Finally, Job gets a response. Finally, God speaks. Thirty-seven chapters in the book of Job have come and gone and except for the setup in the first two chapters, we’ve heard nothing from God and a whole lot from Job, wanting to talk to God. We’ve heard a whole lot from Job’s three friends, who feel that God needs to be defended from Job’s anger and grief. But 35 chapters later, we finally hear from God, the LORD, Yahweh, speaking to Job from out of the whirlwind. For 35 chapters Job has cursed the day of his birth, raged in his pain and his sorrow and his grief, demanded an audience with God to get some answers to some fundamental questions: why has all of this happened to me? Why have I had to deal with so much suffering? Why me, when I have been faithful to you? Why me, a person of integrity? Explain this system to me, God, because I don’t get it. Show yourself, God, and explain yourself. Finally, it’s all about to make sense. Finally, Job is going to get answers. At last, here it is, what Job has been waiting for. Ready? Here it comes. Here is God’s answer to Job’s rage, and pain, and suffering, and questions about the whys and wherefores of it all. And I quote: “Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain on a land where no one lives . . . to satisfy the waste and desolate land, to make the ground put forth grass? Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Is the wild ox willing to serve you? Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars? Look at Behemoth, which I made just as I made you; it is the first of the great acts of God. Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Will it make a covenant with you?”
What kind of answer is this, we may well ask? What is God doing? Well, there are at least two potential ways to look God’s response. One is to say that God is smacking Job down, pointing out to Job how puny and meaningless Job is in the universe – which, by the way, Job did not create. But that’s not the only way to interpret God’s answer (non-answer?) to Job. Another way is to really think about the questions God is asking and ask ourselves, how might this be an answer? What is the point God is making? Why answer Job’s questions with questions of God’s own?
As I was reflecting on this, I was thinking about an aspect of God that I at least don’t always consider: God as teacher. I think we usually attribute the role of teacher more to Jesus, which is understandable, since we see the gospels tell us how much teaching Jesus did and how important a part teaching was of Jesus’ ministry. But God is a teacher too. In this part of the book of Job, what we see of God likens God to that really good but not at all easy teacher you may have had at some point in your life. You know the type – the one who didn’t tell you all the answers, but pushed you to figure them out for yourself. The one who never handed you anything, but made you work hard for it. The one who taught you how to think, and how to look at things. The one who helped you figure out what questions to ask. What if we think about God as this kind of teacher? What does God give to Job here?
Well, here’s what I think. I think that what God gives Job is something Job does not have, so caught up is he in his pain and suffering and grief. God gives Job a sense of the big picture. Those questions God asks Job, they aren’t meant to mock or belittle Job – they’re to get Job out of his way of thinking and open himself up to a new way, a different way of seeing things. They give Job something he never would have had, had he not gone through these experiences: they give Job a God’s-eye view of things. And guess what – things look different from God’s perspective. Job doesn’t get a direct answer from God about why things are difficult, why Job has suffered, why anyone has suffered, whether there is justice according to Job’s definition, according to the system of reward and punishment. Instead, God offers Job an opportunity to see – see the creation, first and foremost – from God’s point of view. And what happens when Job is invited by God to see the creation from God’s point of view? My seminary professor Ellen Davis says that “this God’s eye view of the world plays havoc with Job’s notion of the way things ought to be.” Job thinks the world is or wants the world to be sensible and predictable. Not too hard for people to figure out. Job wants things neat, and tidy, and understandable. And manageable. Under control – if not Job’s control, than at least God’s control. What Job learns, as God points out the way things look to God, is that it’s not about control and it never has been. What Job learns is that when God created the world that God created, the universe and all of its creatures, God figured out that it doesn’t work in the neat and orderly way the creation might have worked – if all of the creatures weren’t in the creation. God learns early on that the creatures will do what the creatures will do – like eat of the only thing that God told those first humans not to eat. As Ellen Davis says in her book Getting Involved with God, “Job is convinced that his moral innocence should have warded off disaster, because he believes that the world is a manageable place run by a demanding but nonetheless predictable God who owes the righteous a good time.” Finding out – from the source – that this is not so is a shock to Job. How God points this out is by showing Job a couple of things. One is the reality of being the creator – were you there at the foundations? “From whose womb did the ice come, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven,” God asks. “Who has the wisdom to number the clouds?” Job knows that he is not the answer to these questions, and that is part of it. The other part is Job’s realizing, with God’s prodding, the extravagance of creation. This extravagance shows itself this way: in rain where there are no living things, in creatures like the ostrich, the Leviathan, the Behemoth, those creatures who have no particular use but who nonetheless please God, in all of God’s prodigality and extravagance. All of this has to shift how Job sees things. Ultimately, he will have to let go of his old way of seeing and start to live into a new way of understanding the world.
