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Fleming Rutledge is a preacher and teacher known throughout the mainline Protestant denominations of the US, Canada and parts of the UK. She is the author of six books and has received a grant from the Louisville Foundation to complete a book about the meaning of the Crucifixion.
One of the first women to be ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church, she served for fourteen years on the clergy staff at Grace Church on Lower Broadway at Tenth Street, New York City. A native of Franklin, Virginia, Mrs. Rutledge has been married for forty-five years and has two daughters and two grandchildren.
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What Job SawTrinity Church, New Orleans
WHAT JOB SAW
Sermon by Fleming Rutledge Second Sunday of Easter 2007
Then Job answered the Lord: “I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted…[1] Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know… I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Revised Standard Version)
I know you can do all things and nothing you wish is impossible… I have spoken of the unspeakable, and tried to grasp the infinite… I had heard of you with my ears, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust. (translation by Stephen Mitchell)
—Job 42:1-6
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I have chosen today’s text from the Book
of Job, an unusual and challenging selection for the Easter season. If God
wills, something new may come forth from it for us today. I have prayed all
last week that the Holy Spirit will be the interpreter, so that the words from
the book of Job may become the Word of God this morning for
I wonder if we could all take just a moment to see if you can recall an incident when you made a big statement in public about something or other and then found out later that you didn’t know what you were talking about. Or maybe you were sounding off about some subject, like the causes of the Civil War for instance, and then learned that the person across the table from you had written several scholarly books about the Civil War. When something like that happens to us, if we have any sense at all, we feel pretty small and embarrassed.
This morning’s text comes at the very end of the book of Job. Job is the man who has lost everything: home, business, family, and now he has got a hideous skin disease. Job’s friends come to comfort him, but the more they talk the more Job resists them and their pious platitudes. Job endures their windy words as long as he can, and then makes his last-ditch stand. The sum of his passionate outcries is a demand that God respond to him.
Well, God responds to him. God appears out of a whirlwind and addresses Job directly. When this happens, the result is astonishing: Job simply sets aside all his great sufferings and abandons all the many words he has spoken. I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. After this, Job speaks no more. His mouth is stopped. I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
We need to get one problem out of the way to start with. In this translation Job says, I despise myself. I don’t think we can tolerate this in our culture where we talk incessantly about self-esteem. But many have noted that the Hebrew original really shouldn’t be translated that way. Some have suggested, “I despise my words.”[2] My own teacher, who was a noted interpreter of the Book of Job, proposed, “I melt away.”[3] And a respected modern translator puts it this way: “I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.”[4] This makes the point best. What happens to Job is some sort of radical, life-changing humility before God. That’s what the book means. God has come to meet Job, and nothing is the same after that.
Job has demanded an answer from God, and God has answered him. God’s answer is no answer at all, and yet, much to the mystification of the modern reader, Job seems more than satisfied. His response is so dramatically different from anything that he has been saying before that the careful listener is stunned into silence along with him as he says,
I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. I had heard of you with my ears, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust. (RSV and Mitchell translations)
The season of Lent began
on Ash Wednesday, seven weeks ago, with these traditional words: “Dust thou
art, and unto dust thou shalt return.” Today, on this high holy day of the
Easter season, we hear the words “I am comforted that I am dust.” The season is
bracketed by dust. We begin and end in dust. In the creation story from Genesis
we read that the Lord God formed Adam from the dust of the earth. You don’t
have to reject evolutionary science to understand the symbolic meaning of this.
As St. Paul
says, the first man, Adam, was a “man of dust”(I Corinthians 15:47). Ashes to
ashes. Dust we are, and to dust we return.[5] That is
what Paul is saying in his Resurrection chapter in First Corinthians. As
creatures of the earth—men and women of dust—we are subject to Sin and Death. That
is why, as Paul writes, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the
At the beginning of this sermon we were remembering times when we made fools of ourselves in front of a group, acting as if we knew something about a subject when the real expert was standing right there. What would we do in a situation like that? It would depend on our level of insecurity. We might just shrink back hoping that no one would notice. We might laugh nervously and try to make a joke of it. We might bluster and say well, actually, we knew the real stuff all along but weren’t bothering to say it in this company. Or, if we are really secure in ourselves we would say something like this: “Look, I’m totally embarrassed. I didn’t know what I was talking about and I retract what I said.”
