Feeling Our Way in the Dark Job 23:1-9, 16-17, 2 Corinthians 4:7-10, 16-18

Last Sunday we were introduced to Job.
We read of this imaginary scene where God, sitting on the throne,
surrounded by a host of attendants,
is approached by hasatan, the Accuser, who proposes a test of Job’s mettle.
The Accuser questions Job’s motives for his faith and integrity,
for his unfailing adoration of God.
Might it be, the Accuser suggests, that Job is only being pious and good
so God will keep blessing him with prosperity?
Will Job’s loyalty to God crumble at the first hint of trouble?
We discussed how Job serves in the story as a representative of the best of humankind.
and how the success or failure of God’s whole plan of creation;
of God’s desire to be in a covenant relationship with humanity;
rides on how Job performs under the Accuser’s onslaught.
We noticed that while God is traditionally blamed
for too easily accepting the Accuser’s dare,
in fact God does limit what the Accuser can do to Job,
AND God bets the farm on Job,
trusting this fragile, mortal human being to withstand the Accuser’s test.
Job left us last week with this question,
“Can a person, a mere mortal human being, possess such incorruptible integrity,
that not even the worst life has to offer is able to shake it?”
[REPEAT]

This week we move from the outer edges of Job to its dark interior.
Scholars believe that the book of Job began as a folk tale
consisting of only the first two chapters in which Job loses all he has
and the last chapter where everything is restored.
This was a wisdom story, they believe, the kind of writing we find in Proverbs,
where righteousness is rewarded,
where Job is the supreme example of one who meets extreme hardship
with extreme endurance and is summarily blessed with even more prosperity
than he had first enjoyed.

But at some point in the history of this simple story
someone came along and was not satisfied.
This person was not content with the simple “reward” theology of the story
and began to probe deeper
It’s as though the author said, “OK, here’s the story of the patient sufferer we all know.
I want to know about the struggles that lie beneath the surface
of such a breathtaking example of faithful endurance.”
So the author of our present story of Job split the original folktale in two
and sandwiched between the two existing crackers of prose
a nasty, processed cheese spread of poetry.
He introduced three so-called “friends” of Job: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar,
who visit Job in his misery
and try to convince him to just confess to his sin and be done with it.
These “friends” even go so far as to tell Job, a grieving father,
that his children deserved death;
that even when he was prospering it was not because he was good,
but because God just hadn’t gotten around to punishing him yet.

The visits come in roughly three poetic cycles
and Job more or less answers each one,
doing his best to deflect the cruel blows the three deliver “for his own good.”
God doesn’t make mistakes, the three visitors all intone,
1 + 1 has got to equal 2, that’s all there is to it.
We know God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked,
and you are obviously being punished,
ergo, ipso facto, presto change-o,
YOU, my friend, MUST BE WICKED!

Our passage today comes near the beginning of the third cycle of speeches
by the three vultures of good will.
Job is near hoarse from making his case that he does NOT deserve what he’s gotten
and he retreats into himself, away from those who harass him.
In his exhaustion he goes looking for God.
This is remarkable.
Earlier Job has referred to God as the Oppressor, the Enemy,
but there is still a part of him unwilling to believe
that the God he has cherished all his life is really behind his suffering.
As harshly as God appears to have behaved toward Job,
Job cannot accept that the devastation he’s suffered is God’s final word.
While he may have indeed felt “the hand of God” upon him,
Job just can’t believe that what he has experienced reflects God’s true heart.

If only Job could visit God in God’s private chambers;
have a chance to present his case rationally and reasonably,
surely God would vindicate him in his integrity.

You’ve got to wonder if the Accuser isn’t getting a little nervous about now.
Provisioned with only an unshakable confidence in his own integrity,
and a long-established knowledge of God’s trustworthiness,
Job has nearly uncovered the Accuser’s plot.
He is THIS close to figuring out that what he’s going through
is only a TEST of the Federal Broadcast Emergency Alert System
and not a REAL emergency.
What’s happened to him is not by the hand of God,
but a test of the Accuser permitted by God to vindicate Job once and for all.

