It Just Isn't fair
Sermon
Daring To Hope
Sermons For Pentecost (Last Third)
Job is a fascinating book. It's a literary masterpiece, a collection of poetic discussions about faith, suffering, God's justice, the human mind. The occasion for these discussions is the story of Job, a wealthy and important man who is devoutly religious, scrupulously moral and careful of everything he says and does, yet who loses everything in his life because of a whimsical argument between God and Satan.
Most of us remember Job for his patience, but the patient sufferer who accepts his ill fortune as God's will without complaining only appears in this opening story. In the rest of the book Job is shown arguing his innocence, rejecting his friends' efforts to counsel him, searching for explanations, challenging God's justice. Today and for the next three Sundays we'll be looking at Job's experiences and reaction to them, and in Job's struggle to preserve his faith in spite of his tragedy, we can find echoes of the questions many of us ask when we or people we know suffer unexpectedly, unfairly or unexplainably.
Today our text is the opening story, in which the big issue seems to be fairness. Fairness is an indispensable doctrine, basic to life in human society. We demand fair taxes, fair judges, fair housing, fair labor contracts, fair fights. Children learn to play fair, and one of their favorite arguments against something their parents have decided is "it's not fair." Fairness simply stated is this: you get treated the way you deserve to get treated, and everyone who deserves the same gets the same.
And the first thing we notice about the book of Job is the unfairness. Job is good, religious, careful, intelligent, devoted to his family; and his virtue and wisdom have made him wealthy, successful and respected. Job is so good, in fact, that God starts to brag about him. God's high opinion of Job rouses Satan's interest, and Satan proposes to test the sincerity of Job's faith. He clobbers Job with tragedy upon tragedy. Job loses his herds and his servants, then all his children are killed in a freak storm. In today's reading Job's health turns bad and he begins to suffer disfigurement and physical pain on top of his sorrow.
It's not fair. A good man like Job shouldn't suffer like that. But we're used to that kind of unfairness. A young woman shouldn't get AIDS from her dentist, nor should a baby get AIDS from its mother. Honest, hard-working people shouldn't lose their homes and have to live on the street. Good people's marriages shouldn't fail. Little children shouldn't get killed in drive-by shootings. Innocent people shouldn't die in wars, or be killed by drunk drivers. Nobody should get cancer or multiple sclerosis, or Alzheimer's disease.
So the story of Job sounds true to us. It offends our sense of justice; it violates our standard of reward for virtue and punishment for vice; it puts God in the questionable position of allowing Job to suffer - but it sounds true. Life shoves unfairness in our faces every day. And if Job's story sounds like stories we know, then maybe the lessons we can learn from Job can help us survive the suffering in our own lives.
The first of those lessons is this: religion isn't the key to prosperity, health or success. People have thought it was since long before Job's day, and still do. God rewards the good and faithful with good things in life. That kind of thinking makes our faithfulness part of a bargain with God: if we believe, worship and obey God, then God is somehow obligated to bless us with good things.
And from there it's an easy step to being religious mainly for the goodies. Television ministers are notorious for that sort of thing: "Be faithful, tune in to my show and give generously to support my ministry and I guarantee God will bless you materially and spiritually." Faith healers, too: "If you really believe, God will grant your miracle." Consumer's Research magazine has even published an article warning people about the boom in religious swindlers, who promise incredible returns on investments in religious scams.1
But it isn't only swindlers who look at faith that way. Most of us do. In our preaching and proclamation we try to motivate faith by promising rewards: Believe in Jesus so you will go to heaven when you die. That isn't the way Jesus made the invitation. When Jesus called his disciples he didn't say, "Follow me if you want to be a winner," or "Follow me; I'll get you into heaven." He said, "Follow me." (Mark 2:14) Later, he said, "Take up your cross and follow me," (Mark 8:34) and "give all that you have to the poor and follow me." (Mark 10:21) As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "When Christ calls [us] he bids [us] come and die."2 Jesus didn't ask people to follow him for the good they'd get out of it, but because he wanted them in his kingdom.
