Job and the Hiddenness of God
Job 23: 1-9,16-17 (Inclusive)
1 Then Job replied: 2 I am still bitter in my complaint- God's hand is heavy, despite all my groaning.
3 If only I knew where to find the Almighty, so, I could approach the Judgment Seat!
4 I would make my case to God, and expound my best arguments in my defense.
5 But I would also benefit by hearing the answers, and get a grip on what is behind all this.
6 Would God get on a high horse in debating with me? No, God would give me the chance to state my case!
7 There an upright person could make such a convincing case that I would be delivered forever from my Judge.
8 But if I go east, God isn't there. If I go west, I find nothing.
9 When God is working up north, I can see no one. when God turns south, I don't even catch a glimpse.
16 The Most High makes my heart sink, and makes my body shake in terror.
17 Even so, I'm not silenced by the darkness nor by the deep gloom that covers my face.
Thank you all! It’s always a pleasure to share the word of hope, even on if today that word may feel different. This week, our lectionary readings explore themes of suffering, and the pursuit of God. The Gospel passage, where Jesus says a rich man cannot enter heaven, challenges us to consider how our priorities align with the Kindom of God. Amos, the prophet, speaks of the wickedness of the rich who oppress the poor for financial gain. He urges us to seek the Lord and live. But what happens when we, like Job, are suffering and cannot find God? How do we seek God in the midst of poverty and oppression? These questions, raised by our readings but particularly Job, invite us to contemplate the complexities of faith and the human condition.
So, today we get to talk about my favorite book. I know, I say that a lot, but you can have a lot of favorites. No? Well, I like Job a lot. Job is one of the most profound books in the Bible, it is a part of what we call Wisdom literature and located in what we call the Old Testament; in addition scholars believe it is situated outside of the time of the Hebrew people, so Job worships Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew people, but isn’t Jewish, technically he is a Gentile. And we don't know the time of this book, scholars think it is before the period when the law was given, meaning the 10-commandments were enacted. Another theory is that there is no actual person that existed named Job, that it was written just to have a thought on the nature of what we call theodicy, the concept in the Bible of divine justice. Why do terrible things happen to innocent people? But was it a real person that this happened to? Is it just a drama? What is it? Quick side note, there will be a lot of hip-hop references today so… just know that…
The basic plot of Job is this, God is chilling in heaven, somehow holds some sort of heavenly court, he sees the enemy there, asks him, “what are you doing here?”, the enemy says one of my favorite lines in all of scripture “From going to and fro on the earth and from walking up and down on it.” I say this all the time to my family, and they always say, that’s what the devil says, and I say, well… it’s in the Bible.
Anyway, so then somehow God says “people are good, my man Job is really good” and the enemy says, “bet you he’s not so good if you mess with him” and God says… “bet!” And God literally gives permission for the enemy to touch Job’s belongings and his children, but not him, to see who would be right
Job loses his children and a bunch of his possessions but somehow is still faithful, kinda like Kendrick Lamar says in 6:16 in LA:
there’s opportunity when living with loss
and so Job lives with it but doesn’t curse God, and so God wins.
So, the enemy comes back, says “if you touch his life he will curse you” and God says… “bet!” and now Job gets sick and his wife leaves him, we don't know if she dies or leaves him, but we know Job is now somewhat terminally ill… all because of a bet… and then we get to the conversations in Job between Job and his friends. His friends are just trying to make sense of his life and what happened to him and console him and after all of that God doesn't answer Job’s complaints or demands and simply makes statements of God’s sovereignty and somehow Job accepts all the things and God gives Job double what he lost.
That is Job people. that is the book.
It isn’t a book that one easily deals with and isn’t one that is easily explained, so it is not an ideal book one would preach from on a Sunday, where we want to wrap things up nicely and quickly, that ain’t Job… but luckily this church doesn't need a simple preaching to strengthen our faith, and so here we are, on a random Sunday in October, talking about Job.
