The Greatest Story Ever Told

 

The Greatest Story Ever Told

 

Job 38:1-7, (34-41)

God challenges Job 

38:1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind:

38:2 "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?

38:3 Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

38:4 "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.

38:5 Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it?

38:6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone

38:7 when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

38:34 "Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you?

38:35 Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, 'Here we are'?

38:36 Who has put wisdom in the inward parts or given understanding to the mind?

38:37 Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens

38:38 when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?

38:39 "Can you hunt the prey for the lion or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,

38:40 when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in their covert?

38:41 Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God and wander about for lack of food?

 

Some of us are old enough to remember a major motion picture from 1965 called “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” about the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. The epic film had an absolutely amazing cast, including the following thespians: Max von Sydow, Charlton Heston, Dorothy McGuire, Pat Boone, Jose Ferrer, Van Heflin, Martin Landau, Angela Lansbury, David McCallum, Janet Margolin, Roddy McDowall, Sal Mineo, Donald Pleasance, Sidney Poitier, Claud Rains, Telly Savalas, John Wayne, Shelley Winters, Robert Blake, Jamie Farr, David Hedison, and Robert Loggia. If you’re keeping score, that is just about any actor people in 1965 had heard of! It’s still an impressive list, although many of them have joined this movie’s “sequel” in heaven, by now. Oh, and one of the writing team for the screenplay was poet Carl Sandburg. I guess if you wanted to make a movie about the Son of God, you had better round up just about every top person in Hollywood, to do it justice. Sandburg was a nice touch, given the main text for the screenplay authors was the Bible. Was it a good film? Yes, according to most critics, earning five Oscar nominations, but none for “Best Picture,” which was won by “The Sound of Music.” Even Jesus can’t beat a good musical, I guess? At least the movie featured an A-list actor—Max von Sydow—as Jesus, instead of Ernest Borgnine or Robert Blake…

 

I admit that I’m stealing the movie’s popular title, though, for this sermon, which touches on a parable we find in the Bible about a man named Job. Some may argue that Job was a real man, and that the Bible is giving us history here, but I severely doubt it. This reads exactly like a Jewish parable story, and the various lessons it imparts are certainly parabolic, in nature. Why distort it with a bizarre insistence that it is “real?” I DO think, though, that the parable should be counted at least among the “greatest stories ever told,” given the study I have given it in my ministry, and the great number of articles and books that have been written about it by scholars and commentators down through the centuries. (One of my favorites was written by Rabbi Harold Kushner, who also wrote the popular book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” which certainly follows the Job narrative to a “T.” 

 

The story of Job is bizarre, but relatively simple: God and “the devil” are having a debate about what a “good man,” Job, will do if he loses all of the things he treasures, including family and loved ones, and his health. Will he keep his faith? Or will he curse God and die? You can guess which one “the devil” believes will happen. In the parable, God gives “the devil” permission to do his worst to Job, but not to take his life. The loses of loved ones and health throw Job into a tailspin, and a small cache of “friends” come to his aid. The advice they give him is like some of the counsel we get from our peers—randomly helpful, but often with little understanding of the personal pain and complexity of our situation. Some of it even borders on trite platitudes or cliched, pop-psychology. In Job’s case, this “counsel” includes the suggestion that HE is responsible for his plight, possibly due to some “sin” he has committed against God. The remedy? “Curse God and die.” Now, that’s helpful, isn’t it? Maybe you’ve had similar “helpful” advice from people like Job’s friends, all of whom mean well, but who just don’t have the class of wisdom needed to help us understand why “bad” things happen to “good” people. Of course, our judgment on what is “bad” versus what may be natural occurrences, and what it means to be a “good” person may be quite lacking, at least in the views of the Divine. Since this is a parable, these factors are “given” by the story, itself: “bad” includes the loss of family, wealth, and good health; and Job is a “good man” simply because he fears God. We can probably agree that “bad” things like such personal losses, especially the painful health crises described in the story, are indeed “bad” for Job, but might retreat a bit on “good” meaning merely fearing God. We certainly see people in our time who “fear God,” but who manifest few traits we consider “good.” This judgment appears quite limited. Nonetheless, this is what we have to go on.

 

The most helpful parts of the Job story are revealed during Job’s “arguments” with God. They take the form of personal “court scenes” wherein Job puts his case before the Divine. Job is sure he hasn’t committed any “sin” that would put him in such personal jeopardy, but pleads his case logically and rationally. Ultimately, he calls upon God to “come clean” as to why these things have happened to him. 

 

The question as to why bad things happen to supposedly “good” people is universal, especially when most of us would characterize ourselves as “good,” while “bad things” is somewhat more subjective. For one person, whose life has been little challenged by negative circumstances, a dead car battery is “bad,” while to another, a sudden death in the family or a life-threatening health diagnosis is. Either way, we tend to ask this question as part of working out our situation. Even Jesus faces this during his ministry, as recorded in the Gospels in Luke 13. “Some present” ask Jesus about why Pontius Pilate was allowed to kill some “Galileans” who had been worshiping God. Jesus answers:

 

 Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” 

 

Jesus is addressing forgiveness in this case, but puts the “worse offenders” argument to rest by bringing up another random, tragic event—the fall of the tower of Siloam that killed 18 people. Is Jesus telling us that the “bad” things that may happen to us have nothing to do with God’s “causality”? It appears so. Of course, Jesus also gave counsel that “What we so, we will also reap,” which can mean that we are quite capable of bringing calamity upon ourselves, and when we do, we have no promise that God will keep our self-induced peril from occurring. I think it is human nature, though, to HOPE that the Divine can somehow keep bad things from happening to GOOD people and met out the appropriate punishment to those we consider BAD. Thankfully, this simplistic formula is apparently not how things “work.” Don’t we get just as upset when “bad” people seem to have “good” things come their way? In the former case, I confess to struggling when visiting parishioners in the hospital who were suffering from the obvious consequences of long-term abuse of alcohol, drugs, or tobacco, only to question their pastor, “Why is God doing this to me?” It took me a while to wake up to the fact that this is a coping mechanism at work, and part of how we process life-changing/life-threatening occurrences. Job’s arguments with God demonstrate this human trait.