That's the point at which Satan thought Job was vulnerable. He bet God that Job was only faithful because it brought him prosperity, and that if the reward went away so would Job's faith. But Job proved him wrong. The first thing we learn from Job's story is that faithfulness to God is not a guarantee of a sorrow-free life. A faith that depends on the promise of rewards is likely to fail us when suffering comes.
Now, the flip side of the idea that happiness is a reward for virtue is that suffering is a punishment for sin. Even if we know intellectually that it's not, we still find it emotionally comforting to find some way to blame people for their own suffering. It's convenient to think of AIDS as the consequence of behaviors that people should have known better than to engage in. One pastor has spoken of walking into a hospital room to visit a smoker dying of lung cancer and having to force himself to feel sympathetic because, after all, he was asking for it, wasn't he? People we see in shelters for homeless families must have messed up somehow to have lost their homes. The high incidence of crime and drug use among young black men must have something to do with bad character, or bad parents, or bad something.
That kind of thinking helps us deal with suffering. It makes it a little less threatening if we can explain it, or blame someone for it. If people suffer because of something they've done, then if we avoid doing the same thing we can avoid suffering. It also clears us of any guilt and, more important, it clears God of any responsibility.
The only problem is that it's wrong. Job shows us that. Job was entirely blameless, entirely faultless, yet he suffered horribly. His story confronts us with the problem we'd like to avoid, innocent suffering. Recently a young man who had just graduated from Emory University in Atlanta - a 21-year-old All-American swimmer, strong, healthy and admired by everyone who knew him - dropped dead of a heart attack while sitting and watching television with his girlfriend. How do you account for something like that? You don't, that's the problem. None of the usual explanations work. It just isn't fair.
Someone said once in a Sunday school class that the things we fear the most are those we can't understand and those we can't control, and suffering often falls into both those categories. Does this story offer us any solutions?
No, it doesn't appear to. Job's story doesn't help us understand why we suffer. The story about God and Satan making a gentlemen's bet on whether Job would stay faithful doesn't really explain anything. In fact, it doesn't appear plausible at all. The picture of God sitting around with a few close personal friends - including Satan - swapping opinions about human beings doesn't square with any other information in the Bible, so most commentators take this to be an ancient folk tale that the author of Job used as the setting for his reflections on suffering. In other words, it doesn't really give us reliable information about why tragedy befalls Job, or us.
That's just like God, isn't it, to leave us in the dark about important things. Martin Luther wrote of the deus absconditus, the hidden God, by which he meant that God has chosen to reveal some things about himself - particularly his gift of salvation through his Son Jesus - but has chosen not to reveal other things. And why there is suffering in the world is one of them. When Moses went up on the mountain to meet God, all God would let Moses see was his backside, and that's all he shows us; we just aren't meant to know everything about God's ways. (Exodus 33:23)
Nor does this story give us control over suffering. It doesn't help us anticipate it or cure it. Job's wife tells him he could end his suffering if he would curse God and get zapped by lightning - you might say she wrote the first suicide manual - but Job refuses.
Yet that does not mean that suffering is out of control. We can't control it, but the story of Job suggests to us that God is in control. Satan can't afflict Job without God's permission or beyond limits set by God. Job observes, in the last verse of today's text, that both the good and the evil he received in life were from God. And because Job believes God to be trustworthy, he is willing to submit to God's decision. We might not know why God allows us to suffer, or refrains from intervening on our behalf, but we can believe that God knows what he is doing. God is in control of suffering as well as salvation; and he proved to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus that he will not run away from suffering, but also that suffering can be redeemed and even redemptive.
Maybe that makes us want to cry out to our heavenly Father, "It isn't fair." But when human parents make decisions that their children think are unfair, they usually have good reasons that their children simply can't understand. Still, they hope their children will trust them enough to accept their decisions. The picture we get in today's story of God and Job is like that. Job can't understand why he has to suffer, any more than we can when we read about him, but he trusts God to do the right thing. That kind of faith might not end our suffering, but it allows us to survive.
