Saint Anthony Park Lutheran Church
7 November 2004
Text: Job 19:23-27a
Preacher: Frederick J. Gaiser
Job 19:23-27 23 "O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! 24 O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever! 25 For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; 26 and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, 27 whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.
I KNOW THAT MY REDEEMER LIVES
Why do bad things happen to good people? Job wrote that book long before it became a modern religious bestseller. Most of you know Job’s story: the genuine good guy, the righteous man, the one everybody would want to have as neighbor or father or friend, a person, everyone said, richly blessed by God—until...until he wasn’t. Until everything went bad, real bad: wealth gone, family gone, health gone—these losses allowed by God, according to the book, precisely to raise the question whether Job or whether any of us are only fair-weather believers. Does Job, do any of us, worship God only when things are going well, only to keep God on our side?
Having lost everything and cried out to God over and over again about the unfairness of it all, Job rises to the outburst of today’s text: “I know that my Redeemer lives.”
What can we learn today from Job’s story and from Job’s faith?
Well, Job’s first problem was that he had watched too much television! That’s why he “knew,” he just knew, that if you only did religion right it had to pay off. Act right, believe right, and success will be yours. Be good and get the goodies. He’d heard it over and over again from all those TV preachers with the big hair and the designer suits, who themselves oozed success from every pore, so it had to be true.
Modern preachers of the gospel of success didn’t invent this idea, of course. It has been the essence of religion since the beginning of human history. Like it or not, the gods run the show (or God runs the show), and the gods, being basically greedy, need appeasing through offerings of various kinds (or God needs appeasing), so religion exists to appease the gods (or to appease God). And if we do it well enough, God, like the abusive parent, will make nice for awhile and let us win the lottery called life.
It’s there in all the systems early humans developed to ward off the evil spirits and attract the good ones. It’s there in all the wizards and soothsayers of human history and human folklore. It’s there in the minor religions and the great ones. It’s there in the various distortions of Christianity that over the centuries have lured believers to a particular church or a particular creed or a particular guru by promising, in one way or other, that their slots pay off more liberally than those in the casino-called-church next door.
It’s there, I suppose, because it’s so deep within us. Children arrange their teddy bears on the bed just so in order to keep the monsters safely in the closet. Teenagers adopt whatever fads their decade dictates to appease the gods of popularity. And grown men wear their baseball caps upside down betting it will guarantee their team a win. It’s cute in kids; it’s understandable among teens; it’s silly for adults—but it’s deadly as religion. Deadly, because it ties us up in desperate attempts to make ourselves acceptable to a let’s-make-a-deal god who doesn’t exist, thereby cutting us off from the waiting Father who does and who mourns our absence at the family feast spread for all his children.
This is the religion in which Job was brought up—not because it is a correct understanding of Old Testament faith, but because it’s a popular, lowest-common-denominator understanding of pretty much every religion. And it’s the religion that is supported, in sometimes trivial ways and sometimes very sophisticated ones, by Job’s friends whose dialogues comprise the main part of this book. The Bible, on the other hand, is the story of God’s 2000-year quest to wean humanity from this understanding of religion. And Job describes this dilemma as fully as any biblical book.
Job’s second problem, of course, is that this religion in which he was reared isn’t working. Job had in fact done everything right, but he was nevertheless thrown into a meatgrinder existence that reduced his once happy and prosperous life to a bloody and unrecognizable mess. Everything gone, Job now sits in the ashheap of his life and wonders why. His so-called friends assure him that the fault has to be his, because God does, in fact, run a you-get-what-you-deserve universe. Slipped to number two, Job? Just try harder!
Trouble is, there’s just enough truth in all this to make it seductive. Good acts do have good consequences; evil acts do kill. Harvard Medical School assures us that religion actually is good for us—and any religion will do. We are our own worst enemies; and most of us could do a lot better if we tried. All that is true. The problem comes when we try to use it as a bargaining chip with the Almighty.
We all do it, I suppose. Why did you come to church today? So God would like you? So your mother would? Because it would be good for business? Because it was the way you were brought up? Because you were supposed to? Because you needed to? Because you hoped somebody would tell you that folks like us are right after all, and everybody else is wrong? That favorite American cynic Mark Twain once observed, “More [people] go to church than want to” (Mark Twain, “Letters from the Earth,” in What is Man? And Other Philosophical Writings, vol. 19 of The Works of Mark Twain, ed. Paul Baender [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973] 407). In one way or other, he thought, people only go to church to pay their dues.
I think I’d rather not spend too much time examining my own motives. It would probably be depressing. I’d rather listen to the word of God—which might get through to us whatever our motives for coming—and this morning that word gives us Job’s surprising confession: Job, while literally watching his life fall apart and his skin fall off, crying, “I know that my redeemer lives.”
