Life is complicated. And there are times we can’t make meaning of it no matter how hard we try. And sometimes, maybe even often, we can’t make sense of God—who God is, what God is doing, what we want or need from God. God can be more of a problem than an answer. But there is an answer that gives us what we need. Here’s a sermon I call, “The Problem of God,” based on Job 38.1-7, 34-41; John 9.1-3. Preached at Davis Community Church on October 17, 2021

Scholars think that this Old Testament document called “Job” is some of the oldest literature in the Bible. It may be among the oldest of humanity’s written fables and myths and stories.

It’s the tale of a man who’s done nothing that could cause him to suffer but who experiences extreme trauma anyway. The problem is, God does nothing to protect or even comfort him. In fact, the storyteller suggests that God is behind his suffering. God, according to this story, allows it, even authorizes it. And that’s a problem for anyone who wants to say that God is good and that God is powerful.

You’ve probably struggled at some point in your life when you’ve suffered or someone you love has suffered senselessly; you’ve probably wondered, if God is good and powerful then is God missing in action? Is God blind? Or is God weak, unable to do anything about the suffering? Or maybe you wondered: did you or your loved one do something to bring it about—something that could have been avoided, and the suffering, then, avoided too?

If you’ve ever asked these kinds of questions, you’re asking questions that have perplexed human beings as long as we’ve walked this planet. When you’re vexed by this kind of question, you’ve found yourself, whether you know it or not, tangled up inside a timeless problem.

The first lines of the first chapter of Job set up the problem:

“Once upon a time there was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who loved God and shunned evil.”

Very quickly, in the first of forty-two long and troubling chapters we learn that Job, because of his saintly nature and integrity, has done very well for himself and his family. And we also learn that Satan, ha-satan, in Hebrew, accuses God of being unfair. Job, he insists, only loves God because good things come to Job; God’s been good to Job and who wouldn’t love God for that? Ha-satan proposes a wager: “God, if you remove the protection of your power and allow me to torment Job, I’ll bet you that Job’s faith will collapse and Job will ‘curse you to your face.’"

God, according to this tale, is intrigued by the wager. God wants to see what will happen. “Well then,” God says, "do whatever you want. All that Job has is under your power now, I remove my protection.”

I hope you don’t like this wager. I hope you have concerns about who this God is. I think the storyteller wants you and me to be appalled. I think the writer is setting us up.

As the story goes: in a single day, Job loses everything—his children, his wife, his property.

And when his life has crumbled, the storyteller says, “Then Job arose, tore his robe, shaved his head, and fell on the ground and worshipped. Job said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.”

Good, saintly Job. He loses it all and still praises God.

Who among us would do that? Seriously. Very few if any of us. And so it’s pure fiction. And too often we’ve thought we were supposed to imitate Job, and dispassionately suffer, even surrender to our suffering as God’s will, that there must be something good it in, something we have to learn, or to come to terms with the fact that we must have done something to deserve it. We sinned or drifted or doubted.

But the point is, the storyteller is keen to tell us, Job’s done nothing to deserve it—no sin, no drifting, no doubt.

So what’s going on?

The storyteller-poet is wrestling with a timeless problem: how we live in relation to the spiritual Power of the universe—to God, whom we believe loves beauty, who works for what’s good, who desires justice and has the power to bring it about, in our lives and in society, but who often doesn’t, won’t, or can’t.

There’s the Christian couple who prayed fervently to become pregnant only to lose their child a few days after giving birth.

There’s the Muslim husband who’s wife, a journalist in Kabul, disappeared one night, never to be found.

There are the teenagers, concerned about the future, who keep vigil—praying and striking for climate justice and universal wellbeing—but who feel like no matter what they do, no one hears, no one really cares, and God seems to do nothing.

Job never curses God, but Job does end up cursing his life. “In all this,” says the narrator, “Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.” Job didn’t sin, didn’t blame God, but Job did lose hope. Being a saint, burying his rage or doubt or grief didn’t help him:

“Let the day perish in which I was born. . . .” he says,

“Why is light given to one in misery,

and life to the bitter in soul,

who longs for death, but it does not come.”