Most of us remember Job for his patience, but the patient sufferer who accepts his ill fortune as God's will without complaining only appears in this opening story. In the rest of the book Job is shown arguing his innocence, rejecting his friends' efforts to counsel him, searching for explanations, challenging God's justice. Today and for the next three Sundays we'll be looking at Job's experiences and reaction to them, and in Job's struggle to preserve his faith in spite of his tragedy, we can find echoes of the questions many of us ask when we or people we know suffer unexpectedly, unfairly or unexplainably.
Today our text is the opening story, in which the big issue seems to be fairness. Fairness is an indispensable doctrine, basic to life in human society. We demand fair taxes, fair judges, fair housing, fair labor contracts, fair fights. Children learn to play fair, and one of their favorite arguments against something their parents have decided is "it's not fair." Fairness simply stated is this: you get treated the way you deserve to get treated, and everyone who deserves the same gets the same.
And the first thing we notice about the book of Job is the unfairness. Job is good, religious, careful, intelligent, devoted to his family; and his virtue and wisdom have made him wealthy, successful and respected. Job is so good, in fact, that God starts to brag about him. God's high opinion of Job rouses Satan's interest, and Satan proposes to test the sincerity of Job's faith. He clobbers Job with tragedy upon tragedy. Job loses his herds and his servants, then all his children are killed in a freak storm. In today's reading Job's health turns bad and he begins to suffer disfigurement and physical pain on top of his sorrow.
It's not fair. A good man like Job shouldn't suffer like that. But we're used to that kind of unfairness. A young woman shouldn't get AIDS from her dentist, nor should a baby get AIDS from its mother. Honest, hard-working people shouldn't lose their homes and have to live on the street. Good people's marriages shouldn't fail. Little children shouldn't get killed in drive-by shootings. Innocent people shouldn't die in wars, or be killed by drunk drivers. Nobody should get cancer or multiple sclerosis, or Alzheimer's disease.
So the story of Job sounds true to us. It offends our sense of justice; it violates our standard of reward for virtue and punishment for vice; it puts God in the questionable position of allowing Job to suffer - but it sounds true. Life shoves unfairness in our faces every day. And if Job's story sounds like stories we know, then maybe the lessons we can learn from Job can help us survive the suffering in our own lives.
The first of those lessons is this: religion isn't the key to prosperity, health or success. People have thought it was since long before Job's day, and still do. God rewards the good and faithful with good things in life. That kind of thinking makes our faithfulness part of a bargain with God: if we believe, worship and obey God, then God is somehow obligated to bless us with good things.
And from there it's an easy step to being religious mainly for the goodies. Television ministers are notorious for that sort of thing: "Be faithful, tune in to my show and give generously to support my ministry and I guarantee God will bless you materially and spiritually." Faith healers, too: "If you really believe, God will grant your miracle." Consumer's Research magazine has even published an article warning people about the boom in religious swindlers, who promise incredible returns on investments in religious scams.1
But it isn't only swindlers who look at faith that way. Most of us do. In our preaching and proclamation we try to motivate faith by promising rewards: Believe in Jesus so you will go to heaven when you die. That isn't the way Jesus made the invitation. When Jesus called his disciples he didn't say, "Follow me if you want to be a winner," or "Follow me; I'll get you into heaven." He said, "Follow me." (Mark 2:14) Later, he said, "Take up your cross and follow me," (Mark 8:34) and "give all that you have to the poor and follow me." (Mark 10:21) As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "When Christ calls [us] he bids [us] come and die."2 Jesus didn't ask people to follow him for the good they'd get out of it, but because he wanted them in his kingdom.