 

After Job lays his case before the Lord, as this famous text says, God “answers Job from out of the whirlwind.” Another whole sermon, or even several, could be written on this verse, alone. Whose whirlwind? Isn’t what we face in life often like a whirlwind? For many in Florida, the Carolinas, and Georgia, the “whirlwind” was a literal storm, or two, and their lives now need a different kind of “straightening up.” However, for most of us, this whirlwind is a metaphorical description of the chaos that may result in our psyche or our soul, as we people of faith would say. Things just get blown around, and disorientation is the word of the day, too often. When that happens, I can almost hear my brain mocking my car’s GPS voice: “Recalculating…” When things come at us from “out of the whirlwind,” we need time and space to “recalculate,” don’t we? I think there are “Psalm 22-like” lessons we can extrapolate from the Job story, lessons which we examined in last week’s sermon: 1.Scream your frustrations in God’s direction, rather than at your spouse or by kicking the dog; 2.Confess your own “sins” and take serious stock of your culpability in what you are experiencing; 3.Remind yourself of our belief that God DOES love us and desires to redeem and transform us; and 4.Move from anger to an attitude of gratitude and confidence in God’s willingness to restore us. The Job story quite well demonstrates this progression, adding, of course, the chorus of well-meaning friends who give advice meant to shorten his anguish, but that instead offers truncated, trite “answers” that get Job nowhere. Job does the Psalm 22 thing by taking his grief and gripes directly to God, but not in anger as much as like a competent lawyer before a “Supreme Court” level judge. In this “answer from the whirlwind,” God sort of acknowledges the validity of Job’s case by pulling rank on him. (When you’re losing, lash out! Isn’t that what modern politics teaches us?) IS God just “lashing out,” though?

 

I don’t think so. “God” gives this wonderful speech (at least in the mind of the parable’s author) designed to remind Job that God IS in charge, but lovingly so. Job’s reactions to his own plight and the case he puts before God comes up short in that they fail to acknowledge God’s benevolence over all of the created order, and God’s willingness to save us. We Christians should understand the magnitude of this last fact, given the sacrifice made by Jesus Christ on our behalf. How amazing it is that the “God of the whirlwind” who “laid the foundation of the earth” gives a hoot about little old me and you. Of course, God gives far more than a “hoot”—God gave the world Jesus. The intimacy of the Almighty is a marvelous fact to hear and behold. God DOES care for each of us, and not merely as an item on God’s agenda; we ARE God’s agenda. Period. This is the place where I fear many believers ere in forming a theology that makes humans just one small element in God’s “in” basket, instead of accepting the Bible’s message that we ARE God’s whole agenda. “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son that we should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Isn’t this “whirlwind” enough of a statement for us to see it? If we acquiesce to a theology that posits that we “exist only to please God,” and that our doctrines and behaviors should be designed to appease the Almighty, we are missing the whole meaning of both the Job parable AND the gospel of Jesus Christ. In fact, God has “chosen to exist” precisely to reconcile and love humanity into ITS full existence! (This is a central point of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology, namely that God chooses to exist “for others,” and that we are made in THIS divine image—we exist “for others,” too, not just for ourselves.)

 

The second significant point of the Job story is how important it is that we regularly take stock of our own life, and of what is motivating us to do what we do. If we have moved too far afield from the “for others-ness” of the image of God in us, we are in danger of self-destruction brought about by selfishness. Then it’s time to “recalculate” and get back on course. This “taking stock” also involves reminding ourselves of who GOD is, and of how passionately God desires to meet us in the midst of life’s challenges in order to support and heal us, not judge us. There’s an old bumper sticker chestnut that says, “Feeling separated from God? Guess who’s moved…” Trite, but helpful in this instance. In the love and grace of Jesus Christ, God is forever moving in OUR direction; are we accepting of this affection, or are we backing away, either out of fear, or FOR fear that we somehow aren’t “worthy” of it? Job’s story reminds us that if we feel cut off from God, we’re probably the ones holding the scissors. 

 

One final lesson from Job is about how we take the advice of well-meaning friends. We all have friends or family who want to solve all of our problems, or at least explain why we have them. Again they mean well, but their advice is mostly overblown and under-informed. If you need good counsel, see someone trained as a counselor, be it a pastor or therapist, with the latter being the “go to” in cases of psychological distress. Still, the lesson is that our trusted friends MEAN well. The best friends are the ones who simply walk with us through what we’re facing, often without uttering a word. One of my favorite stories is about a man who keeps inviting a good friend to go to church with him to hear his “wonderful pastor” who gives such great sermons. The friend finally agrees to accompany his friend to church, and upon hearing the pastor, judges that he’s really a poor speaker, and that his sermon wandered all over the place. At lunch after the service, he asks the man, “Tell me what you see in your pastor and his messages?” The man answers, “You know, he sat with me in the hospital and held my hand for hours and hours, as my wife lay dying. I’d walk across hot coals to hear him preach.” Job could have used a friend like that. And so could we all. Amen.