Audio:

Texts:

• First Reading Job 1:1, 2:1-10
• Psalm 26:1-12
• Second Reading Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
• Gospel Mark 10:2-16

Manuscript:

“Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction.”

You might remember that phrase from a high school physics class. It is Newton’s Third Law. Of course, Newton only meant it to be applied to physics, to the interactions between objects. We desperately want it to apply to human interactions as well. We want there to be a basic order to events so that we can have some means of control.

We see this whenever something bad happens. If we can just figure out who to blame, if we can figure out what that person did, whether that person is someone else or ourselves, then we can undo it, or fix it, or at least make sure it doesn’t happen again. Often, the bigger the event, the greater that need. Even if it was something well removed from ourselves, we want to imagine that somewhere, someone was in control.

Even more, we need to imagine that the cause of an event is roughly proportionate to the effect. Generations have struggled with the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald could, on his own, succeed in killing Kennedy and changing the direction of the nation, but hardly anyone thinks John Hinckley Jr. was part of some massive plot against Reagan.

We see it now with covid, with the insistence, by some, that covid must be an engineered weapon, something released, accidently or deliberately from a lab. We see it in the people who insist that this whole thing is a plot to do…something. It does not matter what the goal is, it just matters that there be some proportionate cause and someone to blame. It hurts our sense of justice, of proportion, to imagine that, after all this disruption, after more than 700,000 dead in just the United States, there might not, in the end, be anyone to blame.

Job is the Biblical challenge to our sense of justice, a check on that desire. Job is the counterweight to our wish to attribute our success to divine reward and other’s failures to divine punishment. The Book of Job’s first verse, “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” is the Biblical equivalent of “Long, long ago and far, far away.” It sets up this story as a fable, a parable. No real, living, human, save Jesus, has ever been blameless, and even Jesus stopped and questioned God in the garden at Gethsemane. No, Job is not a real person, this is a story to set up theological arguments which we will hear in the coming weeks, because the people at the time this story was written were just like us in their need for some basic proportionality, some basic cause-and-effect to the world around them, even as they could plainly see, just as we can, that this is not true.

The core question of Job is not “do bad things happen to good people?” As much as we try to avoid that, we all know they do. We know that earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and tornados strike the wicked and the righteous alike. The question Job confronts is “what do we do about it?”

The lectionary only spends three weeks with Job, and so we do some jumping. This week, we began the story, but after the first verse, we jump to the second chapter, the second curse. I want us to backup a moment into the first chapter, because I think we need that context to understand some of these reactions.

Job was a wealthy landowner, with many children and many flocks. In the first chapter, Job loses all of that. A series of messengers come to Job to tell him that a group of raiders have taken all his oxen and donkeys, that the sheep burned in their fields, that another group of raiders has taken his camels, that a house collapsed and killed all his children, and that all his servants, save the messengers, have also died.

We need to start with that, because we need to understand, before we do anything else, that Job’s wife is also a victim here. We need to remember that she has also lost everything that Job has lost in the first chapter. Job’s wife is spared only the boils and sores that cover Job from head to foot in the second chapter. Everything else that happens to Job also happens to her.

I think we often treat Job’s wife like a bystander, a casual observer in all of this. I hope, at least, that is what we do, because otherwise the historic treatment of her is awful. Generations of commentators have faulted her for her words here, when she asks Job: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” I think many of us read those words and, because we want to think that we are Job, that we are the blameless, the innocent victims, we use those words to then blame her. We become like the friends of Job who spend their time seeking ways to blame him, demanding of him that he just needs to repent so that God will forgive him, even as no one knows just what Job is to repent of. They just know Job must have done something terrible to have received such a terrible punishment because they want to believe the laws of physics apply to human events.

Job’s wife though, she does not blame him. Neither does she discount the power of God. “Curse God and die” is not a command, it is her lament. It is her cry of pain and anguish, her plea for help. The question we need to ask is what are we going to do about it? Are we going to blame her for being angry after the loss of all her children and all her wealth? Are we going to be like Job’s friends, and add our condemnation to her list of problems? I know for many, that answer is yes. I know, for many, the need to find someone to blame is so great that we will gladly blame the victim if it means we can maintain our own comfort. I pray we can read the Book of Job and be inspired to find better ways.