by Preston Moore, Intern Minister

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

My familiarity with the Bible was pretty limited before I went to seminary.  I certainly didn’t know that there was a book in the Bible called the Book of Job.   I did know that there was a person called Job, because at least a hundred times during my childhood I heard my father say:  “Preston, you would try the patience of Job!”

The Book of Job is a very long poem.  It starts out “Once upon a time, in the land of Uz, there was a man named Job.”  Job was “blameless and upright,” one who “turned away from evil.”  He was the richest man in the East, owning 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 donkeys, and a great many slaves.  Job also had seven sons and three daughters.  He worried that his children might have sinned, and performed rituals of purification on their behalf.

Looking down from Heaven, God pointed out Job to one of his deputies who had a name like the devil’s, but actually was a just a special prosecutor of sorts.  God asked his prosecutor what he thought of this virtuous, pious man.  “You’ve put a fence around your man Job,” the prosecutor said to God, “protecting him from misfortune.  Let me inside that fence, and I’ll show you a different person.  Let me strike at his possessions, and I bet he’ll curse you and reject you.”

God accepted the bet.  Immediately, everything Job had was destroyed, including his ten children.  When he was told of these calamities, Job arose without a word and performed the ancient rituals of grief, tearing his robe and shaving his head.  He fell to the ground in a posture of worship.

Back in Heaven, God taunted the prosecutor for his failure to break Job, but the prosecutor wouldn’t give up.  “Let me under his skin,” he said, “and Job will curse you yet.”  God granted him this power, and the prosecutor afflicted Job with boils and sores all over his body.  Without a word, Job continued his rituals of grief, sitting down on an ash heap with nothing but a shard of pottery to scrape away his dead skin.

Job’s wife could take no more of this.  She ridiculed his persistence and urged him to curse God and die.  He rebuked her, saying that they must take the bad with the good.  No curse passed his lips, but a big storm was brewing inside Job.

Three friends visited him.  They were shocked to see how Job had been reduced.  Job’s internal storm broke loose with his friends, starting with his declaring himself better off dead.  The friends responded with one lecture after another.  They all had the same theme:  God rewards goodness and punishes evil; Job’s misfortune shows he must have sinned; and now Job must get right with God.  Job angrily rejected this advice, steadfastly asserting his innocence.  The dialogue raged on, with the friends simply increasing the volume of their arguments.  For his part, Job went back and forth between demolishing their logic and complaining directly to God.  But still no curse passed his lips.

God then suddenly appeared to Job and his friends out of a whirlwind.  He offered no explanation for why Job was being visited with misfortune.  Instead he led Job through a spectacular tour of the wonders of creation, but left the ultimate meaning of these wonders shrouded in mystery.  Job was awestruck.  He withdrew his complaints, saying that before he had only heard of God but now saw God with his own eyes.

God had the last word.  He restored all that Job had previously had, but in even greater measure, and the seven sons and three daughters came back to life.  Job died peacefully some one hundred forty years later.

The story of Job is a four thousand year old legend, a myth.  Some people say a myth is a story that isn’t true, but actually, myths are stories that are so true that they keep happening—over and over again. And so it is with the Book of Job, which has been acted out in story and reality countless times down through history.  The poet Tennyson called Job “the greatest poem, whether of ancient or modern literature.”  The novelist Victor Hugo said, “Tomorrow, if all literature was to be destroyed and it was left to me to retain one work only, I should save Job.”  What has made this Bible story so enduring and compelling?

Job’s grievance is that his misfortune is a violation of the relationship between humans and God.  To him, that relationship is essentially an employment contract.  God is the boss.  Humans are the employees.  If the humans comply with the contract, they are rewarded.  If they fail, they are punished.  This relationship is rational and predictable.  The very purpose of a contract is to eliminate mystery and surprise.  Job complied with all of God’s contractual rules.  He performed all the right sacrifices, gave to the right charities, scrupulously avoided all those things that get listed as sin—lying, philandering, heresy, failing to attend church.  He was “upright and blameless.”  He feels entitled to his rewards, and he is very angry, confused, and afraid.