Still, as close as he gets to the truth,
Job can’t quite get beyond the veil of his own mortality.
As smart and as faithful and as stubborn as he is,
he is, after all only human – unable to know the mind of God.
So, in the absence of a personal Divine epiphany,
all Job can experience is fear and awe
and a desire in his helplessness for deep darkness to swallow him whole.

I was invited once to go on a tour of a West Virginia coal mine.
I was with a group of ministers in a seminar on the forces that have shaped Appalachia.
It felt like a school field trip and I was cracking jokes with the others
as we got in the elevator cage to take us several hundred feet straight down.
There was a light in the cage and we had lights on our helmets
and when we stepped out of the cage we were loaded on a tram
that carried us through a tunnel for about a quarter of a mile.
Our guide then turned off the tram light and asked us all to extinguish
the lights on our helmets.
We did.
Several of us let out an involuntary gasp.
The blackness was total; a complete absence of light.
Not even a stray photon penetrated to where we stood.
I couldn’t have seen a white rhinoceros in front of my face
much less my hand,
and nobody was cracking jokes anymore.

Such deep darkness is disorienting, confusing.
If Job couldn’t get God to hear his defense,
then he wished for such a darkness in which to hide himself from God.
But given who Job is, it’s only a fleeting wish.
If nothing else, Job understands what the Psalmist expresses in Psalm 139.
Speaking to God the Psalmist says, “Even the darkness is not dark to you,
the night is as bright as the day.”

So even though Job’s momentary impulse was to pull up a thick blanket of darkness,
forget about God and trying to be faithful to God, and just go to sleep,
his core identity was still wrapped up in his love of God and God’s love for him.
Despite all the evidence his “friends” presented to the contrary,
Job would not allow himself to sink into the tempting distortion
that God had turned God’s back on him.


The question Job presents us with today is this:
“Can anything separate me from God?
“Is there anywhere so dark or so distant that God is not present there?”

It’s not pessimistic to admit that no life is without its troubles.
Live long enough and each of us will take a stomach punch or two
that will leave us flat on our backs gasping for air.
Sometimes I may wonder why I have it worse than someone else,
but then I look around and there is always someone who has it worse than me.

Paul writes to his friends in Corinth about the afflictions he has endured
in living out his calling as an ambassador for Jesus.
Like Job’s friends, some in the Corinthian church have tried to make Paul a scapegoat,
blame Paul for bringing pain and disgrace upon himself.
But like Job, Paul’s confidence in his own integrity is unshaken.
He uses a simple but powerful image for his work.
“We have this treasure [the treasure of the good news of God’s love]
we have this treasure in clay jars.”
In other words, we are but human beings,
fragile creatures subject to cracking and chipping.
We are fragile, some more so than others,
but God, for some reason beyond our understanding,
has chosen to endow us with a purpose and give our egg-shell lives meaning.
Don’t assume, therefore, that if you suffer, or if you feel betrayed,
or if you get let down or disappointed,
that it nullifies your God-given meaning and purpose.
Sickness, pain, betrayal and disappointment simply reflect what we should already know
that skin and bone are subject to decay,
that human reason is limited, human endurance restricted.
The treasure is INSIDE.
The outer nature is wasting away, but the inner nature is being RENEWED each day.
So long as we do not lose heart.
Even in the midst of Job’s profound loss,
even when it seems like everything has gone dark,
Job refuses to sit down. He continues to feel his way,
He keeps his foot on the familiar path
and God’s promise in his heart
and looks with hope for that which cannot yet be seen.

1 Wharton, James, Job. Westminster Bible Companion, eds. Patrick D. Miller and
David L. Bartlett. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999, p. 4.
2 Ibid. p. 107.