By Reverend H. Frederick Gough, KCSMA
“I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee…”
Those words are the crux of the Book of Job, the literary masterpiece of the Old Testament Wisdom Tradition. Although the Book of Job is forty-two chapters of some of the best literature ever written, and has been studied in college literature courses as such, the pivotal words are those of Chapter 42, verse 5, “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee…”
Now, finally, Job meets God. We know from the preceding chapters that Job is a learned man, a good and capable man. He is knowledgeable in the Scriptures, and in the sacred writings and commentaries. He is also knowledgeable in ways of making things work. He has, we would say, administrative gifts. He is courageous. He doesn’t give up in the face of monumental adversities. He is good. He has a sense of justice and a sense of compassion. He sounds, in many ways, like what we would call a “renaissance man,” equipped with a broad spectrum of gifts, talents and virtues.
What he did not have was a personal relationship with God. He had instead, a hearsay relationship with God – and, you know, if you’ve ever watched Perry Mason, or the People’s Court, or any of the many Court TV shows, you know that hearsay is inadmissible as evidence. I suspect that all of us have known folks who had more than we did whether it was health, wealth, talent or all of the above. It happens that two of my friends of adolescence were bankers’ sons. Both of those fellows were talented, educated, capable, bright and witty. One has already served a felony sentence in prison. The other became unemployed in 1981 and has just sort of drifted about for years supported by a wife teaching school. There are a lot of Job-like qualities about them.
We all know people like that – folks who seem to have so much going for them, folks who seem to let it slip through their fingers. You look into their eyes and nobody’s home. There’s no sense of purpose, no sense of meaning. And we want to shake them out of their trance, jar them from their lethargy, and make real people of them again. I remember the promise those two, and many like them, held, and range between disgust and despair at the waste of the wit, the charm, the intellectual sparkle and creativity, buried within.
Their knowledge of God, as you may have guessed, was hearsay, like Job’s. One of them indeed, a seminary classmate of mine who dropped out, has read far more theology than I, reads the Old Testament in Hebrew, in fact. He knows a lot about God. There’s nothing wrong with that.Indeed, it can be helpful. But it doesn’t give him an eternal purpose. Until he knows God, makes real in his life God’s purpose for it, he will drift.
We, who have to work for a living, can mask that drift, that lack of a sense of our life’s meaning. We can say our purpose is to put food on the table, a roof over our heads, clothes on our bodies. Once we get beyond survival we can always say our purpose is to put the kids through college, build security for retirement, or even a cottage at the beach. We can hide our lack of a sense of eternal purpose, our incomprehension of God’s purpose for us, even from ourselves. We, too, can trudge through life, go to work, go to church, read the Bible, give to the poor, do all the fine things Job did – and not know God. And perhaps the better we are at doing all those things, oddly enough, it may be the less likely we are really to get acquainted with God. The more success we attribute to ourselves, the less room we leave for God in our lives.
“I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee…”
Job didn’t see God literally. God was speaking to him from a whirlwind. The wind is such an exquisite vehicle for the discussion of faith. But how do we know God by faith? Do I believe in the wind? Of course! Do I see the wind? Of course not. Even with my best glasses I can’t see the movement of air molecules. How do I know it’s there? Sometimes I can see the dust it carries. Sometimes I can see the leaves move. Sometimes I can feel its comforting touch. Sometimes I can feel its insistent push. We know wind only by its evidence and through faith in the cause of that evidence.
So Job came to know God for himself. So we may come to know God, not by hearsay, but through faith based on evidence. And the result of Job’s encounter with God? “therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” Suddenly, Job realizes what a little pond it is in which he has been a big fish. It is not the usual collection of sins of which Job repents. He’s been a good man, remember. It’s the recognition that even his own goodness is nothing beside the God he has not troubled til now to know. He has compartmentalized God – in theological study, in liturgical observance, in all the many devices we have at our disposal for limiting God’s claim on our lives, all the techniques we use to keep God from living with us.
And suddenly, this arbiter of indescribable power, this God, deigns to speak with Job. And the compartments Job has created for Him, collapse. All the walls Job, like each of us, perhaps, has so laboriously built to keep God in His place, come tumbling down. One interesting thing about that is, that, just as with Thomas, confronted by Jesus the Living God in the 20th Chapter of John, there is no mention of fear. In both cases, Job’s and Thomas’, the knowledge of, the encounter with, the God of all power reveals Him as the God of all love. As the dams and dikes of our construction give way to God’s power, we are flooded with His love.
This is the Easter message. Now we know about Job’s encounter with God. Now we have heard once again about Thomas’ confrontation with the Risen Christ.
Now may we watch for the mighty wind of the Spirit in our own lives, see the leaves move in the course of our days, feel the gentle touch, respond to the insistent push of God’s Spirit as He calls us to know Him, to make room for Him in our priorities and purposes. He comes to be a part of us in prayer, in communion and beyond. He comes to live with you and with me.
Thanks be to God!
