“Once upon a time in the land of Uz…” Have you ever been
there? I often like to visit. Many of us were born there but have had to move
on. It is a beautiful country, where the sky is deep blue, and the rivers run
clear and clean. There is no need to watch for trouble lurking in dark corners,
and there appears to be a good reason for everything that happens. Uz is a safe
and secure country, full of bright colors and straight lines, where the
righteous flourish and where the wicked are banished for their evil deeds.
Those who live upright lives dwell there in spacious homes, surrounded by
loving families, protected by a divine fence. Some televangelists have their
tents pitched in Uz right now, where they take pictures for us of the many
blessings that they see raining down on those who follow the rules.
Even in Uz, however, suffering is eventually
going to rear its ugly head, and its inhabitants are never prepared. Cancer
survivor Carol Shields writes: “Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry
in your head. It takes all of your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s
smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.”[1]
Once it is smashed, we find
ourselves sitting on the outskirts of Uz, tossed aside like the trash, using the
sharp, broken pieces of our happiness to pick at our painful wounds. Once it is
smashed, we are Job. Once
it is smashed, we have to figure out how to keep our integrity, what it means
to be whole when our world breaks open.
There are two sides to “integrity” or
wholeness. There is the moral integrity that is the upright “fulfilling of
commitments.” [2]
This is the kind of integrity that is
expected in the land of Uz. As Job says later in the book, “Until I die, I will
not put away my integrity from me. I hold fast my righteousness and will not
let it go.” This desperate holding on to traditional religious duties, no
matter what, is one side of Job’s integrity. Indeed, as the most perfect man in
the Hebrew Scriptures, more graced with virtues than Abraham or even Moses, Job
is completely righteous in his dealings with others, and he respects the divine
will, serving his Creator in all things. He walks with “integrity,” fitting
seamlessly into the Creator’s flawless design for the world. And as a direct
result of his integrity, he receives blessing upon blessing from God’s hand.
But wait! Integrity is also “giving
credence to one’s experience,” finding meaning in a wholeness between our inner
selves and the world around us.[3]
We cannot be whole without being true to our experiences. When things are
turned upside down in the land of Uz, and Job’s children are all killed and his
livelihood destroyed, the text in today’s reading praises Job for “[persisting]
in his integrity” and refusing to blame God. But how can Job walk in integrity
when he knows that he is blameless before God, yet finds himself suffering as
only sinners are supposed to do? Job’s wife sees the problem before Job does.
As he sits among the ashes, picking his sores and refusing to be moved, she
comes over to him and sighs, “Do you still persist in your integrity?” In other
words, the ground on which your piety was based has been yanked out from under
you. Your experience no longer fits with the way you are acting. If you
continue to bless God, you will lose your integrity. It would make more sense
for you to curse God and suffer the consequences.
So what are all we Jobs to do when
faced with tragic, meaningless suffering? Aren’t we supposed to “keep the
faith?” Aren’t we supposed to trust in the Lord, no matter what, like today’s
Psalm encourages us to do? “I have lived
with integrity,” the Psalmist boasts, “I have trusted in the Lord and have not
faltered. Test me, O Lord, and try me; examine my heart and my mind.” I haven’t
done bad things like those other sinners. In the end, I won’t get punished like
they will. I should be redeemed because I live with integrity.
Of course we are to trust in the
Lord, but we are not to trust in God based on the system of protection and
reward that is practiced in the Land of Uz. What the book of Job wants to make
clear, is that our relationship with God is not based on this kind of theology
of retribution. We don’t have to be one of those Prosperity Gospel people who
think that God sent hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for the sinfulness
of Mardi Gras, in order to share an ingrained theology of retribution that
seeps from the land of Uz into our own thought processes. I hate to admit the
number of times that I have sat on an airplane caught in scary turbulence and
looked around, anxiously counting the number of cute babies and kind-looking
people sitting around me, calculating somehow that God wouldn’t let a plane
full of that many good people crash.
In Mary Doria Russell’s novel, The Sparrow, Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz
struggles with this theology of retribution in his travels to the faraway
planet Rakhat. Upon arriving on the new planet, as one of the first humans ever
to see its wonders, he feels chosen by God, a part of an amazing divine
creation, part of an entire universe where everything has its place and
faithfulness is clearly rewarded by God. He is empowered by a sense of divine
purpose and feels that his whole life has been leading up to these crowning
moments of mission. In the end, however, Emilio’s friends all die on Rakhat;
human interference makes a mess on the new planet; and Emilio himself is left,
like Job, a physically and psychologically broken man who bitterly mocks his
own former sense of purpose. “If I accept that the beauty and the rapture were
real and true [Emilio complains], then the rest of it was God’s will too, and
that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness.”[4]
Russell comments on her characters: “we seem to believe that if we act in
accordance with our understanding of God’s will, we ought to be rewarded. But
in doing so we’re making a deal that God didn’t sign on to.”[5]
By the end of the The Sparrow, Emilio does not yet find a
way out of his bitterness, but by the end of the book of Job, Job finally
catches on. He allows himself to maintain a deeper kind of integrity by raling
at God, by shining the light of his experience on his earlier notions of piety.
At the end of the book, Job understands that God’s blessing is a free and
wondrous gift, that God is a God of Covenant, a God who gives himself
unconditionally to Job. Job can worship God in gratitude for the “gratuity of
God’s creation,” rather than calculating where he stands with God.[6]
Our ever-creating, ever-loving, ever-self-giving
God, calls us into the kind of relationship that cannot be weighed and measured
and counted. God is indeed a God of justice, but it is a justice that is beyond
our understanding. While we cannot understand God’s judgments, we can trust in
God’s compassion, seen in the life and death of Jesus Christ. We can trust in
that deep power that doesn’t look like power, that Resurrection power that can bring
to life what is broken by pain and even by death. Yesterday, at Father Joe
Smith’s funeral, we began the burial service by singing the Christmas carol, “O
Come, All Ye Faithful.” As we all sang, “O come, let us adore him,” in the face
of tragic death, we were marching bravely together from the Land of Uz to Bethlehem,
to the city where God mysteriously yet graciously joins us in our pain and
suffering, as a human child.
New Testament scholar Kathy Grieb
wonders if Mark, in today’s Gospel on divorce, doesn’t include the story of
Jesus taking the child in his arms, in order to show us that the reign of God
is open to all who receive it in the way that only a little child can receive
it: “as sheer gift to those with no power, no rights, no demands, no status,
and no sense of their own achievement.”[7]
In the Land of Uz, these remarks on divorce would cause us to condemn ourselves
or others as deserving of punishment for our failure in God’s eyes. In Jesus
arms, the God who became a little child holds all of us sinners, however, in a
loving embrace. In our despair, in our incomprehension, in our pain, in our
guilt, we hold up our arms to God, tears running down our cheeks, sobbing and
screaming for all we are worth, like a baby waiting to be picked up from his
crib and held in loving arms: in this cry is our integrity.
[1]
Carol Shields, “Unless,” quoted in Samuel Balentine, Job (Smith
and Helwys, 2006), 16.
[2]
Carol Newsom, quoted in David Hester, Job
(Interpretation Bible Studies, 2005), 13.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow, 394.
[5]
Ibid., 415.
[6]
Susannah Ticciati, Job and the Disruption
of Identity, 73.
[7]
Kathy Grieb, “Blogging toward Sunday.” http://theolog.org/2009/09/blogging-toward-sunday-is-it-lawful.html.
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