So now that you have the backdrop we can talk about what is happening here, in this text, here we are in the middle of Job’s argument with a friend of his. His friend is basically saying “listen man, people don't just suffer for no reason, there’s gotta be a reason, so you must have done something to deserve this” and Job is like “I didn’t do a thing” and now we get to this part where he is making his case. So now let us read scripture.
That was a lot, there is so much there, so let’s start with a time of conversation about the text, in groups look at the text we read and point out, What are two or three things that you notice when you read this text?
This is an interesting text for many reasons, chief among them the fact that this text literally deals with God being absent, apparently to Job. But Job feels like he is right and is looking for him so he can make his argument to the person he knows could answer him. And so, he is looking for God, “imma get back to that for the record”, but can’t find him, like the great Chicago poet Common said once in “Respiration” by Black Star:
I tried to call or at least beep the Lord but didn't have a touch-tone
It's a dog-eat-dog world, you gotta mush on.
That bar relates straight to this text. Job is like “I am looking for God but can’t find him but I guess I just gotta keep on keeping on.”
But the lectionary does us a disservice and takes out some intriguing lines from the text that add some context, let’s read what it says in the lines the lectionary leaves out.
10 But the Most High knows my movements and once I am tested, I will be as pure as refined. gold.
11 I have always followed closely God's path, I have maintained a straight and narrow course.
12 I have treasured God's commands, and prized the divine words in my heart.
13 Who can dissuade the unchangeable divinity? Divine acts flow from divine desires.
14 For God will complete what is destined for me, like God's mandates for all of us.
15 That is why I am so afraid to be in the sight of God, when I think of it, I am horror-struck.
So how does that change what we think? Does that add? Does that take away?
These lines add that there is a dual fear for Job, he can’t find him because he wants to talk to him but is afraid that if he is in God’s sight it wouldn’t go well because no one could convince the divine to change course, said best by Dr. Esther J. Hamori:
Moving directly from the inaccessibility of God in verse 9 to Job’s fear in verse 16, we could imagine—or even assume—that Job fears God’s absence. But those verses in between are blunt: Job laments that although he has been faithful, God is going to do whatever he wants regardless— “therefore I am terrified at his presence” (23:15). Job is in a bind. The only thing as terrible as God’s absence is God’s presence.
That adds so much, right, it adds these ideas about what could happen to him, and that he can't change God’s actions, but then even though he is terrified of God to be clear, he’s like, “nah, but I still will not be silenced by what is happening” and this is why this text is strong.
This text deals with the question that we ask, what happens when God is hidden or not to be found? It is not asking if that is the case, it actually says that is the case, whether it is Job then or Common recently, God remains hidden or feels hidden when we look for God to answer questions about why good people suffer.
And that is a reality, when we are going through the thick of it ourselves, or when we are experiencing it in the world, God feels far and distant, and even if we have the strongest faith, God feels far. Job’s faith seems pretty strong and yet he can’t find God at this moment, a low moment, of which he has no fault, in his life.
So, we're dealing with a few things here: the reality and the ontological truth that sometimes people who suffer are the righteous people who “shouldn’t” be suffering and why, if that is the case, does God feel absent.
Job presents the case of someone who is purely innocent, knows they're innocent, yet is forced to suffer because of divine injustice. God places a bet and throws Job as his winning piece in this grand game with the satan. What does that mean for us today? It means that God is hidden, feels hidden, and that the wicked feel like they win. Even though that might not be the truth in the end, it's sometimes the truth in our lived experiences at the moment, especially moments of suffering.
The question of this book, and the question of today, isn't where we can find God, because God is always and anywhere to be found. The question is: how do we deal with the hiddenness of God? How do we understand that those moments will come? How do we engage with the fact that while we're living this life, we won't always feel that God has our back?
