The alternate Old Testament lectionary text for this Sunday is God’s address of Job from the whirlwind:
Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? "Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?-- when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped'?
Job 38.1-11
It is this display of ineffable, incomprehensible almightiness that finally quiets the complaints of Job.
You know the story.
Job, a man in the land of Uz, a man blessed with seven sons and three daughters, a rich man in possession of seven thousand sheep and five hundred yoke of oxen, a righteous man, blameless and upright who feared God above else, by providential decree, Job loses everything. His estate is taken from him by marauders. His home is burned by fire. His family is killed by a devastating wind.
And then, Job is plagued by a contagion and sores erupt all over his body. To make matters worse, in his suffering, Job is consoled by three insufferable friends who dispense pieties and the cold comfort of explanations.
Eventually Job explodes, indicting God for His poor job performance, “Oh that I had one to hear me! Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me!”
Job registers his grievances for thirty-five long chapters in the Book of Job. From chapter three to chapter thirty-eight, the book is nothing but Job complaining about the cosmic injustice he’s suffering and petitioning for a lawsuit hearing against God.
It’s important to point out that despite its reputation as such, the Book of Job is not an attempt to explain the mystery of suffering.
“Why do bad things happen to good people?” is not a biblical question because, as Jesus himself says, “No one is good but God, alone.”
Nor does the Book of Job intend to answer the other very modern question about God’s existence,“Is there a God given a world of such suffering?” The Book of Job simply sets to the side the question of what merits our suffering, and God’s existence is taken for granted in the book; in fact, God is the active agent of everything in the book.
The Book of Job is not an explanation.
The Book of Job is a rage against explanation.
Job does not receive the reasons for his suffering.
Job receives a revelation.
And, to the incredulity of many modern readers, that’s enough for Job.
God finally responds to Job’s indictments by appearing amidst a whirlwind summoning Job to behold not his own situation but the Creation, itself.
Taken on one level, God’s mighty address in reply to Job’s complaints sounds extraordinarily irrelevant. God never gives Job the response Job has sought. But taken on an altogether different level, God’s reply from the whirlwind renders the questions to which Job has sought answers obsolete.
God’s answer for Job is no answer at all, yet it satisfies Job totally.
Job forgets all his sufferings and grievances. Job abandons all the many words he has uttered over thirty-five chapters. Job replies sparingly to the Lord’s interrogation:
“‘I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. Therefore, I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”
God condescends. God comes to meet Job, the grandest scene Job has ever witnessed. In great power, in a display of godawful almightiness, the Lord reveals Himself to Job in a whirlwind, and that revelation reconfigures everything for Job.
Job has pleaded with God for answers about his trials and hardships, but now, face-to-face with the greatness of God, Job’s suffering is incidental to the point of no longer being interesting to him. God, says Fleming Rutledge, gives Job not answers or explanations, but a new epistemology; that is, a new way of knowing, a new way of seeing the world and his place in it.
“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise my words.””
And Job says no more.
In his commentary on the Letter to the Philippians, Karl Barth posits that Paul’s surprising and memorable declaration, “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain,” should be understood alongside God’s self-revelation to Job. What Paul attests from his cell should be heard in conjunction with how Job responds to God’s address from the whirlwind.
As the circumstances of the letter make clear, the church at Philippi has heard the news that the Apostle Paul has been arrested and sentenced to prison in Rome. His status as a Roman citizen exempted Paul from crucifixion, but his citizenship would not spare him from the executioner’s sword. The Philippian congregation had learned of Paul’s situation, and, in all likelihood, they intuited the suffering and death that lay in Paul’s future.
As the letter makes clear, they have written to Paul to inquire about his suffering. They’re worried for Paul. And, counterintuitively, Paul replies by talking about himself and his suffering not at all.
“For to me,” Paul writes in reply, “living is Christ and dying is gain.”
Paul doesn’t give them the answers they have sought. The Philippians have asked about Paul’s situation. Paul answers instead about the situation of the Gospel. “I want you to know, beloved,” Paul writes, “that what has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to everyone else that my imprisonment is for Christ…What does my suffering matter? Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in that I rejoice.”
