Thomas J Parlette
“Job’s Complaint”
Job 23: 1-9, 16-17
10/10/21
A few years ago, the English comedian and actor Stephen Fry, who is a self-declared atheist, was interviewed by Irish broadcaster Gay Byrne. At one point, Byrne said to Fry, “What if it’s all true, and you walk up to the pearly gates, and are confronted by God. What will Stephen Fry say?”
And Fry responded, “Bone cancer in children; what’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world where there is such misery that’s not our fault? He then added a second question he’d an answer to: “Why should I respect a God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?”
Well, that segment of the interview was soon posted on YouTube, where, within days, it was viewed over 5 million times. Not surprisingly, the responses to the clip ranged from admiration to outrage, with the head of Ireland’s Presbyterian Church branding Fry as “spiritually blind.” Fry later apologized for any offense he might have caused and said he wasn’t referring to any specific religion. He explained that he was merely saying things that many better thinkers than he had said over the centuries.(1)
Many of us have likely had similar thought and questions. Just imagine if you could be transported to heaven for an hour to talk face to face to God – with the assurance that God would answer one question for you. What question would you ask? Would you ask for the winning lottery number? Or perhaps when the Vikings might win the Super Bowl? Or would you ask something a little meatier? Like…
Why am I suffering from this cancer?
Why are some people capable of child abuse?
Why can’t we have wisdom when we’re young and could really benefit from it?
Why must we have earthquakes, hurricanes and wildfires?
Why the endless violence in the Middle East?
Why the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide or the Khmer Rouge slaughter of millions?
Why?
There really is no limit to the questions we’d like to ask God, and not just out of idle curiosity. Many of us experience some pain or grief to the human condition. We’re invested in the questions we’d like to ask, and, we think God’s answers might help us deal with what we cannot avoid.
Questions – specifically complaints – that’s what’s on Job’s mind this morning. He has never sinned in his life, and yet God has seemingly punished him like this. It makes no sense to Job. “Why?”, he asks.
Our passage for today comes from chapter 23, which is part of a longer section that runs through chapter 24. Job’s friends have arrived and try to comfort him in his misery. But in all honesty, they fail miserably. For 20-some chapters Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar take a tag team approach to make sense of Job’s suffering. They pretty much repeat each other’s arguments – “Job, you must have sinned somewhere along the line, you must repent, for God punishes the wicked and your guilt deserves punishment.” Nice friends. They don’t offer much in the way of comfort; they just point their fingers accusingly at Job.
But Job stands his ground. He maintains his innocence. But he also laments that there’s no place where he can put his case before God to receive a verdict of “Not Guilty.” He says, “Oh, that I knew where I might find him… I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me.”
In other words, Job wants his hour with God at the pearly gates. He wants God to answer a question for him. And Job seems confident that if he could only get such an audience, he’d be acquitted.
When we read the whole book of Job, of course, we find that, while God does eventually respond to Job, God never really answers Job’s questions – but more on that next week.
Isn’t that how it is for us with the many questions we’d to ask God? God is simply not going to answer them – no matter how good the questions are. Stephen Fry is unlikely to have his questions answered, and we’re unlikely to have ours answered either.
You might remember a TV show called Joan of Arcadia, that was on CBS from 2003-2005. Unfortunately, it is not available to stream on any platform I can find, although you can find clips on YouTube. It was one of the few shows that actually took God seriously. The show revolved around a teenage named Joan who hears message from God. Initially Joan thinks she can’t be hearing from God, but eventually she learns to trust the voice and follow God’s instructions – but not without some questions, which, of course, God does not answer.
I do want to make a distinction here. God does answer prayers – but not questions. When we pray, we ask God to help us, to meet a need. Questioning God is something a little different. God will answer prayers, but will not answer questions.
Back to Joan of Arcadia – While the series was still running, Barbara Hall, the show’s executive producer explained, “In trying to write God, I obviously don’t know what God is thinking. On the show, God says he won’t answer any direct questions because he chooses not to explain what is going on, because God is a mystery. The show is really a lot about posing theological and philosophical questions and not about answering them.”(2)
And that’s how it often is for us as well. We can pose all kinds of questions, but if we’re waiting for God to answer them, we may have to wait a lifetime. That silence – that absence – can be maddening. The poet W.H. Auden once said that, “Our dominant experience of God today is of God’s absence, of God’s distance.”(3) That is true for many people these days, as it was for Job so many years ago. All Job knows is that in spite of being upright and faithful to God, terrible troubles still came upon him. He has no idea why, and when he complains, when he tries to get God to answer his questions, he gets nothing. Silence. Job is left to assume that God does not care to answer – or worse, perhaps God is not even listening.
Yes, we find within ourselves much empathy with Job on this point. In his essay, God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis describes how we tend to deal with God these days:
“In ancient times, people approached God as an accused person approaches a judge. But in modern times, the roles have reversed. We put ourselves on the judge’s bench, and God is in the dock, or in court as a defendant, as it were. If God should offer a reasonable defense for being a God who permits war and poverty and disease – well, we’re ready to listen. The trial might even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that we put ourselves on the bench and expect God to answer us.”(4) That’s what Stephen Fry wanted to do - put God in the dock, on trial, to get some answers to that question “Why.”
But let’s not forget that we know more than Job. We know that God is still there throughout this whole story. God is allowing these horrible things to happen as a test. Job doesn’t know that. He didn’t get to see that opening scene in God’s heavenly throne room when God and Satan made that wager about his faithfulness. That means that what may seem to Job as God’s indifference is really God’s restraint to allow the test of Job’s faith to continue. It’s not that Job needs a date in small claims court to trumpet his complaint against God, but that God needs someone like Job to stand the test and still trust in God.
And that is what Job ultimately does. Though he is filled with a sense that he is suffering unjustly and that God will not give him a fair hearing to plead his case, he does not lose his faith, and eventually he receives a response from God.
In the end, Job’s story is a faith story, it is about trust. We might generally describe faith as a movement toward God that goes beyond evidence or reason. Faith takes us to a place where language bends and the best we can do is jump for metaphor and analogy. Job is in such a place, trying to find words for his bitterness. He is going through a long dark tunnel in which his prayers seem trapped, and he is unable to get an answer from God. Yet, in the longer view of his life, in what he had seen and heard and felt before the troubles came upon him and what he would see and hear and feel later – he had found and would find again, that faith is not forever unsupported – only that in some of the deepest valleys, faith is all we have to keep us going.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”(5)
Living the questions themselves, living the questions and the complaints now – that’s what Job is doing.
The Quakers have something that they call “queries”, a series of questions used for individual and collective reflection, spiritual growth and prayer. Historically at least, one purpose of queries was to check how members of the fellowship were upholding the already agreed upon testimonies.
Quaker Martin Grundy tells of one experience: “The most recent query we discussed came at the end of a rather tedious, long-winded, not particularly well-grounded, meeting for business. The query we were considering was simply, “How do we recognize what we are called to be obedient to?” As people spoke to it, the silence deepened and lengthened between speakers. Finally, the speaking ceased altogether, and we were wrapped together in quietness and love. The clerk ended the meeting, but we were loath to leave. We were in the presence of God, and found it good.”(6)
In the end, perhaps that’s what we should expect from our questions and complaints for God – not answers, but a dialogue with life and the experience of God’s presence in our daily life. Perhaps we should expect not answers but faith. Faith to keep trying. Faith to keep believing that God is still there listening, sitting with us in the silence. That’s where we all find ourselves sometimes – needing faith to live the questions and the complaints, while God works things out.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Homileticsonline, retrieved Sept 20th, 2021.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
