The book of Job begins with a bird’s eye view from the heavens. God and God’s emissaries are looking down upon the earth. If we could take such a heavenly survey today, we might travel south to look upon the devastation of hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods. We would see mountain mudslides and water main breaks, flooded streets, and tornado-flattened mobile homes. We would pray for those who have lost livelihoods, homes, or loved ones. Or, we could travel across the Atlantic and look upon the rubble of Gaza, Beirut and Odessa, praying for doctors trying to repair bodies in impossible situations, families that have lost entire portions of their families, and orphaned children, hungry and alone. Wherever we went, in some form or fashion, we would witness human suffering: overwhelming in its enormity; relentless in its struggle.
Last Sunday we began a sermon series on Job, the biblical book addressing human suffering. Job lost everything dear to him: possessions, children, and health. Within the book’s opening chapters Job is reduced to a body covered in sores and a life smothered in grief. In this teaching tale, scripture exposes the ruptures that happen when convictions of God’s goodness intersect with an unjust world. Soon after his devastating losses, Job is joined by four other voices. The friends first sit with him in the shock, and then engage him in conversation. With differing viewpoints of the meaning behind Job’s calamities, they argue with one another for thirty-five or so chapters, without reaching a singular conclusion about the cause of his misfortune. Scholars who delve into Job cannot settle upon a singular core message of the book. Even its structure is contradictory, moving between prose and poetry, adding a disjoined fifth friend, restoring Job’s fortunes in the end, in a double-reversal. With all this complexity, no one sermon will probe the depths of Job’s dilemma. No sermon can answer the age-old question, “How do I reconcile a trustworthy God of love with the wreckage of my life?” Instead, for this morning, I want to speak about silence. Silence. For it is the juxtaposition of human speech and God’s silence that clamors for attention here in the middle of the book, in the middle of the mess.
In the days after devastation, silence is a gesture of compassion. Job sits in the ashes. His friends come sit beside himself. Scripture says they sat on the ground alongside him for seven days and seven nights, a number which symbolizes a totality, a wholeness of sharing in suffering together. While words were not exchanged, a message was conveyed. We care. We hurt for you. We won’t diminish your pain with attempts to cheer you up. We sit in silence beside you.
Three days after my birth, on the night of my first surgery, my parents were in the surgical waiting room when one of the pastors of their church walked by. My mom called out, “Oh, good, you are here because of Amy’s surgery.” Later she learned he hadn’t known about the surgery. He had been at the hospital to visit someone else. But he had wits enough to answer “Oh yes, I’m here.” And to sit beside them, wait along with them, until I was in recovery. Then he said, “I’ll visit you tomorrow.”
I suspect you have stories of people who showed up, sat down, brought dinner, filled the refrigerator, mowed your lawn and said little, all the while conveying everything. You are not alone in your pain.
Eventually, though, suffering moves into speech. Job tried to put words to what he has endured. His speech is raw, wounded. Essentially, he says, “I should never have been born.” A phrase uttered when life itself feels too much to bear. The friends also trade silence for speech, feeling compelled to fill up the space with explanation. They insist a reason exists for the calamity. They say, Job, you must have done something wrong. Re-examine your life. Figure out the act that set this all into motion. They try snappy encouragement, framing his life as a survival story. Pray harder. God will make it right in the end. Each message insists the world is an orderly, moral place where the wicked are punished and the righteous are rewarded. The more they persist, the wider the distance they create between themselves and their sore-afflicted friend.
It is easy, from our distance of centuries, to perceive how false their comfort is, how hollow their lines fall. Cole Arthur Riley calls such speech an attempt “to manipulate the hurting into feigned happiness.” And yet, we too create distance between the suffering of others and our protected positions, searching for errors that explain another’s misfortune. If only he hadn’t gone out into the night. If only she had curbed her impulses. A tragedy happens next door and we strain to identity what distinguishes our neighbors and ourselves.
The companions want a certain speech from Job. They seek an admission of his sins, a prayer of repentance, or a confession that God is still just. But such speech feels intolerable to Job. It would be a lie, a violation of his integrity, a betrayal of what he knows to be true. He has already lost his children, his capacity to earn a living, his livestock, and a healthy, whole body. He is not letting go of his truth. And remember, we as readers know the setup. We know Job is right. He didn’t cause this calamity; God allowed it. What does Job want? God to speak. Job longs for God’s speech for the silence of heavens conveys God’s absence.
Do you know that feeling? I can bear the pain if I can know God is caring it with me. I can walk through this trial, if I sense that God is guiding me, re-purposing the mess into a live-able solution. Life has its suffering. It is meaningless suffering, senseless suffering, the isolated, God-absent suffering, that breaks us apart.
Job cannot find God. “I go forward, God is not there. Backward, I cannot perceive God. On the left, God hides. On the right, God is not to be seen.” Another totality; this one of absence. The silence of God is deafening. It thunders through our world. Eli Wiesel recalled entering a death camp, “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.” The world roars when God is silent.
Have you ever been awoken by such pounding silence? Sat on the porch in the middle of the night, noting how the world that once felt friendly, warm and safe now is cold, menacing and deathly? Looked up at the heavens and thought no one sees my tears, no one knows the agony of my days? Why does God not move when I plea for intervention?
We, the people of God, speak often, and eloquently, about God’s closeness. Our God is a God who comes near, who is always faithful. These statements are true. But in our desire to heal the wounds of the world, we can conjure up a cozy, companionable God, neglecting the reality that God is also mysterious. God can be, as our opening hymn said, “invisible and hidden from our eyes.”
Unwilling to compromise by speaking a confession he did not believe, Job stares into the uncertainty. Some translations suggest Job says, “If only I could vanish,” suggesting he may succumb to the suffering. But a more accurate reading has Job saying, “God has made my heart faint . . . Yet I am not silenced by the darkness.” My companions may say the wrong thing. God may not reply. But I will not be silent, about my suffering, about my longing for an explanation, about my hope for God to reply.
These are defiant words of faith. They are the words of a person determined to stay in an honest relationship with God. They are the speech of one who refuses to be satisfied with cliches, half-truths, or pious platitudes and who also does not abandon their expectation that God will be responsive to human lives. I will not be silenced.
Sometime in the upcoming weeks, the memoir of Alexei Navalny will be published. Begun before he returned to Russia following the assassination attempt on his life, Navalny continued writing in prison until his death last February. I read an excerpt online this week. Reading his stark prose, one can envision him writing truth from a prison cell. Here is the truth of the injustice of his sentence, of his choice to be a witness, of his determination to stand for a better future, of his love for family and country. His memoir is an act of saying, “I will not be silenced.”
This is Job’s position before God. Job speaks, honestly, achingly, truthfully. I will not be silenced. We can extend his witness. God, before you, I will not be silent about the pain of this disease that has ravaged the body of one I love. God, before you, I will not be silent, about the awful loneliness of empty chairs, loved ones gone. God, before you, I will not silent about a world with too many wars, despite all our prayer for peace, with too many moments where evil triumphs and we feel defeated. It is an act of faith to keep speaking.
As we continue to read the story, God will, in time, speak. But for today, let’s imagine God’s silence as the wordless, tender presence of one who shares our suffering, a silence akin to the friends’ posture at the beginning of the story. I’ve come to sit beside you, share your outrage, hold your tears, and let you speak. Amen.