“The Eastering of Job”
Job 42:2-10 and Colossians 3:12-17
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/26/24
12Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 13Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
14Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.
17And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Colossians 3:12-17 NRSV)
Before reading today’s sermon text, let’s remember that, at the outset, Job is a man of means—lots of money, lots of property. The storyteller also implies that Job’s superabundant holdings are signs of God’s favor. So, as ancient as this story is, chapters 1 and 2 of the Book of Job presents pretty much the same idol as today’s prosperity gospel. And such deities inevitably prove all-too-human. What besides pride would allow a god to do something as un-godly as agreeing—on a devil’s dare—to test Job?
This story vividly illustrates the way that humankind creates all manner of gods in our own image. And for 37 chapters the characters in Job continue to assume this human-imaged god. Then, in Chapters 38-40, something catastrophically glorious happens. As Forrest Gump says when the hurricane hits his shrimp boat, “God showed up.”
“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
‘Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place…Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?
‘Have the gates of death been revealed to you…?
‘Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you observe the calving of the deer?
‘Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?’” (Selected verses from Job 38-40)
These three chapters expose the impressionable, small-g god of the early chapters of Job as an absurdity, and they introduce us to Yahweh—the Creator, the eternal and capital-G God.
Now, Job is still suffering, still feeling broken and defeated, but he also begins to feel enlightened and hopeful. He realizes that the idol whom he has blamed and to whom he has complained is decidedly not the God who will redeem him.
In chapter 42, the final chapter, a humbled and emboldened Job opens himself up to Yahweh.
Listen for God’s word.
2“I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours
can be thwarted.
3‘Who is this that hides counsel
without knowledge?’
Therefore I have uttered
what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me,
which I did not know.
4‘Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you declare to me.’
5I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
6therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.”
7After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. 8Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering, and my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done.”
9So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what the Lord had told them, and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer.”
10And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends, and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. (Job 42:2-10 NRSV)
Now I know, Job says to God. You overwhelm every human image and expectation of power. Yours is the realm of mystery and grace.
Job realizes that all of his furious ranting against God rose from an understanding of God based solely on projections and rumors.
“But now my eye sees you,” says Job. “Therefore I…repent…”
Having desired death, Job has now experienced a death. And while this death does not release him from life and its bitterness, it does give him a new lease on life through a whole new kind of faith. He dies the death that we all must die in the process of living into more authentic images and mature understandings of God.
Awakening to this new revelation is a kind of resurrection experience for Job. And once he staggers out of his tomb, God puts that new faith to work. Just like Jesus forgiving his disciples for their betrayals and denials, Job finds he must forgive and intercede for the friends who condemned him in his suffering.
To experience resurrection here-and-now, we forsake all those small, vengeful gods of reciprocity. To live an Eastered life is to live sacramentally—forgiving the unforgivable, loving the unlovable, giving voice to the voiceless, recognizing God’s holiness in the midst of the mundane, and discovering life in the throes of death. This is to have our “fortunes” restored.
While Job has his material fortune restored, being freshly-Eastered, he handles his new wealth very differently. In Job 42:15 we read: “In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers.” This detail may seem trivial, but Job’s radically new generosity reveals the effects of his awareness of a holiness and a wholeness in the Creation that the god of chapter 1 cannot offer. Surrounded by and saturated with the God-who-acts-within-yet-exists-beyond human comprehension, Job subverts sacred tradition and makes his daughters equal to his sons. This revolutionary act foreshadows Jesus healing on the sabbath, talking alone with a Samaritan woman, and “eating with tax collectors and sinners.”
In their narrow confines, self-serving theologies always try to distort God into something friendly to any status quo that exalts privilege and ignores injustice and suffering. For instance, don’t we understand that the phrase God helps those who help themselves is not biblical? That idol dies a memorable and transformational death in the pages of Job—and alongside Jesus on the cross.
Both Job and Jesus live and die in ways that proclaim a God who helps those who cannot help themselves. Their stories reveal that true knowledge of God includes the embrace of suffering as well as happiness. And both stories reveal that blessings are only truly blessings when they are shared in humble and generous gratitude and when they become acts of justice and peacemaking.
That’s especially true when they’re shared with people who don’t “deserve” them—like Job praying for his friends and Jesus’ living his life for all Creation. And don’t such things demonstrate grace?
Richard Rohr is fond of saying that Jesus comes not to change God’s mind about us, but to change our minds about God. It seems to me that Job’s story has that same mission. It has become, for me, a kind of CliffsNotes version of how individuals and faith communities progress from Santa Claus and fairy godmother images of God to images that inspire awe, humility, hope, and action—images that inspire us to participate in God’s resurrecting presence in this beautiful if all-too-broken world.
I usually cringe when I read sayings posted on church signs. Too many of them express theology worthy only of the god of Job 1 and 2. Some years ago, though, I did see a sign that caught my eye. It said very simply, “The struggle is real. So is God.”
When a congregation reveals itself as a vibrant, relevant, real faith community, it’s because all of its members—individually and corporately—work together to acknowledge and enter the suffering of the people next to each other in the pew, at the grocery store, the post office, the ball game, the coffee shop…
Job and Jesus both tell us that God is Eastering the Creation toward justice through the ways of love and the means of grace. Through many deaths and resurrections, God is transforming us into a people of gratitude and generosity in and for a world which sits among ashes, crying out for deliverance. And while wecan’t do the delivering, we can offer to God, for our neighbors, the prayers of our hands, our feet, our voices.
So, even now—whether through us or in spite of us—God is Eastering the Creation and making you, and me, and all things new.
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