By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
October 28, 2012
The Book of Job, Chapter 42
Job ends on a bizarre, uncomfortable note. God “rewards” Job by giving him NEW wealth, NEW property, most bizarrely, NEW CHILDREN. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or even a biblical scholar, to step back and say, “Wait a minute.” This is a reward? New children can be wonderful and beloved, but they can’t possibly make up for children who’ve died. Is this how God thinks?
The short answer is, no, this isn’t how God thinks. Nor does God make bets with Satan about us human beings and allow Satan to torture us to test our faith, which is the opening premise of the Book of Job. Whole belief systems have been built up to justify or to explain these more unpleasant and disturbing aspects of the Book of Job, and those belief systems are WRONG. They are built on a heresy. Let me explain what a heresy is. A heresy is a false belief about God. So of course to build a theology on a heresy is wrong. But the other side of it is, we all tend to be heretics. We all over-emphasize one belief about God at the cost of under-emphasizing other aspects of God’s nature. That’s what’s happened here: an over-emphasis on one aspect of belief has caused us to lose our hope in God. And that’s heresy.
Here’s the heresy that these false beliefs about God are built on. The heresy is to take the Bible literally.
That’s right. Taking the Bible literally is a heresy. This may shock some of you, but the plain, on-it’s-face fact is that the bible isn’t MEANT to be taken literally in every case. The Bible never CLAIMS that it is to be taken literally. There is no place anywhere in the Bible that it is written that this is the literal Word of God. Now, the Muslim Quran DOES claim to be the literal Word of God, that it is word-for-word from God’s mouth to Mohammed’s ear. But the Jewish and Christian Bible makes no such claim. But for whatever reason, some Christians have for centuries maintained that the Bible is literally, word-for-word, right in every aspect of history and science and that it fully explains God’s perspectives and ways without any flaw, deviation, or contradiction, WHEN THAT IS SELF-EVIDENTLY NOT TRUE.
Here’s something we must understand about the Bible. When we open the Bible, it’s like we’ve walked into a library. It has historical books, and theology books, and even a type of self-help book. It has letters and histories and poetry, but it also has novels—even fiction novels. And that’s what Job is—a fiction novel. And as with all fiction, we aren’t meant to take the FACTS literally, but to seek the deeper meaning. It is this deeper meaning that’s the point of Job. It’s this deeper meaning that caused the Jews to decide Job was a holy book. It is this deeper meaning that was inspired by God and makes it worthy for us to study as scripture.
Job was not a real person. God didn’t make a bet with Satan to see if Job would stay faithful when tested. His children who were killed, as well as the new children we hear about at the end of the story, are not real people.
But, as the God and Satan characters in Archibald MacLeish’s JB says, there’s always a Job. Often several million at any given time—people who’ve suffered terrible hardship and tragedy, who have been dealt a terrible hand in life, who’ve lost someone they love or everything they own or had terrible things happen to them, and they want to know why.
Sometimes you and I are Job. And that’s what makes the story of Job true, and that’s what makes it the Word of God.
When you and I are Job, then we have to interpret God’s word and God’s will not through a book, no matter how inspired it is, but through the lens of our own experience. But Scripture helps us understand our experience, and to arise out of the depths without committing the ultimately heresy, which is to lose hope in God.
Losing hope in God is not a heresy because it’s breaking the rules. It’s a heresy because we are lost unless we have hope in God. It’s a heresy because God wants us to hope in Him, and actually we need to hope in Him: because there will be times when things look so bleak, and dark, hopeless, for ourselves and for the world, that we can see no solution except a supernatural solution, no solution except that there is a good, loving God, who is larger than the world we live in, larger than what you and I can do, larger than what humanity can and can’t do; a God who has the power to do what it looks like just can’t be done. A God who knows the world is wounded, and not only longs to heal it, but can and will heal it.
When we are Job, we don’t need a God of justice. Things have gotten beyond that. When we are Job, we need a God of redemption.
When I was a kid, I’d finish a short green bottle of coke, then hop on my bike and ride up to the local five and dime store to return the bottle to get 5 cents back. I was redeeming the bottle. I guess the company reused the bottle, maybe melted it down or washed it out, and somebody else eventually drank coke out of it. That was redemption. I didn’t get the original value when I returned the bottle–after all it was 15 cents and I was only getting 5!–but it wasn’t being thrown away either. I was taking something useless and the company was making it useful again.
That’s what redemption means. Redemption means that things are broken in the world, but God doesn’t throw them away. God fixes them. Redemption means the world is sick, but that God can heal the sickness.
But it means more than that: it means that God uses what’s broken to fix the world.
When I was a teenager, my mother was diagnosed with a terrible mental illness. It made her terrible to live with. She was angry, vicious, manipulative, fearful, lonely, and sad. The medications they put her on in the ‘70s never seemed to work, and now we know they may have made things worse. Ultimately, she committed suicide. It was the week after my daughter, our first child, was born.
For years, both living with her and in the aftermath of her death, I had (and still have) lots of questions that don’t have answers, including the big ones: Why was her life so terrible? And where did she go after she died?
