"A Bitter intimacy"
Job 23:1-9, 16-17 and Romans 8:31-39
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/5/24
31What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32He who did not withhold his own Son but gave him up for all of us, how will he not with him also give us everything else? 33Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34Who is to condemn? It is Christ who died, or rather, who was raised, who is also at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. 35Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? 36As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”
37No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (NRSV)
Last week we began looking at Job. Much happens between the first two chapters and the twenty-third chapter. So, let’s begin with some review.
Job is a man of wealth and renown. He lives by rules of hospitality and generosity.
Then, twice, God brags on Job to the accuser. And twice, the accuser, doubting all human goodness and faithfulness, challenges God to make things difficult on Job. God relents, and in no time, Job has lost everything except one furious wife.
“Curse God, and die!” she screams. But even in his emotional, spiritual, and physical pain, Job does not “sin with his lips.” And a fierce conversation begins.
Cursing the day of his birth, Job 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, accept your punishment, and move on.
Throughout the saga, Job maintains his innocence. Things reach a crescendo 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…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 saying, “Is not your wickedness great? There is no end to your iniquities.”
And to Eliphaz, the ever-faithful Job says:
2 “Today also my complaint is bitter;
his hand is heavy despite my groaning.
3 Oh, that I knew where I might find him,
that I might come even to his dwelling!
4 I would lay my case before him
and fill my mouth with arguments.
5 I would learn what he would answer me
and understand what he would say to me.
6 Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power?
No, but he would give heed to me.
7 There the upright could reason with him,
and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.
8 “If I go forward, he is not there;
or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.
16 God has made my heart faint;
the Almighty has terrified me.
17 If only I could vanish in darkness,
and thick darkness would cover my face! (NRSV)
“If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!”
Job’s accusatory lament reminds me of Psalm 139 when the poet says, “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.”
Somehow, in the midst of his existential darkness, Job cannot not sense the light of God.
Both Job and the psalmist acknowledge that the utter loneliness of human suffering still happens within the context of intimacy with God. It’s a bitter intimacy, but intimacy, nonetheless. And if we can’t share our deepest anger, fear, and hurt with those we love the most, do we truly love them? When we offer to God nothing but laundered and starched formality, aren’t we just trying to gloss over 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 an untimely death. A few months earlier, the man had been a heart patient at a hospital in Atlanta—a good hospital, with a good staff, where a good person made a bad mistake and gave medication to thicken instead of thin the man’s blood. There were confessions. 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. He began with words of comfort, Psalms 23 and 42. Then he read from Psalm 44 in which the poet dares to name God’s shortcomings: “You have rejected us and abased us…You have made us like sheep for the slaughter…You have sold your people for a trifle… and covered us with deep darkness.”
The lady squirmed in her chair and said, “O my! I don’t believe I could talk to God like that.”
While I understand that, I also think we need to feel free to offer to God the rawest, most bitter intimacies of our hearts. Sometimes they’re 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 felt troubled by his own innocence. It “left him in the dark…[Job] demanded…an answer that would show him unequivocally that [humankind] is not a toy…Job turned against God to find and confront Him.” Specifically, says Wiesel, Job “defied [God] to come closer to [God]…[Indeed] Job needed God because he felt abandoned by…his wife [and] his friends,” none of whom had anything to offer but sanctimonious pity and judgment.1
Job’s anger and his stinging laments declare his absolute faith that his suffering does not reflect the will of God. As pervasive and inescapable as suffering is, it is not God’s desire for anyone. And very often, in our most vehement, unfiltered protests of God, we draw closest to the one who, as James Finley says, “protects us from nothing [yet] sustains us in all things.”
People of wisdom know that truth, but one challenging annoyance in all of this is that God’s sustaining faithfulness becomes most real in retrospect. The writer of Psalm 23 would have nothing whatsoever to say without having already known the speechless despair in the “valley of the shadow of death.” He could “fear no evil” only by having already endured fearsome evils.
For many in the world right now, these are times of darkness, uncertainty, and suffering. And it’s easier to act like one of Job’s “friends,” to cast blame and judgment. As children of God, however, one of our callings is to enter the bitter intimacy of lament, to lend our voices to the cries of suffering in the Creation, and in doing so, to help reveal the presence, the strength, the grace, and the love of God.
And let’s remember, 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 judgment.
If the story of Job does nothing else, it ushers us into the deepest, darkest, most faith-threatening pain in our lives and in the world. And it calls us, in the midst of that pain, to draw near to God, who is nothing like the caricatured deity of Job 1 and 2.
Job also invites us to prepare for and to meet the God being revealed in Jesus of Nazareth—the God who comes to us as one of us, and suffers with us. The God who transforms even our deepest sufferings into sustaining wisdom and redeeming hope.
That God creates and sets the table before us today and invites all humankind to come the feast of reconciling and restoring grace.
1Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, Random House, NY, 1976, pp. 198-199
