Regular thoughts on the oft-neglected Old Testament Lectionary passages
The gospel this week is Mark’s story of the stilling of the storm, and the Job passage could be seen as God’s beginning to still the storm which had so viciously rocked Job’s life. After 36 chapters of Job’s agonised philosophising God finally speaks, although his words are not yet the words of comfort for which Job had been hoping. God begins by asking a series of rhetorical questions designed to remind Job who he is and how he has the right and the power to do whatever he likes. God is Lord, not just of Job’s life but also of the created world. He allows storms to scare us, although not ultimately to defeat us.
The phrase ‘Gird up your loins like a man’ is used in the OT as a rough equivalent to ‘grow a pair’. Stop grizzling about your misfortune and get on with it. This seems a bit harsh, as does God’s deliberate reversal of the question and answer dialogue. In 23:5 Job demands some answers from a silent God: if only he knew where to find God ‘I would find out what he would answer me’. But now the roles have been reversed: Job is in the dock and God at the bar, and his questions all demand the answer ‘No’. No, I wasn’t there at the creation, and therefore, by implication, no, I don’t have the knowledge to question or the right to object to your purposes.
Again, a bit harsh, we may think. I have written elsewhere about the book of Job as a whole, and this isn’t the place to repeat it, but nevertheless there are some parallels with Mark’s story, and therefore some insights into the way God handles us. ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ cry the terrified disciples. Behind this, and behind Job’s agony, is the assumption that God’s job in life is to keep everything nice for us, to keep the waters calm so that we may glide along across the millpond of health, wealth and happiness without so much as a ripple to disturb us. Yet Jesus sleeps while the fishermen struggle; God is silent while Job mourns. Yet in both cases there is growth and learning, which wouldn’t have happened without the rocky waters. ‘Who is this?’ ask the disciples. ‘Surely I spoke of things I did not understand’ concludes Job.
In this passage, and the chapters following, God takes job on a whirlwind tour of the cosmos, and shows him scenes he had never encountered in his comfortable life as a pillar of the urban community. He takes him where the wild things are, and shows him the uncontrollable and desolate corners of the universe, places, incidentally, devoid of any human habitation. This walk on the wild side challenges his former predictable lifestyle, and both shrinks him into perspective, yet also elevates him to the privileged position of having been taken on the tour at all. We are left with the question ‘Where would I rather be?’ settled, comfortable and completely unaware of the wildness of life, or on an adventure to see life in all its dangerous, unpredictable fullness.
This faces us up to a big question for the church. The older I get, the more likely I am to opt for comfort and safety. Last weekend my son climbed Helvellyn and walked Striding Edge. I did that once, when I was young, but last weekend I weeded the garden. I used to bung a tent in the back of the car and go off somewhere: now I book a hotel. Increasingly, as the church grows more elderly, we opt for comfort and safety. But a generation younger than us longs for adventure, danger, storms and the thrill of having overcome them. Will we let them lead the church into some of it, or will we go gentle into that good night?