“Everything happens for a reason.”

These are five of the cruelest words in the English language to someone who is suffering.

Right up there with: “It’s all in God’s plan.”

Tell that to someone who has lost loved ones and livelihood to the wind and water of hurricane Milton. Or to the North Carolina family who watched their home float down a muddy torrent into the next county.

And if you’re one of the lucky ones? Please don’t ever say you’re blessed to have escaped tragedy. Don’t even hint that the reason you’ve been spared is by the grace of God. Because where are the blessings and the grace of God for your neighbor who has lost everything? You get grace and blessings, and they don’t? What kind of God allows that? What kind of God would do that?

Welcome to the Book of Job.

The author of Job hates platitudes as much as I do, which is one of the reasons it is among my favorite books of the Bible.

Job, written somewhere between the 7^th and 4^th centuries B.C., is part of the Scriptures known as Wisdom literature, which includes Job, Proverbs, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes. Wisdom literature ponders major existential questions about God, Creation, and what it means to be human; often wrestling with issues of suffering and evil. The main project of the writers of Wisdom literature was to push back on prevailing understandings of God, sin and suffering. They repudiated the notion that when bad things happened to people, it was because they had done something, somehow, to deserve it. Furthermore, the Wisdom writers looked around and saw that those who deserved punishment for their sins often prospered instead, committing acts of injustice and cruelty with impunity.

They thought, what kind of God allows that? What kind of God would do that?

The author of the Book of Job skewered this conventional wisdom with a story of a righteous, good man who loses everything at the hands of a capricious God who is manipulated into allowing disaster upon disaster to befall Job for no reason, leaving him in “dust and ashes.” As we heard in last week’s reading from the prologue, God is confronted, not by Satan as we have come to understand him, but by ha satan, which is Hebrew for “the accuser”, who is a member of the divine council. The satan observes in casual conversation with God that Job is righteous “for no reason”; that his devotion to God is born solely of God’s preference and protection of him:

“Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.”

And God says, “Okay. I’ll take that bet. Just don’t kill him.”

What kind of God allows that? What kind of God would do that?

Theologian Kathryn Lopez in The Christian Century says that in order to understand Job’s predicament and his complaint, we need to see the story, not as a tragedy, or even as a dark comedy, but as a parody of the author’s religious worldview:

“The book of Job mocks the hollow piety found in his world and in ours. This is the idea that believers are required to act out a false patience and accept suffering as “God’s will.” This view imagines, falsely, that it is more faithful to suppress the pain of our circumstances than to express legitimate anger. It imagines that hard questions lead to lack of faith and that to question God is to invite destruction.”

In other words, we’re reading this story all wrong if we come away from it thinking for even a moment that Job was “patient as Job.”

In this parody Job is caught up in the religious system that makes him feel the need to proclaim and defend his innocence (because he is innocent), insisting that God show up and face him, as if in a courtroom:

I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me.

Yet even as he stands firm in his desire to see and confront God, Job is aware that God is God, and he is not. In the verses excised from today’s reading, Job says,

But he stands alone, and who can dissuade him? What he desires, that he does.

Job is torn between his desire to confront God in the dock, and the realization that it may make no difference to his situation in the end, and he is terrified.

But this doesn’t stem his complaint. In the next chapter Job rails against, not just his own suffering, but that of others who are victims—women, children, the poor, the elderly—all innocent victims of the wicked and the powerful who never face consequences.

“If it is not so,” Job rages, “who will prove me a liar and show that there is nothing in what I say?”

What kind of God allows this?

Much of the book is comprised of an escalating argument between Job and three friends who come to comfort him. They sit with him, bearing witness to his suffering, but after a while they just can’t help themselves. They begin to speculate on the reasons for Job’s predicament, because surely, everything happens for a reason.

And to every premise Job responds in the same way: I am innocent, he says. God must tell me to my face what God thinks I have done.

And God finally relents and shows up. In a whirlwind. But not to answer Job’s complaint. As we will hear in next week’s reading, God instead puts Job in his place with a magnificent monologue proclaiming the wonders of a Creation that only God could bring into being or begin to comprehend:

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? …Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? …Who determined its measurements—surely you know! …[W]ho laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”

(If you do nothing else churchy this week, get out your Bibles and read Job 38-41—you will not regret it.)

The author of Job is saying here that God is beyond our reasoning and rationalizing or any of our attempts to box God in. This is a beautiful poetic passage, but we need to understand that it isn’t meant to be comforting. God proclaims the wonders of Creation, from stars to ostriches to Leviathan, and never once mentions human beings. Job’s author describes what is, and what is, whether we like it or not, is a wild world in which we are not the center, in spite of all of our attempts to bring order to it. It is humbling, as it is meant to be.

What kind of God…? What kind of God…?

These questions at first have seemed, like Job’s complaint, to be questions that demanded answers. That’s what questions do, right? If we dig deeply into this story as scholars have done for centuries; if we read this story as tragedy, or dark comedy, or parody, Job’s author speaks to our minds as we try to figure it all out. We too, like Job’s friends, can’t help ourselves as we try to understand the why of human suffering, the world’s brokenness, and the times when God seems silent, or even callous.

Which is how Job’s story becomes everyone’s story—a story for the ages–of suffering in a world that often does not make sense to us. It’s a story of the heart that prompts us to rethink our overthinking and instead simply bear witness to the world’s pain; in other words, to lament. The author of Job, as much a character in the story as Job himself, sees the world as it is, and cries out in anger and compassion, shaking their fist at a God whose ways pass all understanding. Lament is not cursing God to God’s face, as the satan put it, but it is a raw pounding on God’s chest. The wisdom of Job lies in staking its claim to unvarnished, unsuppressed, grief; to lament, from the dust and ashes, from the mud and muck, from the wind and rain.

What kind of God…?

The one present with us in the whirlwind.