Sure, I could say something about needing more faith or trusting that the Divine is always there and that God always has you. But we also need to understand that we can come to God in our moments of anger, complaint, fear, disappointment and come to God even when God seems absent. Job invites us to practice coming to God with all of who we are, just like the rapper JID says:
Lemme bear it all when I'm tellin' God, you know Imma rant when I talk to Jah.
That, being willing to go to God, bear it all, is in itself is a form of faith in God even if it isn’t answered or resolved. Our faith isn't always wrapping it up entirely in a bow neatly and saying, 'Hey, I'm angry, but you know what? I'm really not that angry because I know you're all good.' That's not the case, and also that doesn't always denote strength of faith, sometimes that’s a display of weaker Faith. People, God can handle our laments. God can handle our complaints.
But the reality is that sometimes God does indeed feel hidden. Like God isn’t there.
I struggle with moments like that all of the time. Recently it’s been a struggle for me to see the way that Black people live throughout the world. Everywhere I go, every time I take the train, it is Black people who are often at the bottom rung of society and I know we may not want to acknowledge that and think about that but it’s true. It is what birthed a theory called Afro-Pessimism, which at its core says that black death and suffering is the bedrock of the current world, so that is true. But on the other hand I am influenced by Black Liberation theory and Black liberative ideologies that say we will at some point see the world in a moment of Black Liberation, where all people of African descent are free to love and have prosperous fruitful lives, free of oppression and racism and harm. I am influenced by the women of the Combahee River Collective who said
If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
I live by that logic and work to bring about Black Liberation in my work and life. But how do I hold both of these in tension? the tension that I believe in Black Liberation as an ideology and what I do in my life but also understand that Afro-Pessimism is right that the like yasiin bey, then Mos Def, said:
“the length of Black life is treated with short worth”?
I was talking about this to a friend and what I'm seeing in my lived experience, and she said, “sometimes we just have to live in the chasm.” hmmm… live in the chasm. That's hard because we want solutions, we want to feel like the Divine can resolve things, we want to see the unjust suffer, we want to see the wicked lose and the good people win, the Mets to beat the Yankees, we wanted to see Kendrick defeat Drake. But the reality is that we have to learn to live in the chasm of life.
How do we continue to live a life while people in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria are being bombed? How do we live a life while 10,000 Haitians are being deported every week by a racist Dominican government? How do we live in a world where people in Sudan lack basic access to water because of the Civil War? How do we live in a city that is at the same time the richest in the world and yet can’t provide more than 60-day housing for people who have no money? We must somehow accept the fact that sometimes, and I would say most of the time, the righteous suffer unjustly.
The tension between Black Liberation and Afro-pessimism is similar to what we deal with when we engage with this scripture. We're dealing with the reality of God's absence and, at the same time, knowing that God is there. This tension, this idea of God's presence and absence, Job teaches us, is the discipline of living in the chasm. Living knowing that we may not get tidy answers to these profound questions.
Let me also say that we need to challenge this idea of righteous and unrighteous suffering. Suffering is an unpleasant fact. Suffering doesn't mean deserved or merited. Dr. Esther J. Hamori says:
The association between suffering and sin is problematic wherever it appears—in the Bible, and in various forms in modern religious discourse, including in Christianity. If we object to the association… We can recognize our discomfort and let that prompt us to question our own assumptions and to consider how we respond to people who are suffering.
That isn’t the religion of Jesus, or of Job. That's not the Christianity we grew up with, and that's not the Christianity that gets preached. Westernized Christianity has turned Christianity into a religion of the victor, an Imperial religion that means some people do suffer because they deserve it. But St. Paul says that we need to preach a crucified Christ, not a resurrected one. A Christ that is more identifiable with suffering than the one we often preach. We don't preach a poor Christ who was made to suffer unjustly, we prefer to preach a Christus Victor Christ. But we don't need to wrap everything up in a nice little package. There's strength and power in living in the chasm, in an unresolved state. Job is doing that for us, and so is NC rapper Rapsody, who said in a song called Faith:
For people that need healin', I share my truth and my problems.