Now multiply that to the nth power to understand what has happened to Job. He and his so-called friends (“Job’s comforters”) have been yammering on and on for days and days about God and about the meaning of it all, and then suddenly God sends a northeaster ahead of himself to announce his arrival. The friends seem to disappear; we don’t know where they went. Only Job is present when God begins to speak. God grants him a personal audience. That’s what Job has been demanding all along—that God would hear him, answer him, respond to his cries of distress.
Virtually all interpreters agree that the book of Job gives no answer at all to the problem of suffering. The voice out of the whirlwind passes over it altogether. What God says is, basically: Job, can you create the world that I have created? Look at it! Look at the wonderful things I have made, the snow and the rain, the stars in the firmament, the doors of the sea? Can you make the sun come up or the planets move in their orbits? Can you even imagine, let alone create, all the amazing beasts of the field and the sea? If you can do that, then surely you don’t need me; your own flesh and blood can save you! (40:14)
Then Job answered the Lord: I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know… I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee… I am comforted that I am but dust.
All through his long speeches, Job has been struggling against the remoteness of the God who has hidden his face. “This….eclipse of the divine light is the source of his abysmal despair. And the abyss is bridged the moment [he] is permitted to see…and this becomes a new foundation.”[6]
It’s important to notice that although Job says that he has seen God with his eyes, that’s a figure of speech. He hasn’t seen God at all, in the literal sense.[7] When the Bible speaks of people “seeing” God, it means that their inner understanding has been opened—by God. When John Newton wrote, in his famous hymn “Amazing Grace,” I “was blind, but now I see,” he didn’t meant that he was literally blind. He meant that the eyes of his understanding had been opened by the Spirit and he had come to know Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. When Job says he has “seen” God, he means that he has heard and understood God’s voice. That’s really important. We “see” God through his Word. And his Word comes to us from the faithful reading and preaching of Scripture. In this living Word, God makes himself present to us just as surely as he does in the Eucharist.
In the final analysis, the Book of Job is asking this great question: Is there a living God beyond what we can imagine? Is there a Being independent of us, beyond the boundaries of earthly life and earthly struggle? Is there a God who speaks with a voice that is not simply projected out of our human religious consciousness?[8] Is there a God who can deliver us from the dust? Job’s great longing is for revelation. He craves a God who is really God. He wants to be shown that God has a power that he cannot discern in the world that he knows.[9] That is why he is different from his friends, whose entire message is bound up with the world that they know where there are “explanations” for everything.[10]
Now if God had answered Job in the way that we would expect, with soothing explanations and comforting reassurances, then the answer to the question, Is there a God beyond what we can imagine? would have to be, No. Anyone can imagine a God who does what we expect. The reason that so many people have complained that God’s answer to Job is no answer at all is that they want a God who fits their preconceptions. Job, however, is manifestly satisfied. The God who is really God has come to him and has revealed himself as the one who was already present, already at work before there was anyone to imagine him. God is the author of creation; the creation is not the author of God. This was revealed to Job by the living voice and presence of God’s own self. That was enough.
There is a wonderful link between the passage from Job and the Gospel lesson this morning. The disciple Thomas was not interested in hearing what the other disciples had to say about the Resurrection. Very much like Job, he refused to be satisfied until he got a personal response from the Son of God. If he didn’t get one, he would not believe. When Jesus therefore came and stood before him, Thomas hushed up in the same way that Job did, and for the same reason: God had revealed himself from a domain beyond the grave that Thomas could not have imagined for himself.[11] The living Son of God had appeared to him personally,. Thomas’ response is the pinnacle of Christian affirmation, spoken in the highest language of the Bible: My Lord and my God.
