Bible reading: Job 1:1 then 2:1-10.

Message.

I’m sure that there are many reasons which lead to people losing their faith. Some folk simply stop believing in God, possibly because they never graduated from the faith they were taught as a child and can’t cope with the issues thrown up by the grown-up world. Others start questioning the truth of the Bible: did Jesus and Mary, Moses and Joshua, Adam and Eve, really exist, or are those stories just fables? Some people give up on faith because of the corruption, abuse and bad behaviour they see in churches: how can believing people behave in such appalling ways? Yet others find the pressures of family, life and work squeezing the time for church and faith until none is left.

I think, though, that the biggest cause of people turning away from the Christian faith is when something bad happens to good people, whether they be members of their family or victims of some disaster on the other side of the world. They may see a loving mother stricken at an early age by an aggressive cancer, or a young family wiped out by a drunken driver, or aid workers killed by terrorists, or innocent bystanders massacred by a suicide bomber, or villagers crushed by a landslide … the list is endless. Not only do we ask, “Why did it happen to them?” but we also think of the murderers, swindlers and other thoroughly nasty people who seem to flourish freely. We instinctively feel that this is unfair and, if we are people of faith, we think we’re justified in saying, “If that’s how God runs the world, he can’t be a God of love. I certainly don’t want to worship him”.

This of course isn’t a new issue: it must have been asked from the very start of religious belief. And it stems from the fundamental idea that your god (whoever that may be) will take care of you and reward you if you behave well, but will punish you (or your family) if you do wrong. We find this commonly-held belief expressed in the story of the blind man to whom Jesus gave sight: “Whose sin caused him to be born blind?”, ask the disciples. “Was it his own sin or his parents’?” Jesus answers, “His blindness has nothing to do with his sins or the sins of his parents”. In just one sentence he demolishes this idea of cause and effect which had been the basis of so many peoples’ religion.

Although books of the Bible such as Psalms and Ecclesiastes often ask serious questions about faith, suffering and human integrity, there is one which has these matters at its core: Job. We can only make an educated guess about its origins. I’ve heard it said that this is the oldest book in the entire canon or collection of writings that make up the Bible. But it’s also been suggested that it’s much later, dating from the time when Israel had been defeated by Babylon, with its Temple destroyed and brightest young people carted off into exile. Why had this catastrophe happened? Was this the divine judgement which prophets had repeatedly promised? Had God abandoned his people or – perish the thought – might he actually not exist at all? These were big questions but I can’t imagine they’d not arisen earlier.

There’s also the question as to whether there really was a man called Job. One writer comments, “The prologue to the book reads like a folktale. There is no mooring in history or place (Uz is not mentioned as a place anywhere else in the Bible). The book of Job, in other words, should be read as a parable, not history”. Is this writer correct? He may be; but, in my view it doesn’t matter whether this story is fable, folktale, or true history. What’s important is that it’s a way of dealing with one of the biggest questions of faith, which it does admirably.

So let’s start with that prologue, which really ought to begin, “Once upon a time”. Straightaway we are told Job’s name and his qualities: he was blameless and upright, he feared God and turned away from evil. That sets the scene for everything that happens and is said later. Jumping, as our reading did, to the next chapter we encounter a huge problem: God and Satan (accompanied by some of his minions) have a conversation in which Satan is given permission to tempt Job into cursing God by any means he likes. The only thing he mustn’t do is kill him. Now, quite apart from us wanting to say, “How on earth did the author know about this conversation?”, we are shocked to read of God and Satan chatting away on friendly terms in what looks much like a heavenly court populated by other celestial beings. Although it’s clear who’s ultimately the boss, this scene either makes us laugh at its primitive view of the spiritual realm – or sends shivers down our spines. Either way, it’s almost impossible for us to take seriously.

I’d just like to spend a few more moments on this. Firstly I need to say that “Satan” – like “Christ” in fact – is not a personal name but a title with a meaning: “the adversary” or “the accuser”. We could call him “the prosecuting attorney of heaven”; he isn’t quite the demonic figure we encounter elsewhere in the Bible but is more of a “devil’s advocate” who is tasked with proving guilt and calls everything into question. In this passage he almost sounds like an investigative journalist or an intelligence agent who has just returned from a fact-finding trip to earth where he’s been “going to and fro”, collecting information. The picture we’re given sounds more like pagan mythology than one which comes from the Jewish and Christian Bible. It’s very fanciful and we struggle to believe it – at least I do.

