Rochester, MN UCC - "Were You There?" - Job 38:1-7
In Job’s story he is a righteous man who suffers terrible catastrophes: the loss of all his children, his possessions, and his health. Much of the book centers around Job and his friends trying to make sense of these catastrophes. His three friends all seek to defend God by seeking justifications for God’s actions- they are certain Job must have done something to deserve his fate. Yet Job insists that he has done nothing wrong and begins to accuse God of injustice and cruelty towards him.
At the end of the book, God condemns all three of Jobs friends, for not speaking what was right about Job. Job was telling the truth, he hadn’t done anything wrong; the disasters that befell him were not a result of his sin. But God does give a sort of answer to Job’s accusations of injustice and cruelty. Speaking from a whirlwind swirling before Job’s face, God asks who Job is to be questioning the God of all creation. “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” As merely a tiny part of God’s vast creation, whose very ability to think and speak and question comes from God, Job, as a human being, is not able to fathom the ways of God.
“Who are you to question the transcendent God,” may seem like small comfort to one going through a tragedy. Yet it is an approach that avoids looking for tidy answers where there are none- it avoids blaming ourselves for disasters we couldn’t have avoided. It also preserves hope for justice and righteousness in a world whose fallenness presents us with much unexplained tragedy. We can’t always make sense of the horrors of human existence- of our pain, our grief, our loss. Yet we have been promised that God’s love is triumphant in the end and that God’s grace is sufficient for the salvation of the world. Understanding that God's ways are above our ways, that will not always understand the workings of God, allows us to hold to these promises even in times of great pain. May we seek this Sunday to enter ever further into the mystery of God and to trust ever more firmly in God’s promises to us.
Rev. Andrew Greenhaw