The Fourth Sunday after Trinity

Sermon

23 June 2024

The Reverend Dr James Gardom

Job 38.1-11; Psalm 107.1-3, 23-32; 2 Corinthians 6.1-13; Mark 4.35-41.

Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die”.

I want to talk about the book of Job, and about how Christians understand suffering and evil. I don’t normally apologise for sermons, but I am acutely aware of the presence and reality of suffering within this congregation, and of experiences I have not had. I am being led by the Scriptures at this moment, and not by my own experience. Forgive me if that becomes too obvious.

The book of Job is an extraordinary document from the ancient world. Do read it some time. A thought experiment about God, evil and suffering.  A framing narrative in the form of a folk tale. Fortune, Family and Health. Job is offered three options – the first by his wife. Curse God and Die. Through 40 Chapters of the stock answers of the day, offered by Job’s Comforters. Suffering is a punishment for sin. Suffering is a discipline through which we grow.

Constantly and patiently Job responds to those who ask him to accept these answers. Job will not give up the two things he really knows. That God is good and loves him. That suffering and evil are suffering and evil, not punishment and education. In then end God answers Job and commands his comforters to do penance for what they have said. The standard answers are not God’s answer…

Here is a book in the deep tradition of faith, which asks with extraordinary energy and clarity the fundamental question about a suffering world and a good God. Do not let anyone tell you that faith is blind. It may be wrong, but in such books as Job and Ecclesiastes it has asked the hard questions, before western civilisation was born, and faced up to their consequences. The Christian faith, and I suspect all other faiths, arise from the question that the book of Job is facing.

Christians have these two fundamental experiences, like other people. That God is good and loves us. That suffering and evil are suffering and evil, not hidden goods, not punishment and education. The Christians I know are people who are unwilling to give up on either of these fundamental experiences. Like Job they will not give up either of these foundational beliefs. Like most thinking people, Christians are trying to make sense of their lives, and to live them in a way that hangs together. Many people, Christians included, have at times, an intuition of the meaningfulness of existence, the reality of God’s love, the requirement to respond to need and pain as things that really matter.

Almost everyone, Christians included, have quite frequently experiences or intuitions of failure, emptiness, meaninglessness, personal loss and transgression. What is distinctive about religious people is that they are committed to taking both these intuitions very seriously, and they don’t want to give up on either. It is quite easy, and quite common to abandon the sense of meaning, purpose and love in the world as an infantile illusion. It is less easy, but perhaps more common, to cut ourselves off, for the moment, from experiences of pain, emptiness, meaninglessness, injustice – and lead our insulated lives in a bubble of cultural comfort and security.

To be seriously religious, it seems to me, is to insist that both the intuitions of glory and meaning, and the intuitions of brokenness and meaninglessness are absolutely right, and that we need to make both important in our lives. To be human we need both. But they are in tension, and for Christians, and to be honest, the book of Job does not provide an answer. Indeed, no simple answer is possible – it would be glib and to be rejected. Job insisted on the reality of his experience of God, and the reality of his experience of suffering. In today’s reading God answers from the whirlwind. We have heard only a little of four chapters of God’s answer to Job. With that answer Job is sufficed. He has sensed the glory of God, he has seen God, and he will question no more.

God’s answer to Job is not, in the end God’s answer to us. Job is faithful to God who is untamed, unimaginable, beyond thought. God is all those things, and we are called to that faithfulness. But we are faithful to God who is also shown to us in Christ, present on the Cross, and always close to us in the Holy Spirit. The resolution of the tension of the loving God and the broken and fallen world is not a matter for a single sermon. It is the matter of all our Christian Sacraments and teaching, our stories, our prayers, indeed of our entire life. The conviction that this resolution is possible arises from our belief in Christ, that in Him the fullness of God dwells, and that he has suffered all things, and given glory to God.

With Job we must insist on the reality of God’s love, and the reality of suffering. Beyond Job we must insist that these realities are united in Christ, and that in Christ is our resolution and our salvation.