“To live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
Can you imagine someone who has lost everything responding to an inquiry about their situation with, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain?” Can you imagine their loved ones saying to them, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain?”
Of course not. You’d think them callous or crazy.
What accounts, then, for Paul’s ability to center his life and death wholly in Christ and to center his concern not on his life or death, but on the advancement of the Gospel?
Paul, don’t forget, has lost nearly as much as Job. He’s lost his status and the community that came with it. He’s been beaten and scorned. He’s been rejected by those Christ called him to lead. He’s been shipwrecked, attacked by lions, and arrested at least three times. He’s lost his sight, and now he’s about to lose his life. But all he cares about is the spread of the Gospel, for “To live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Like Job, Paul has lost much. And like Job, Paul has suffered mightily— he bears the wounds of Christ in his own body, Paul writes to the Galatians.
But like Job, Paul has been encountered by the power and majesty, the godawful almightiness of God, and it has reconfigured everything for Paul.
When Karl Barth saw the Christians of his own time and place succumb to the idols of nationalism and nativism and racism, he said the only antidote was for the Church to rediscover “the God-ness of God.”
Having shaped God into our image, Barth meant, the Church needed to be encountered once again by the incomprehensibility of God— the God who reveals Himself from the whirlwind.
The God who cannot be conjured up by our own projections and imaginings.
The God who can only be known by us through revealing Himself to us.
Like Job, Paul has been encountered by the God-ness of God.
The God of wind and storm, fire and flood, the God who is “infinitely greater than the sum of all natural phenomenon put together,” the God who knows the number of the hairs upon your head and when the mountain goats give birth— That is the same God who reveals Himself to Paul in the resurrected flesh of the crucified Christ.
The God of the Whirlwind has revealed Himself to Paul as the Man of Sorrows. Like Job, Paul has been encountered by the Comforting Whirlwind. The treasure in the field has found him. The pearl of great price has obtained him at great cost. And, whereas, Job departs the whirlwind mute over the greatness of God, Paul rests in prison absolutely loquacious about the grace, such that, the advancement of the Gospel is now the entire meaning and measure of his existence, compared to which his own imprisonment is no longer very interesting.
He’s been given a new epistemology, a new way of knowing, a new way of seeing the world and his place in it. And his place in the world— your place in the world— is in Christ.
Paul doesn’t mean that metaphorically.
That’s why he can say, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
Living or not, on account of Jesus Christ, your true location in God’s Creation will not change, cannot change. As Paul tells the Colossians, your life is hidden with God in Jesus Christ. You belong to Christ, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, and Christ belongs to God; therefore, death holds no terrors. There are no Christians in hell, because all are already and forever in Christ.
And because you are in Christ, Paul tells the Corinthians, the only difference between life and death is that in death you will see what now can only be known by faith. This is the sense in which Paul can speak of death as “gain.” Or, as Paul puts it to the Roman church, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”
Notice the connection—
Our future is incomparable because it is in Christ Jesus who is himself the God beyond comprehension.
If Job leaves from his encounter with the Lord with every single one of his questions still unanswered, then there are many questions to which this mortal life will not yield answers. Of course, if God had given us an explanation for the suffering of the world, then, as Stanley Hauerwas says, we should worship that explanation.
Instead God the Father has given us his Son and the Son has given us his Spirit, three-in-one, the blessed Trinity, an incomprehensible reality which nevertheless meets us in the Word, in Water and Wine and Bread and which may— just wait and see— reconfigure all your questions.
From his own prison cell in Nazi Germany, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend, “Only the Suffering God can help us.”
He was talking about the God-ness of God.
Only the God who is beyond our understanding, a carpenter born to Mary who yet knows the time the mountain goats give birth, can save us.
When we encounter God, even today, it gives us a new way of knowing, a new way of looking at the world. Who can hold on to their sorrows when confronted with the Almighty God?
Thank you for unpacking all these truths. I think of Psalm 8:4, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them!" Mindful of us and even loves us! So inscrutable, but I am very grateful!