Then, into the absurdity of Job’s misery come three of Job’s friends. I hope in your misery you’ve not had friends like these. Each one of them tries to explain Job’s suffering, make sense of it, justify what’s happened to him. They lecture Job, telling him that there must be sin in his life, something he’s done to rouse God’s anger, some way Job has distanced himself from the divine.

We do this too, don’t we?

We try to make sense of the senseless. We scrabble for firm ground; we scramble for some kind of certainty, some explanation that side steps the reality that we have a problem with God, we don’t like the way God works in the world, not if God is both good and all powerful—

like telling those grieving parents of a dead newborn that God must have needed another angel in heaven

like saying to that Afghan husband that his wife was a martyr and saint in God’s cause

like saying that the kids don’t really need to worry about the climate crisis because heaven’s a better place anyway

But these kinds of explanations don’t comfort those who are hurting. In fact, they compound the problem. And they foster notions of a God who can seem to be more against us than for us—especially when we’re less than our best (which is most of us most of the time).

In today’s reading, a poem from the thirty-eighth chapter of Job, a writing that comes near to the end of the entire work, the storyteller-poet shows us the implications of a God who has the power to protect us from suffering, or not:

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up your loins like a man,

I will question you, and you shall answer me.’”

This God is like a professional heavyweight boxer in the ring against a scrawny little kid. This God is a caricature of what this kind of God becomes in a world like ours where the big movements of suffering—pandemics and fires and floods and political corruption—combine with the small daily experiences of suffering we all endure, a world where no explanation for all this makes any real sense at all.

In the end, the writer of Job gives us no explanations. We only get a meditation on the absurdity of a God who holds absolute power. The writer of Job wants us to be appalled by what such a God would mean to us—one who has the power to remove the barriers to evil and who is willing to gamble with the likes of Satan to just see what happens to us.

You might say that to the writer of Job, absolute power can corrupt even God.

The writer of Job gives us no answer to the problem of God Almighty. But that’s not the only vision of God we have in the Bible.

“As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.”

That’s how our second reading today begins.

“Jesus’ disciples asked Jesus, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Job was written centuries before the Gospel of John was written. And its challenge to those who want such simplistic explanations were utterly ignored.

And what does Jesus say?

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” Your attempt to make sense of this is nonsense. “This man was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

And Jesus reached out to heal the man.

Now that’s a different kind of answer, isn’t it? Jesus’ disciples were still trapped by trying to make sense of God’s power in light of our suffering. But Jesus doesn’t bite. Jesus doesn’t give a tidy answer. Jesus knows that life is messy. Jesus knows that suffering is real. Jesus knows every attempt to give an explanation is essentially absurd. “I can’t and won’t try to explain this,” he says. “And you shouldn’t either.” Instead,“let’s make this an opportunity for us to work for the wellbeing of the world. For that’s the only thing that matters.”

In Jesus, the writer of the Gospel of John, shows us the nature of God not as absolute power, but as absolute love.

God is not like a king or dictator who holds power over us. God does not rule the universe like that. Job shows us the absurdity of putting our faith in a God who holds power over us.

Jesus reveals to us that if God can be said to have power, God is a power with us, beside us, in us. God is love. God is compassion. God does not act on us from above to cause one of us to suffer while choosing another to know bliss.

Job shows us how absurd and frightening it is to live as a servant to an almighty God high upon a throne, governing the universe.

Jesus shows how healing and comforting it is to live as a friend and companion to the divine presence which, according to the Gospel of John, is more like a warm breeze of love moving around us to heal us; God is like a river of compassion welling up from inside us to water and nourish everything in and around us in love and life.

So when you pray, remember the lesson of Job: don’t imagine a God who holds power over you. That only leads to tyranny in its many forms.

Instead, hold yourself inside the vision of Jesus: draw near to love—above us, beside us, and within us. Love, kindness, and compassion is the power, not of tyranny, but of ministry. And love is the only power that will save us now.