The glaring problem with this is that contracts always depend on the presence of someone empowered to determine whether the contract has been complied with, if the parties disagree.  But the God of Job’s religion is both a party to the contract and the judge who decides disputes about it.

Job longs to take God to court.  “If only I knew where to meet him and could find my way to his court,” Job frets.  “I would argue my case before him; words would flow from my mouth.  I would counter all his arguments and disprove his accusations.”  But his misfortunes make him doubt God’s fairness, so he reaches for an even higher authority.  “I have a witness in Heaven,” he declares, “a spokesman above the clouds.  May he judge between mortal and God as he would between man and neighbor.”  In Job’s eyes, God turns out to be no grander than his own neighbor.

Job’s friends agree with his legalistic view of religion.  But they recommend a different legal strategy:  plead guilty and throw yourself on the mercy of the court.  They fear God’s power, but a deeper reason for their advice is their fear that Job might actually be innocent.  Job has got to be guilty.  Otherwise all of humanity is living in terror of a God who actively judges and punishes but has no sense of justice.

Job and his friends keep both God and us woefully small.  God is at most a judge, with the basically mechanical task of determining contract compliance and handing out punishments and rewards.  We are at most sophisticated machines with software that is supposed to enable them to comply with the contract.  Job’s religion has the smallness of manipulative relationships based on power, rather than the spaciousness of intimate relationships based on love.

We see this lack of intimacy reflected in Job’s own life:             

(1) He had none with his wife, to whom he offered no consolation when their children were killed, and who urged him to end his misery and hers by cursing God and dying;        

(2) none with his children, whom he treated like domestic animals to be kept in line, lest they sin;

(3) none with his friends, with whom he exchanged bitter denunciations in the midst of his suffering;

(4) none with the community, who stood outside the fence around his insulated life of comfort;

(5) none with nature, which he either fenced out when it was wild or fenced in when it could be domesticated;

(6) none with himself, focusing entirely on outward accomplishment rather than inward reflection; and finally,

(7) none with God, treating God as a business partner or even an adversary.

When God appears to Job out of the whirlwind, it is not to offer him a judicial opinion giving the reasons and rationales for his woes.  Rather, it is to offer him an utterly new kind of relationship—one of love, based on intimacy.  For literary purposes, God is personified in the Book of Job so that we can hear him speak, and he appears out of a whirlwind.  In real life, there is no personified God describing the wonders of the world to us.  But there is the world, and it is wondrous.  God is reflected to us in the world we encounter every morning when we rise, and the wonder of it includes all of it—beauty and ugliness, life and death, creation and destruction, gain and loss, sadness and bliss, wounding and healing, the whole nine yards.

And in real life, of course, there is no magic whirlwind for God to appear from.  But there certainly is what the whirlwind symbolizes in the Book of Job:  mystery.  God, life, and the world are inherently mysterious.  In declining Job’s demands for reasons for his misfortunes, God’s message is “if I were not mysterious, I would not be God.”

In offering the world to Job and to all of us, God is talking the talk of a lover:  “take me as I am,” he asks of Job, “—good and bad, impossible to disassemble, surprising, and all wrapped up in ultimate mystery.”  God is ready to take Job on the same unconditional basis:  just as he is—way off course in his spirituality, deeply stuck in vanity and egotism, foolish in his quest to litigate with God.  And God’s invitation is open-ended.  The offer of the world is made over and over, from moment to moment, one opportunity after another to begin again in love.

The restoration of Job’s children and possessions at the conclusion of the story dramatically underscores these themes of mystery and love.  What appears to be a fairy tale ending is actually loaded with symbolism.  Job’s restoration is not a reward for piety, or for meekly shutting up.  That would be a throwback to the contractual relationship God invites Job to move beyond.  In fact, it is just the opposite:  a pure gift, unearned and unearnable, emblematic of God’s mystery, arriving only after Job has completely let go of his sense of injustice about his calamities.

When God makes his invitation, Job is free to choose.  God makes no threats.  No punishment or reward is mentioned or implied.  Rather, in showing Job all the wonders of the world he has been given to live in, God simply asks of Job “Take me as I am.”  Not even God can force someone to fall in love.  If that were possible, the wager in Heaven between God and his prosecutor would have made no sense—not even as a literary device.  A bet is only a bet if there is uncertainty about the outcome—here, the uncertainty of what Job would choose to do.