What in the world did Job mean? In Hebrew culture, the “redeemer” was a family member who could bail us out of whatever mess we found ourselves in—whether it was our fault or the fault of the bad guys or the government or the economy or fate or simple wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time accident. A “redeemer” was our champion who could buy us out, turn us loose, set us free. The redeemer was the cavalry coming over the hill or the handsome prince come to rescue us from the tower of our imprisonment. Somewhere out there, says Job, is my redeemer. My present distress is not equal justice under law, it is not the judgment of a just God, it is not fair; it is hell on earth, and no matter how good I am or how well I believe, I can’t fix it. But somebody has to be able to.
A very real option for someone in Job’s shoes would be resignation or suicide. Macbeth got it right, didn’t he? Life “is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing” (William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, V.v.19-28). Deal with at. Or, if you can’t, follow the counsel of Job’s wife who told him to curse God and die (2:9). But Job won’t go there. Everything I learned about how, under God, the good guys prosper and the wicked get their just deserts seems to have turned out to be wrong, but I have known God to be good, so I won’t let go of God. Somebody has to make things clear—maybe God himself. I know that my redeemer lives!
We could get Job wrong now—terribly wrong. Because at the end of the book, he does get his life back. You know what happens when you play a country-western song backwards: you get your dog back, you get your truck back, you get your wife back—everything returns back to where it started from. Externally, that seems to happen to Job. But Job can never be back where he started, because late in the book the God who has been the subject of all this abstract discussion actually shows up, and from then on nothing will be the same. The God who shows up comes neither with new demands and rewards nor to pat Job on the head and say, “There, there, it doesn’t matter.” The God who shows up will be neither the crafty bargainer nor the sentimental wimp. God lets Job know that all human attempts to put God in a neat box are doomed. All such religious systems are nonsense. Can you make a hippopotamus, Job? When you can, come back, and we can talk. It’s the ultimate put down, but it’s also the ultimate act of love. God cares enough for Job and Job’s questions to show up. God meets Job’s questions not with the kind of simple answers that people seem to want but with mysterious and gracious presence. Here I am, Job, face to face. Your redeemer lives. Not with a redemption that will satisfy either you or your friends, Job, if you keep on looking for a simple system of reward and punishment. The redemption comes in my accepting your questions, even by challenging them, in accepting you in spite of them and because of them; the redemption comes in showing you my face; the redemption comes in who I am, not in who you are. I am not finally a God of punishment and reward, but a God of compassion and steadfast love who creates all that is, with a beauty, complexity, and mystery quite beyond your ken. Knowing that, even if you do get your stuff back at the end of the book, it won’t be the same, since now you will know that stuff is not your reward for services rendered, stuff is just the gift of my good creation—a creation that is awesome and wonderful, providing you with all you need from day to day, so that you are free to quit trying to appease me, since I don’t need it, and to start caring for your neighbor, who does. Seeing God, Job repents of his arrogant attempts to control God by figuring out the system, and Job is redeemed—set free from trying to see religion as a chemical equation in which an adequate amount of piety mixed with a certain amount of charity produces a lovely white precipitate of grace, and free from his vigorous complaints when that doesn’t work. Job can just bask in the wonder of God’s presence.
God shows up in the middle of the dialogues of the book of Job, and Job is redeemed. When God shows up in the middle of history, we all are redeemed, we and all the saints we remember today. Jesus is nothing other than God showing up, confirming once and for all what Job can only hint at, that it’s not about how good or how bad we are, but about how good and how loving God is. Jesus suffers Job’s fate on our behalf—the innocent one nailed to the tree of human religious zeal, because he won’t play the game of religion by the rules humans have devised. Jesus dies to deny forever the notion that if we’re good enough God will love us and that health and wealth, success and reward are the ultimate signs of divine blessing. In Christ, God himself shares Job’s story, experiencing first hand the terrible cosmic unfairness of life, and demonstrating first hand the kind of love and forgiveness that alone can overcome such terror—even the terror of death. God shows up, and, like Job, we throw ourselves at God’s feet in thanksgiving and amazement. I know that my redeemer lives.
It’s a reason to go to church. No matter what our motives, known to us or unknown; no matter what our age; no matter how silly our superstitions or how desperate our longings; no matter how sophisticated our theology or how simple our faith; no matter how vague our commitments or how firm our zeal; no matter how surprisingly we have prospered or how unfairly we have not; no matter how hard we have worked or how idly we have stood by; no matter why we thought we came today or how little we thought about it at all—here we have come, like all the saints through all of Christian history. Here we have been brought, actually, called by God’s Spirit—and here God shows up. As far as I can tell, this really is the only reason to come to church that matters. Here is where God promises to show up—in a way fuller and richer and more surprising and more gracious than ways in which God is present everywhere. Here we hear God’s word, we taste God’s goodness, we are surrounded by God’s people, we meet God’s Son, we experience unconditional love, our sins are forgiven, we are set free from the terrible burden of using religion to make a deal with a calculating God, and—every once in a while—we get it, and we say, “Wow. I know that my redeemer lives!” God shows up. Welcome to the communion of saints. AMEN