Hope it might change your outcome even if it doesn’t solve 'em!
What does it mean to hold both black pain and black joy in the same place? What does it mean to hold both God's pain and God's joy? As hard as it is to conceive, Job challenges us to do it. It's understanding that this is a reality of life and being able to move from that reality with a faith that isn't imperialistic, seeking a nice tidy resolution, but rather a faith that is more vibrant and stronger because it can hold and handle both difficult and easy times.
Liberation theologian Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez says in his book about Job “On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent” that Job practices and displays a theology that is more akin to a theology of the poor than a theology of the rich.
Job’s religion is [religion that doesn't require interest] meaning it is given freely. He doesn't need material prosperity to maintain his trust in God… This [hardheadedness] gives testimony to the fact that his faith and behavior are not motivated by material compensation or reward. This is the language used by the poor. (my translation)
The poor, according to Gutierrez, exhibit in God what we might call a popular faith that is difficult for theologians to understand. The theology of the rich is one that always needs to benefit from faith, that if one is good, one must always receive blessings on blessings. The theology of the poor is one that says, 'I realize that this is my lot, but this lot is not the desire of God. And therefore, even though I have to live this life, it is not the only experience of life, and I know that it is not divinely ordered.' They echo what De La Soul say in “Days of our Lives.”
This is ‘MY LIFE’ Which is filled with bad minutes and good hours.
And, good months and bad years and with my peers.
According to Gutierrez, the difference between the faith of the rich and the faith of the poor is that the poor do not believe in private ownership of any one single thing. Suffering is not because God has chosen to punish them personally, but rather they understand the whole of creation to be a place that is controlled and led by God. The rich, on the other hand, always see everything as personalized. The suffering is personalized, the hiddenness is from them specifically. It's a very individualized concept of theology, whereas Gutierrez is saying that the poor have a more corporate understanding of theology. It's a way of saying ‘They Not Like Us.’ They, the rich, are not like us, the poor.
I said a lot, but I think the key takeaways for us here are that sometimes God will feel hidden when we suffer when we hold all of life. That our faith is not always displayed in trying to reconcile all the things but rather in continuing to come to God. we are having issues with what we are facing, still go to God, we do not like what we see in Gaza, go to God, we don't like the lot of the poor, go to God, don't ever stop going to God. Better said by theologian Dr. Madipoane Masenya:
While we have the courage to yell at God and pour out our frustrations about the injustices suffered in our midst, we should also do the same toward the pillars of the evil structures that, in most cases, are directly or indirectly responsible for the inequities in our midst. Whether Job's complaints ever reached the ears of the perpetrators of the injustices of the time is unknown.
We need to understand that God can handle our complaints. It is good news for us that Job could be very honest with God even when he couldn’t with his friends. These calls, these laments are forms of proof that God can handle our complaints, it isn’t wrong to complain to God. How do we navigate our relationship with God? Job gives us language to navigate that. Dr. Masenya says it best again:
“So huge and sovereign is this Sacred Other, who has become and continues to be the object of our yelling, anger, criticisms, and frustrations, that God remains patient with all those who wrestle with God in the midst of unjust suffering. If these sufferers persist in their steadfastness with God, they, like the biblical Job, will eventually say: "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you" (Job 42:5)”
Lastly, that Contemplation is a path to hold all of these things. Gutierrez says the language Job uses the language of contemplation which deepens and vitalizes our faith. He talks to God, not about God. Howard Thurman encourages us to go deeper into ourselves, and in that depth we find God’s voice. And sometimes times of unmerited suffering should encourage us to go deeper and deeper into ourselves, go deeper into a relationship with God, and there we can hold the joy and pain of life without being distraught. Contemplation helps us really deepen and believe what the African American proverb says:
“trouble don't last always.”
Let us pray.