And there’s worse to come. Having identified Job as a uniquely good, blameless and religious man, Satan wants to get him to curse God. It’s a sort of challenge, really: Satan says, “I can get him to do that” and God responds, “Oh no, you won’t” – but he also says, “All right, see what you can do. I give you my permission to do whatever you like to Job; the one thing you’re not allowed to do is kill him”. This to me is truly appalling: for here is a person being played like a pawn in a heavenly chess match – without having the slightest inkling of what’s going on. The story seems to be saying that, for some if not all of us, our lives are being tweaked and controlled by decisions being made “up there”, decisions we can never know. We may be responsible for our reactions to the joys or sorrows which may befall us, but we have no control over the good and bad events happening in the first place.

This to me paints an incredibly gloomy and disturbing picture of human existence, but I think we must set it in the context of a society which had very little understanding of science and of “how things work”, and which had no idea of how apparently random natural happenings can in fact be predicted or controlled. I’d like to suggest (and some of you may profoundly disagree with me here) that we’ve “grown out” of this way of thinking – although I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that everything on earth is the result of natural or man-made forces. I certainly don’t want to rule out the spiritual side of things entirely, but I don’t think we today can view life in the same way as the author of this book. However we mustn’t ignore it, either!

Anyway, once the Satan has signed off his compact with God, the most terrible things start happening to Job. His servants are working on the farm when bandits kill them and steal their animals. Exactly the same thing happens to the men looking after his camels. His family are having a great feast when a tornado from nowhere demolishes the house they’re in – there are no survivors. So far Job himself has not been afflicted, but that doesn’t last: his skin becomes covered with itchy, painful and suppurating sores. It’s a real disaster movie: about the only thing that doesn’t happen is a meteorite crashing from the sky and wreaking destruction (perhaps the author didn’t think of that). At the end of all these woes we find Job sitting alone and scraping his sores with a piece of broken pottery. His wife says, “Look at everything that’s happened to us. Why don’t you curse God and die?” And Job replies, “Don’t talk nonsense! When God sends us something good, we welcome it. So how can we complain when he sends us trouble?” He seems to be exhibiting an almost Muslim-like fatalism: “Mashallah” or “Qué será, será” – “We don’t argue with God”.

It’s at this point in the story that Job’s three friends or “comforters” appear: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. Much of the rest of the book is filled with the discussions that Job has with them; they are convinced that Job has brought all these calamities upon himself by somehow sinning against God, an accusation which Job strongly denies. But this part of the story is for another time: today’s section with Jacob in despair yet, incredibly, refusing to blame God for all that’s happened. Job’s wife thinks that he is an utter fool for still believing that God is worthy of his devotion; I suspect we might agree with her. Surely God is supposed to protect us from all ills (or, as the famous Evensong prayer says, “perils and dangers”) – here he seems not only to have proved himself totally useless but also, just possibly, to have been their perpetrator and cause. He isn’t a God of love who deserves our loyalty and worship.

The famous author Virginia Woolf, known for being an agnostic critic of religion, once wrote in a letter to a friend: “I read the book of Job last night. I don’t think God comes out of it well”. After what I’ve said this morning, you well feel that it’s not just God, but Job and perhaps the Bible who haven’t come out well. We find it impossible to sign up to this book’s approach to suffering and disaster; we sympathise with Job’s wife for thinking he was an idiot to keep faith in such adverse circumstances. We’ll come back to this book., and see where it takes us, in a couple of weeks’ time.

Meanwhile I leave you with a thought to ponder: the people of old believed that good people should be blessed, while calamity and illness were God’s judgement on individuals, families, even nations: a notion which hasn’t by any means gone away. What might that say about Jesus the sinless One, being whipped by Roman soldiers, pinned on a cross to die in pain, and crying out in agony, “Why, God, have you abandoned me?” How could he, of all people, have deserved that fate?

Those old beliefs don’t help us, but we can take comfort from the thought that Jesus, according to the ancient Nicene Creed, “came down from heaven, … was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered death and was buried for us and our salvation”. Or we can hear the words of Stuart Townend’s hymn: “It was my sin that held him there until it was accomplished; his dying breath has brought me life – I know that it is finished”. Reflecting on Jesus gives us the very different picture of a God who was willing to do anything to give us life and hope. That isn’t heavenly power play: it is simply love.