was God's will - but it is the Amish who are so very quick to say, "in my heart he is already forgiven." Rather to turn to needing to have an answer, the Amish teach us to embrace the totality of the tragedy, even the person they have every human right to view as the enemy.
We come all too easily to think of the biblical story as one in which God was consistently present to people, but often the experience of God was the experience of God absent. And the very once who felt most intensely the presence of God where the same ones who articulated with some anguish the hidden-ness of God. So the Psalmist laments: "How long, O Lord? Will Thou forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?" (Psalm 13:1)
And when the experience of God is absent, the people of faith are called upon to wait for God! The problem with Job's friends is that they could not wait - that is, they could not live with the tension of not having longed for answers, they could not stand the sound of silence - so they settled for "pre-mature" answers.
When Israel, in its youth, was in the wilderness, the waiting for God's appearances became too much for them, finally they said, "Enough of this God-Who-hides! We need a god that we can see and touch" - they tried to create a god who stays where you put it and can always be counted on to be there. So they melted down all their jewelry and built a golden calf - the kind of god they could count on. And we understand - because sometimes, we, too, get so weary from the journey that we will hitch a ride with almost anything that comes along.
I don't know how math books are laid out these days, but back when I took algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, in the back of the book, there was a special section that contained the correct answers to every problem in the book. The purpose was, of course, to check your work after you had completed it. But there were always a couple of people in the class who could not resist starting with the answers and working backwards, because it was ever so much easier to do the homework assignments that way. But when it came time for exams, they were in deep doo doo; because on the exams, you were just presented with the problems, and you had to be able to work your own way to the answers.
Contrast that, if you will, to the Hebrew prophets - especially those that prophesied in the time of the Exile in Babylon. Whatever else, those prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, Zephaniah, and others, were absolutely honest about Israel's condition and Israel's God as they were given to experience God. And as such there is a cleansing integrity about them. If Israel is in exile, they don't just say, "Don't worry, you'll be out of here in no time." They sometimes said, "Yes, and things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better." They understood their divinely-appointed task as not always one of comforting the people, but of keeping the people from settling for a premature false comfort.
To follow the analogy, they tried to keep people from going "to the back of the book", as it were, and look for a quick set of easy answers with which to solve the problems of their collective life. No one was going to thank them, because their task was often to get people to stay with their pain - the pain of not knowing, the pain of feeling abandoned by God; the pain of being perplexed by life; the pain of an uncertain future. If it were possible to summarize the message of the prophets, it might be something like this: "The answer isn't everything!" The struggle is an important part of faith journey.
Parenthetically, I might add that my understanding of Biblical waiting is not passive; but waiting, in the biblical sense, involves very active struggle.
Creative people in all disciplines of life somehow know this. You'll remember that Rainer Maria Rilke, the German based poet who wrote during the early 20th century, was once approached by a young poet who asked the master-poet's advice in beginning his own career. Rilke's reply in Letters to a Young Poet is classic. He writes:
"You ask whether your verses are good, as if I'm the one who should answer your question. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now . . . I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward for answers, and that above all you should not do now. . . . Go into yourself! . . . Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart . . . try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
It seems that we are so preoccupied with instant answers that we can't even imagine what it would be like to "live the questions." Certainly Job's so-called "friends" couldn't.
So . . . Job's so-called "friends" offer an assessment of theological explanations for Job's predicament, but God doesn't offer one. Maybe the reason God doesn't explain to Job why terrible things happen is that God knows that what Job needs most isn't an explanation. Suppose that God were to say to Job that the reason the cattle were stolen, the crops ruined, and the children killed was thus and so, spelling everything out. Understanding why they had to die, Job would still have to face their empty chairs at breakfast every morning, and cry for them after to getting into bed every night. Even carrying in his pocket straight from the horse's mouth a complete theological justification for his children's death, Job would still carry within himself a broken heart.
About 20 years ago, William Sloan Coffin, then pastor of Riverside Church in New York City, and before that Chaplain at Yale, experienced the tragic death of his son when his car went into Boston Harbor. In sharing that tragic experience with his congregation he told this story. It is wonderful Coffinese:
When a person dies, there are so many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died I was sitting in the living room of my sister's house outside of Boston, when the front door opened and in came a nice-looking middle-aged woman, carrying about the 18th quiche. When she saw me she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen saying sadly over her shoulder, "I just don't understand the will of God."
Instantly I was up in hot pursuit, swarmed all over her. "I'll say you can't, lady!" I said. (I knew the anger would do me good, and the instruction to her was long over due.) I continued, "Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his?, that he was probably driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of "frosties" too many? Do you think it is God's will that there are no streetlights along that stretch of road, and no guard rails separating the road and Boston Harbor?"
Coffin goes on to say: "For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn't go around this world with His finger on triggers, His fist around knives, His hands on steering wheels. . . . My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; [but] that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break."
So God doesn't reveal some grand design for the universe; God reveals himself. God doesn't explain to Job, rather, God is present with Job. And Job says, "Indeed, I spoke without understanding - of things beyond me, of wonders beyond my understanding. Only by report did I know of You then, but now I see You with my own eyes." (Job 42:5)
And even covered with sores and ashes, Job looks oddly like a person who has asked for a crust of bread and has been given the whole loaf!