Job spends most of the 42 chapters of his story in deep uncertainty about what to choose.  He wishes for his own death.  He considers whether evil people who are not punished are really the smart ones.  He asks God to just leave him alone.   In the end, Job chooses to accept God’s invitation.  His abandonment of his grievance is not the capitulation of one who has been overpowered, but rather the embrace of a lover opening his arms to his beloved, saying “take me as I am.”  And just as God gives Job the world, day after day, moment after moment, Job gives it back to God the same way:  new and surprising, reflecting the choices made and actions taken in Job’s own life, which, like the life of every human, changes the world forever.  This is mutual love between God and humans.      

Job is transformed, and his relationship with God is transformed.  His grievance is resolved by being made moot.  He is not even the same person who started the complaining.  The pious good boy has become a mature man, capable of real love.  His loud complaining to God and ferocious arguments with his friends have prepared him to do what must be done for his life to be transformed:  surrender.  Surrender in its spiritual meaning, rather than its military meaning.

Spiritual surrender means to open one’s self, to allow one’s self to be vulnerable.  It means to reveal, to risk, to receive rather than take, to offer rather than command.  To be willing to be surprised, which is the opposite of control.  This is very different from submission.  Job is above all a chooser, freely giving up lesser things in exchange for much greater ones.

He gives up his futile attachment to being in control, his life of building fences to keep the world at a distance.  He does this to gain the freedom to receive all things—other people, the world, even God—just as they are, without judgment.  This is the essential foundation for love.

Job gives up power as a way of relating.  He gives up treating people well or not based on whether they can enable him to score points with his boss, God.  He does this to gain the far greater power available from relating to other people on the basis of love.

In these and other ways, Job gives up a small life of mere egotism and vanity in order to gain the largest possible life.  His surrender is the perfect match for God’s own surrender.  God too is open, willing to be surprised, ready to receive rather than take, always offering rather than commanding, never controlling of Job’s choices.

What Job does not give up is his potential to be a person who cares about right and wrong.  Receiving the world just as it is given to us by God does not mean taking a passive attitude toward life.  It is our nature to care about justice, and that nature is part of the world given to us by God.

Job is the perfect character for a story of transformation through surrender—precisely because he is the hardest case, for two reasons.  First, his life has been all good fortune and no misfortune, leaving him naïve and immature in trying to cope with misfortune when it comes.  Second, Job is the quintessential man’s man.  The cultural training of men is and always has been to fight rather than surrender, to control, enclose, and defend.  To be guarded rather than open.  That he can transcend this training and transform his life is a message of great hope and optimism.  If Job can do this, anyone can.

The Book of Job was the first Biblical text I studied in seminary.  It had a big impact on me, because I saw myself very clearly in the main character.  But I didn’t realize until recently that Job wasn’t quite done with me.

I’ve finished the classroom part of my seminary education.  The internship is flying by, and the time to make some decisions about my ministry will arrive very soon.  As I think about those decisions, I am pulled back to Job, to ask myself the questions his story raises in my own life.

Am I willing to be surprised by unlikely possibilities in ministry?  Will I evaluate my choices by the conventional measures of success, the way Job did before his transformation?  Is a big flock inherently better than a small flock?  Is a church with a fence around it better than one with no fence?  Am I willing to use faculties other than reason to see my way through these decisions?  In stepping down this path of choices, am I willing to trust God more than I trust my own aggressively self-sufficient ego?  Can I give up control for something much more valuable?  Am I willing to surrender?

The ancient story of Job is happening again in many lives.  What is your list of questions?  What surrender is waiting there to open you to new gifts?

After God speaks, Job’s surrender is expressed not in prostration or self-abasement, but rather, in awestruck silence.  “I am speechless,” he says.  “I put my hand on my mouth.  I have said too much already; now I will speak no more.”  No more in the story, true enough; but today, a voice that cannot be ignored, ringing in my own ears.  AMEN.