Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge. “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!
(Job 23:1-9 & 16-17)
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Well, yes, there is a certain irony to hearing a story about Job on Thanksgiving weekend. After all, Job had little obvious reason to be thankful - but that alone is perhaps enough reason to consider Job’s story today. I mean, it’s possible that there are some of you here today who for one reason or another don’t feel very much like being thankful. We don’t often think of you folks at these festive times of the year. In that way, Thanksgiving is a little bit like Christmas. The calendar and the culture tell us to be happy and thankful and yet any of us might be facing circumstances today (right at this moment) that make being happy and thankful a difficult thing indeed. Maybe a deeper look at Job’s story might help us to understand why we should be thankful even when thankfulness might not be the normal response to our circumstances. Leading up to today’s passage, Job had faced three calamities: he had lost his wealth, his health and his family, and now Job is doing something that all of us want to do every now and then: filled with fear or desperation or grief, we look to God and we say “why?” “Why me?” “Why now?” And we wait for an answer. Sometimes it seems as though God isn’t listening and we start to wonder if God has abandoned us in our moment of deepest need. Some people see so much hardship that they reject the very idea of the existence of God. “Would a loving God allow this?” they wonder. That’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s one we do struggle with from time to time. Leith Andersen, in a book uncomfortably entitled When God Says No, writes that,
... for every story of answered prayer, there are a thousand stories of unanswered prayers - many of them asked by godly saints on their knees pleading with God. God needs no defence. But [we] need an explanation.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting an explanation. Even Job wanted an explanation. Job was an upright, blameless and genuinely good man who loved God - and yet he lost everything, and Job demanded an explanation: to paraphrase, “Why me, God? I didn’t deserve this!” And Job was right! He didn’t deserve any of the terrible things that had happened to him - and isn’t that so often the case? Bad things happen to good people, and there doesn’t seem to be any justice in it. We say that God is good, but then we’re confronted by the reality that life isn’t fair. When we face that contradiction - when we feel that we’ve been treated unfairly by God, whose goodness we so passionately believe in - what can we do? Job had been talking to three of his friends. Friends are supposed to support you, but their advice was that Job should repent. They assumed that Job was being punished for something, but Job knew better. He didn’t deserve what had happened. It was unfair, there was no justice in it and so instead of repenting, Job argued with God! He was mad, and he let God know it! That’s an important lesson, I think - it’s OK to be angry with God, and when we’re angry with God we don’t just have to swallow it and mouth pious words that we really don’t feel at that moment in time - we can tell God we’re angry. That’s a good thing - because all of us feel unfairly treated by God sometimes, and if we deny that, our anger and resentment against God builds to the point at which it destroys our relationship with God. And feeling anger toward God at least gives us a chance of rebuilding our relationship with God, because if we’re angry with God we’re believing that there’s a God there to be angry with.
The most frustrating thing, perhaps, is that generally speaking God doesn’t argue back. As every person who’s ever been married knows, it’s a lot more satisfying to argue with someone when the one you’re arguing with shouts back at you! But God doesn’t do that, and in part that’s why Job confesses that he’s terrified. His terror doesn’t spring from the awful things that have been happening to him, but because of the sudden distance he feels from God. He’s suddenly discovered that he can’t find God anywhere, no matter where he looks; no matter which way he turns. God just seems strangely absent. He’s angry and he’s frustrated and he’s frightened - and those feelings grow because he can’t find God, even though he knows that God is everywhere. That sense of God’s absence when your life has been devoted to God is overwhelming. Because - you know - God knows everything; God is aware of our troubles. Why shouldn’t we be angry with God for not taking them away? Well, as I suggested last week, if belief in God took away all our problems then our relationship with God would be a sham, based not on love but on gain. The mark of a true relationship isn’t selfish gain, but selfless commitment, and the love of God is shown not by God taking away our troubles but rather by God sharing our troubles.
As Christians, perhaps reflecting on Job helps us understand Jesus better. God became incarnate in Jesus to bridge the gap between the human and the divine. Faith in Jesus assures us that God is with us; it tells us that God is not so removed from us as to be unable to understand our troubles. Here, perhaps, is where we begin to understand how and why we should be thankful even in hard times - because thanks to Jesus, God is with us; because in Jesus, God became one of us; because through Jesus God understands what we feel and why we feel it because God has felt it. Jesus lived and died; Jesus suffered pain; Jesus knew the heartache of being betrayed; Jesus laughed and cried and ate and drank; Jesus loved and suffered the grief involved with losing those he loved to death; Jesus knew what it was like to have God say “no” to his heartfelt prayers - “Father take this cup from me” (another way of saying, “Please don’t let me go to the cross”); and, on the cross, Jesus knew what it was like to feel abandoned by God - “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” In so many cases, Jesus seems to ask the same question as Job - the same question we all sometimes ask - “why me, God.” When we have troubles, it can be annoying when someone says “I know what you’re going through,” because you know darn well that they don’t know what you’re going through. Usually, it’s just an empty platitude. But Jesus does understand, and when God says “I know what you’re going through,” God really means it.
It might feel sometimes as if God doesn’t answer us, but that isn’t true. There’s always an answer. It’s just that sometimes it’s an answer we don’t want to hear. Many people fall into the trap of believing that when they ask God for something, the only possible answer should be “yes,” and yet we all know that “no” is an equally valid answer to any request. When people speak of unanswered prayer, what they really mean is that they didn’t get the answer they wanted, but God is not a genie in a bottle who pops out and offers to grant our every wish. That’s a fairy tale - God is real! The answer we want won’t always be the answer we get. A child might want chocolate cake for breakfast - but any responsible parent will say no - because even though the chocolate cake would taste good to the child, it wouldn’t be good for the child. And, hopefully, the child eventually grows up and learns why they couldn’t have chocolate cake for breakfast. Faith is similar. Perhaps the important thing is that with God’s help we learn from the troubles we face rather than simply having God make it all better. After all, it’s really “no” that teaches us about relationships - that they’re not about getting; they’re about giving. That they hold together in good times and in bad times. That there would be no relationship between God and us if God simply gave and we simply took.
After the end of World War II, a message was found scrawled on the wall of a basement in Cologne, Germany where many Jews had been hidden in a desperate attempt to escape the Holocaust. In those horrible times, an anonymous author had written these words: “I believe in the sun even if it isn't shining. I believe in love even when I am alone. I believe in God even when He is silent.” Today, as Christians, we believe and we give thanks to God because whatever our circumstances and whatever our lot in life, God is good. We give thanks to God because through Jesus God is always with us, even if we sometimes raise a few barriers. We give thanks to God because God is our God and we are God’s people - even if we sometimes get a bit frustrated and even angry with each other. We give thanks to God even if, sometimes, God responds to our prayers with the answer we don’t want to hear. So, whatever your circumstances this weekend and whatever has been happening in your lives, I wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving. Give thanks, indeed, because God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God!
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