“A Bitter Intimacy”
Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
10/11/15
Two weeks ago
we began looking at Job. Much happens between the first two chapters and the
twenty-third chapter. So, let’s review a little first.
Job is a man of
wealth and renown. He lives by rules of generosity and hospitality. His ten
children seem a little spoiled by privilege, but all in all, life is exceptionally
good for Job.
Then, twice, God
brags on Job to Satan. And twice, Satan challenges God to make things difficult
on Job. Push any human being far enough,
says Satan, and they’ll turn on you. Here,
let me show you.
He’s all yours, says God. Just don’t kill him.
In less than
two chapters, Job has lost everything except one furious wife.
“Curse God, and die!” she screams.
But even in unspeakable pain, Job does not “sin with his lips.” And the fierce
conversation begins.
Job curses the day of his birth. He
wishes himself dead. Then we meet Job’s three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and
Zophar, all of whom say basically the same thing: You must be guilty of something. Confess it, and move on.
Throughout the saga, Job maintains
his innocence. Things reach a kind of climax when Job speaks words that Handel
completely misuses in the Easter portion of The
Messiah. In 19:25-26 Job cries out, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and
that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus
destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God.”
Job is claiming a vindicator,
someone who will help him get justice
from God who has so uselessly and unjustly abused him.
In chapter 22, Eliphaz scolds Job
yet again. “Is not your wickedness great? There is no end to your iniquities.”
Unyielding in the face of such battery-acid
counsel, Job says:
2“Today also my
complaint is bitter;
[God’s] hand is
heavy despite my groaning.
3Oh,
that I knew where I might find [God],
that I might come
even to his dwelling!
4I would lay my case
before him,
and fill my mouth
with arguments.
5I would learn what [God]
would answer me,
and understand
what he would say to me.
6Would [God] contend
with me in the greatness of his power?
No; but he would
give heed to me.
7There an upright person
could reason with him,
and I should be
acquitted forever by my judge.
8“If I go forward, [God]
is not there;
or backward, I
cannot perceive him;
9on the left he hides,
and I cannot
behold him;
I turn to the
right,
but I cannot see
him.
16God has made my heart
faint;
the Almighty has
terrified me;
17If only I could vanish
in darkness,
and thick darkness
would cover my face!”
(Job 23:1-9, 16-17)
Listen again
to that last line, “If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness
would cover my face!” Job’s accusatory lament takes me to the poet’s
affirmation in Psalm 139: “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and
the light around me become night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you…for
darkness is as light to you.”
Job wishes he could “vanish in
darkness,” but he cannot.
Both Job and
the psalmist acknowledge that the utter loneliness of human suffering still
happens within the context of intimacy with God. It is a bitter intimacy, but
intimacy, nonetheless. If we cannot share our deepest anger, fear, and hurt
with those we love the most, do we truly love them or trust them? When we offer
to God nothing but laundered, starched, and clean-fingernailed formality, we
are trying to protect something.
After my first
year at Columbia seminary, I interned at a church in a small town south of
Atlanta. During that summer a church member died a death he should not have
died. Just a few months earlier, the man had been a heart patient at a hospital
in Atlanta - a good hospital with a good staff. Yet a good person made a bad
mistake and gave medication to thicken instead of thin the man’s blood. There
were confessions, and tears all around. But the damage was done.
A couple of
weeks after the funeral, I went with my supervising pastor to visit the man’s
widow. She greeted us with gracious melancholy. After pleasantries, the pastor
read some scripture passages. He began with words of comfort, Psalm 23 and
such. Then he read from Psalm 44 in which the poet dares to name God’s
shortcomings in caring for Israel: “You have rejected us and abased us…You have
made us like sheep for the slaughter…You have sold your people for a trifle…you
have broken us in the haunt of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness.”
The lady squirmed
in her seat. “O my,” she said, “I don’t believe I could talk to God like that.”
I think we
need to feel free to offer the rawest, most bitter intimacies of our hearts
with God. Sometimes they are the most profoundly honest prayers and most
sincere affirmations of faith that we can utter. They take seriously our faith
that God creates the world and declares it good.
Bitter intimacy also takes seriously God’s steadfast presence in the midst of
human suffering.
Job’s tortured
laments do all of these things. They also emphatically declare his innocence. Elie
Wiesel says that Job’s “innocence troubled him, left him in the dark; his guilt
might give the experience…meaning. [Job] demanded…an answer that would show him
unequivocally that [humankind] is not a toy…Job turned against God to find and
confront Him. He defied [God] to come closer to Him.”1
“Moreover,”
says Wiesel, “Job needed God because he felt abandoned by…his wife [and] his
friends,” none of whom had anything to offer but empty pity and judgment.2
Job’s angry
words, his stinging laments declare his absolute faith that his suffering does
not reflect the will of God. As pervasive and inescapable as it is, suffering
is not God’s desire for anyone. And it is very often in our most vehement,
unfiltered protests of God that we draw closest to the one who, to re-quote
James Finley, “protects us from nothing [but] sustains us in all things.”3
The problem
is, of course, God’s sustaining faithfulness is most real in retrospect. The
writer of Psalm 23 would have nothing to say whatsoever without having already known
the speechless despair in the “valley of the shadow of death.” He can “fear no
evil” only by having already felt fear, and having been all but overcome by it.
These are
indeed desperate and overcoming times. And it is easier to act like one of
Job’s “friends,” to judge victims for comeliness or cowardice. As children of
God, however, our calling is to enter the bitter intimacy of lament, to lend
our voices to the cries of suffering in the creation, and in so doing, to help reveal
the presence, the strength, the grace, and the Love of God.
A word of
caution: Healthy lament always begins with our own intimate struggles with God.
When people of faith do not feel free to be bitterly honest with God, we will
almost certainly, like Job’s wife and friends, project onto others our anger at
and fear of some deity we really have not known and are too timid to confront. Misdirected
intimacies and bitterness can cause any of us to lay the burden of blame on people
who deserve compassion, not sanctimonious judgment.
If the story of Job does nothing
else, it slings us into the deepest, darkest, most faith-threatening,
contemporary pain in our lives and in the world. And it dares us, in the midst
of that pain, to draw near to a God very unlike the caricatured deity of Job 1
and 2.
The story of Job invites us,
instead to prepare for and to meet the God being revealed in Jesus of Nazareth
– the God who comes to us as one of us. The God who suffers with us. The God who
transforms our darkness into sustaining and redeeming light.
1Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits
and Legends, Random House, NY, 1976, p. 198.
2Ibid., p. 199.
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