That's the point at which Satan thought Job was vulnerable. He bet God that Job was only faithful because it brought him prosperity, and that if the reward went away so would Job's faith. But Job proved him wrong. The first thing we learn from Job's story is that faithfulness to God is not a guarantee of a sorrow-free life. A faith that depends on the promise of rewards is likely to fail us when suffering comes.
Now, the flip side of the idea that happiness is a reward for virtue is that suffering is a punishment for sin. Even if we know intellectually that it's not, we still find it emotionally comforting to find some way to blame people for their own suffering. It's convenient to think of AIDS as the consequence of behaviors that people should have known better than to engage in. One pastor has spoken of walking into a hospital room to visit a smoker dying of lung cancer and having to force himself to feel sympathetic because, after all, he was asking for it, wasn't he? People we see in shelters for homeless families must have messed up somehow to have lost their homes. The high incidence of crime and drug use among young black men must have something to do with bad character, or bad parents, or bad something.
That kind of thinking helps us deal with suffering. It makes it a little less threatening if we can explain it, or blame someone for it. If people suffer because of something they've done, then if we avoid doing the same thing we can avoid suffering. It also clears us of any guilt and, more important, it clears God of any responsibility.
The only problem is that it's wrong. Job shows us that. Job was entirely blameless, entirely faultless, yet he suffered horribly. His story confronts us with the problem we'd like to avoid, innocent suffering. Recently a young man who had just graduated from Emory University in Atlanta - a 21-year-old All-American swimmer, strong, healthy and admired by everyone who knew him - dropped dead of a heart attack while sitting and watching television with his girlfriend. How do you account for something like that? You don't, that's the problem. None of the usual explanations work. It just isn't fair.
Someone said once in a Sunday school class that the things we fear the most are those we can't understand and those we can't control, and suffering often falls into both those categories. Does this story offer us any solutions?
No, it doesn't appear to. Job's story doesn't help us understand why we suffer. The story about God and Satan making a gentlemen's bet on whether Job would stay faithful doesn't really explain anything. In fact, it doesn't appear plausible at all. The picture of God sitting around with a few close personal friends - including Satan - swapping opinions about human beings doesn't square with any other information in the Bible, so most commentators take this to be an ancient folk tale that the author of Job used as the setting for his reflections on suffering. In other words, it doesn't really give us reliable information about why tragedy befalls Job, or us.
That's just like God, isn't it, to leave us in the dark about important things. Martin Luther wrote of the deus absconditus, the hidden God, by which he meant that God has chosen to reveal some things about himself - particularly his gift of salvation through his Son Jesus - but has chosen not to reveal other things. And why there is suffering in the world is one of them. When Moses went up on the mountain to meet God, all God would let Moses see was his backside, and that's all he shows us; we just aren't meant to know everything about God's ways. (Exodus 33:23)
Nor does this story give us control over suffering. It doesn't help us anticipate it or cure it. Job's wife tells him he could end his suffering if he would curse God and get zapped by lightning - you might say she wrote the first suicide manual - but Job refuses.
Yet that does not mean that suffering is out of control. We can't control it, but the story of Job suggests to us that God is in control. Satan can't afflict Job without God's permission or beyond limits set by God. Job observes, in the last verse of today's text, that both the good and the evil he received in life were from God. And because Job believes God to be trustworthy, he is willing to submit to God's decision. We might not know why God allows us to suffer, or refrains from intervening on our behalf, but we can believe that God knows what he is doing. God is in control of suffering as well as salvation; and he proved to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus that he will not run away from suffering, but also that suffering can be redeemed and even redemptive.
Maybe that makes us want to cry out to our heavenly Father, "It isn't fair." But when human parents make decisions that their children think are unfair, they usually have good reasons that their children simply can't understand. Still, they hope their children will trust them enough to accept their decisions. The picture we get in today's story of God and Job is like that. Job can't understand why he has to suffer, any more than we can when we read about him, but he trusts God to do the right thing. That kind of faith might not end our suffering, but it allows us to survive.