I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…The message of the Resurrection is indeed too wonderful for us. Flesh and blood cannot inherit it. It is grasped only by faith. Through the Word of God the Holy Spirit creates such faith in those who gladly hear the message.
There is a well-loved hymn that’s not in the Episcopal hymnal. I suspect it’s a bit too melodramatic and emotive for us. But if we listen to these words together, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, they will sum up the response of Job:
O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder Consider all the works thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy pow’r throughout the universe displayed; Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee: How great thou art, How great thou art![12]
AMEN.
[1] The passage is tricky because the words of Job are interrupted twice with repetitions of the questions that God asked Job. For the sake of clarity, these words of God are omitted here. [2] The Hebrew word meaning “I abhor” has no object, so the object must be inferred. “I abhor myself” (KJV) or “I despise myself” (RSV and NRSV) are not really the best guesses. [3] There is no consensus on the translation of 42:6. Other suggestions include “I am dissolved,” “I am poured out,” “I am smitten/struck down” and “I esteem myself dust and ashes.” (Marvin H. Pope, Job, Anchor Bible series, New York: Doubleday, 1965). Samuel Terrien, who was my teacher, writes in his commentary that it is not a matter of Job’s retracting his words or despising himself. The point is that Job has had “a devastating encounter with... ‘the Holy One.’ (Terrien, commentary on Job in The Interpreter’s Bible, New York: Abingdon, 1954). Although The Interpreter’s Bible fell out of fashion not long after it was published, Terrien’s commentary on Job is one of three or four in the 12 volumes widely considered to be first-rate and of lasting value. [4] Stephen Mitchell, Into the Whirlwind (New York: Doubleday, 1979). Also published with an Introduction as The Book of Job (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987). [5] In
the context of the agony of New
Orleans, it might seem more suitable to speak of
beginning in water and returning to water. This imagery also finds a place in
the Scripture. In the first letter of Peter we read that Christian baptism
corresponds to Noah’s flood, when Noah and his family were “saved through
water” (I Peter 3:20-21). God brought them out of the catastrophe into a new
life of spaciousness and blessing. Baptism is like this. [6] Martin Buber, “A God Who Hides His
Face,” in The Dimensions of Job, ed.
N. Glatzer. [7] In the few references to “seeing God” that we find in the Old Testament, there is always some intermediary manifestation—a sapphire pavement (Exodus 24:10-11), an angel (Genesis 32:30), a “train” of seraphim (Isaiah 6:1), a “vision” (Numbers 12:8). Not even Moses, to whom God came closer than to anyone else, “saw” God unequivocally, despite the phrase “face to face” (Exodus 33:11), an expression meant to convey the intimate access that God granted to Moses alone among all his servants (Numbers 12:8). What he saw was “the form of the Lord” (Numbers 12:8), or it may have been something like “the appearance of the glory of the Lord” (Exodus 24:17)—deliberate circumlocutions that manage to convey a sense of the real presence of God while avoiding a suggestion of an unmediated presence. When Moses came down from the mountain after talking with God “mouth to mouth” (Numbers 12:8) he had to put a veil over his face to protect the people from the blinding glory of the Lord. A fuller account of the impossibility of seeing God directly is given in Exodus 33:20-23: The Lord said to Moses, You cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live…I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen. [8] This point is made especially well by
Thomas G. Long in “Job: Second Thoughts in the [9] Calvin, Sermons From Job, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979, 123.. [10] And so, at the end of the book God commends Job and rebukes the friends. [11] Notice that, contrary to what the artists of the ages have painted and sculpted, Thomas never touched the Lord’s wounds. He didn’t have to. The gracious word of Christ was enough. [12] Bill McKibben directed my attention to this hymn in his marvellous (though admittedly tendentious) little book about God’s response to Job, The Comforting Whirlwind (Eerdmans). The hymn is not in the Episcopal hymnal, but is found in numerous others including Lift Every Voice and Sing. Related: |
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