As Ellen Davis puts it, “What does all this mean for Job’s case? Job has long clung to his ‘integrity’, by which he meant being responsible within his own social sphere. But now that God has given this guided tour of the creation, the whole project of human integrity looks different. It means fitting into a design vastly bigger and more complex than Job ever imagined. What God says, in effect, is this: ‘Look away from yourself, Job; look around you. For a moment see the world with my eyes, in all its intricacy and wild beauty. The beauty is in the wildness; you cannot tame all that frightens you without losing the beauty.’” That is, Job is finally seeing the big picture. And as a result of the big picture what Job learns, as Ellen Davis puts it, is that
'only those who relinquish their personal expectations can live in peace.' Only those who let go of the idea that the universe is neat and orderly and controllable, by human beings or by God. Only those who realize that there is a much bigger picture, and that we humans can’t and don’t necessarily or always see it – and therefore our view is limited.
Job learns all of this because of the kind of teacher God is – showing Job the way when Job wouldn’t have found his way there himself. And this is where our gospel comes in. Jesus is this kind of teacher too – showing his disciples the way, the way to a life lived more fully in God’s presence. And today we see, in a familiar teaching, that Jesus too is asking his followers, again, to relinquish their own personal expectations – just like God does of Job.
We have this story where the disciples, once again, confuse what it means to be a follower of Jesus with what it means to be in the world. They think, mistakenly, that it is the same. Jesus knows that it is not. Jesus tells them this: You know that the rulers among the Gentiles –those who are considered great – lord it over them and even act as tyrants among them. This isn’t the way to greatness, Jesus tells them. He says, “But it is not so among you.” Your values are not to be the world’s values. There are higher expectations for you. You are to behave differently, to live differently. And here’s the crux of it: whoever wishes to become great among you must be servant of all. Greatness doesn’t mean sitting at my right hand and my left; greatness means following me, Jesus tells them. It means getting your ego out of the way. It means opening yourself up to deeper connection to God. It means understanding that we, as followers of Christ, are to see things differently. It’s not about having the position of privilege or getting the goods; it’s not about getting it easy by following Jesus. Discipleship will mean more trouble, not less – there’s an important thing to learn, which the twelve don’t really figure out until Jesus is no longer with them. It’s not about personal power – it’s about personal giving. It’s not about being great according to the world, it’s about being great in the eyes of God. And these are very different things. And assuming our vision – human vision - is God’s vision is a mistake, one that the disciples make just like Job does. Both learn differently.
Both Job and the twelve, in these lessons today, get the opportunity to see as God sees, to see as Christ sees. For Job, we know it changes his understanding of how the world works. For the twelve, who have a hard time grasping what Jesus is trying to get them to understand, what they eventually learn and what we know is that seeing things from God’s point of view is the only way that what Jesus says makes sense, that to be great one must be servant of all. He tells them – he tells us - that ‘the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.’ I am your example, he tells them. Learn from me that it’s not about greatness according to the world, it’s about something else. God says to Job, learn from me that it’s not about the world working the way you think it should work, it’s about something else. And this doesn’t make sense if we’re using the values we are given by our culture, just as it didn’t make sense if Job was using the values of his culture and the disciples were using the values of theirs. The teachings of God, the teachings of Jesus make sense only when we get a glimpse of how things look from God’s point of view. Ultimately, this vision is freeing, as we will see in Job when his story comes to an end next Sunday. As we will see in the disciples most clearly in the Acts of the Apostles, when they have to take what Jesus has taught them and put it into practice on their own. And as we might ourselves see, if we take seriously what we learn from God through Christ Jesus.
A different way of seeing: that’s what stewardship is about.