It seemed to me that as a mentally ill person, mom couldn’t help the way she was. But at the same time, I felt, and still believe, she could have done more to control her behavior than she often did. I was, and am, angry that she treated my dad, my sister, and me so badly when we tried so hard to help her.
On the other hand, I also know we grew tired and resentful, and often just avoided dealing with her and her neediness. I have felt ashamed of that.
And I wonder about God. Why did God allow her to be that way? And what about life after death? Can God hold her responsible for all the awful things she said and did when actually so much of it was beyond her control? And anyway, ultimately, isn’t it true that as bad as she made life for us, it was much worse for her—literally hell on earth. Just beyond the ravages of the disease itself, there were experiences in her past, in her family history, that were terrible, heart-breaking, and tragic. Is there no hope for my mother?
Now there are all kinds of theological ways to think about this that don’t help much. For instance, if God can’t save us unless we first make a “decision” to come to Christ, then my mom’s afterlife is in trouble, because as a mentally-ill person, her ability to make a decision was sorely constrained.
After all, she was sick.
And according to scripture, so is the world. The central problem of the world, according to both the Old and the New Testaments, is the world’s brokenness. The world is damaged, broken, sick. Sometimes it is as crazy as my mom. Quite possibly the world is dying. But scripture also calls us to believe in the Tikkun Olam, the Healing of the World. God loves the world and the people in it. Tikkun Olam means this troubled world can (and by God’s grace shall) be healed, and in fact that’s God’s work in the world—what we Presbyterians call “grace,” God’s love that embraces us and saves us in spite of our flaws, sins, and shortcomings—in spite of our decisions. God redeems my mom, you and me, and the world, not because we decided God should, but because God has decided God should. God has decided to heal the sickness of the world.
We call that healing of the world’s sickness Redemption. Redemption means that things get broken but God doesn’t throw them away–God fixes them. It’s the essential ingredient in the world in which we live. And it’s God’s work.
The last chapter of Job is an attempt to claim the restorative power of God’s redemptive love, the power of the Tikkun Olam. It’s an attempt to say, God will make everything better. It’s a pretty ham-fisted attempt, no doubt. But it’s of a piece with other ways the Old Testament tries to say the same thing: that God’s people will return to the Promised Land, that the deserts will blossom and bloom, that the sword will be beaten in a plowshare and spears into a pruning hook, that they will neither hurt nor destroy in all God’s kingdom, that a little child will lead them. The only way the world would ultimately get better would be for God to dramatically and definitively intervene to save us from ourselves. As much as we wish we’d see that amazing redemption in the world right now, it only rarely happens: but we can certainly be sure of it in the future. But even more important, we HAVE to believe in it, because if we’re left to our own devices, that healing will never happen. It can only happen if God in Person intervenes to redeem us, to heal the world.
What we believe as Christians is that that’s what God has done. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus embody redemption in its most powerful form. If Jesus was in fact God, then God has in person taken on our human frailty to show His solidarity with us in our need, our suffering, and also in our hopes and possibilities.
If Jesus was in fact God, then our nailing Him to the cross was an act of apocalyptic proportions. None of those who did it were bad people by their lights–in their own ways, the Romans, the Sanhedrin, the Disciples, Judas, all thought they were doing the right thing. But they killed God. How could humanity stand after that?
We stand because Jesus rose. It was the ultimate act of human brokenness (something that must be said with great humility in the light of so many other acts of human brokenness since then, the Holocaust, genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans, God knows what)– but God turned it around, completely, and turned it into our salvation. God turned our apocalyptic act on its head, completely undermined it’s meaning, and used it to redeem us.
That’s the essence of redemption. God doesn’t just take what’s wrong with us and make it better. God actually uses what’s wrong with us TO make things better.
And that’s how we continue to practice redemption in the fallen world. That’s how I’ve tried to understand my mom’s illness and death. Many of us ministers can point to some thing or event or person in our lives that was broken, and we wanted it fixed, and that is in some way why we entered the ministry. For me, it is my mom. I’ve sought to use that experience as a way to be a bit more empathetic to the suffering of others, especially the mentally ill and their families. And I hope that in the process I’ve helped a few people along the way, and used her struggles as way to make the world a better place. It hardly makes up for or explains away her suffering. I’d never say, “God made my mother suffer that way so it could be a blessing to others.” That’d be heresy, too. But since I believe in redemption, I know that God can and does take the terrible experiences of life and use them in a way that facilitates the healing of the world. So that gives me the hope and assurance to keep believing that by telling my mother’s story God is using that wound to heal the world, to touch and by God’s grace change other people’s lives for the better. By God’s grace, my mother and I have a chance to participate in the healing power of the resurrection right here and right now in the world.
As to the state of mom’s life after death—that’s God’s business, not mine. But God loved her, and God loves her. My hope is not in my actions or in hers, but in God’s love, God’s redemption, and God’s ultimate healing of the sickness of us all. My hope—and ours—is in God, for God loves us and will yet save us.
So I have much reason to hope. As do we all. As does the world.