Yesterday's sermon endeavored to tell the story of the Book of Job from the point of view of James 5:11, with a view toward encouraging us to reflect that our troubles often pale in comparison to those endured by Job, who persevered despite their severity: "Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy."
No sermon, of course, can do justice to the many difficulties the Book of Job presents to the reader. Not the least of these difficulties presents itself in the opening chapter: "And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. . . . [and] there came also another [messenger], and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee."
It has always arrested my attention that this last of the preliminary calamities which fall upon Job estimates the value of his own progeny as just so many possessions, right down there with all the other possessions he loses: the caravan camels, the sheep, the oxen, and the asses. And the servants who go with them, who all likewise perish. Job is not unmoved, to be sure, and displays the proper mournfulness, but a student of the gospels cannot help but remember the jarring contrast this presents to the saying of Jesus: "Behold the fowls of the air . . . Your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" In other words, whereas Job's story minimizes the worth of some human life, and does so in a way which makes it look like God toys with human destiny in a capricious, unpredictable, unreliable, unmerciful, yea even malevolent and Manichaean way in its dualism between good and evil, there is another story in the Bible which tries to assert itself from time to time, maintaining the infinite worth of every person to the God "who so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son . . .."
It is tempting to choose sides. Down that path endless debates ensue about the priority of the various testimonies of Scripture, screened through equally various interpretive lenses, which have multiplied in the twentieth century to such an extent that Biblical study has largely been reduced to bibliography. "Enlightenment" types still sketch out the progress of religion, from the offending God who appears in Job to the liberal Jesus of a daydream afternoon, who couldn't possibly have predicted the consummation of all things in his own lifetime. Stalwart defenders of the inerrancy of the Bible continue to want to have it both ways, never quite reconciling the texts and holding them, and us, in a perpetual, nervous tension.
Without disrespect to the text, may we not ask whether the text does not instead say something about the human imagination that we have written about God in both of these ways for about as long as writing has existed? Is the text not a reflection of our experience of reality, that we are born into a world of both joy and sorrow, of gain and of loss, of judgment and of forgiveness, indeed only to one day face death ourselves as sure as the noon day sun? The list of antonyms is almost endless, and the ineffable dream of religion is to escape from them.
A very famous man who died last year was wont to warn our generation that the line separating good from evil runs through every human heart. He was not well received. But evil and death do always seem to prevail. There can be no other explanation for the American century just passed with its millions upon millions senselessly slaughtered and gone. Countless sons and husbands and fathers who never came home, to live and prosper and work and love as my father came home to do in 1945. It is of such escapes that our dreams are made, our hopeful stories written, our belief in the goodness of life born anew established.
According to Chief Dan George in The Outlaw Josey Wales, the Cherokee nation is lectured by the Secretary of the Interior that they must endeavor to persevere on the reservation set aside by the U.S. government for the Indian nations. "We left," says Dan George, "and thought about the phrase 'endeavor to persevere.' When we had thought about it long enough . . . we declared war on the Union." And we know how that ended. As everything must, one way or another.
