[Job said:] "O that my words were written down!
O that they were inscribed in a book!
O that with an iron pen and with lead
they were engraved on a rock forever!
For I know that my vindicator lives
and that in the end he will stand upon the earth;
and after my skin has been destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.” (Job 19:23-27a)
Does death get the last word in the world... or does life?
Does injustice win out in the end over justice, or does good get the final say rather than evil?
Those might seem like abstract quandaries for armchair philosophers who don't have enough real-life worries to attend to, but really at the core of each moment of our lives are these fundamental questions. Will death and rottenness carry the day in the end, or will it be life and righteousness? And how do we know? On what basis do we come to our conclusions?
These questions are the beating heart of the book of Job, which was the source material for these verses that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday. And while the whole book is a sort of extended debate set within the story of one man's story of profound suffering, these verses get at the crux of it all. By this point in the story, Job has lost everything--his wealth, his children, his health, and even the support of his spouse. He is lamenting all of that loss, and his three friends who had come to console him at some point got tired of empathy and decided to start blaming him for his suffering, each of them basically trying to convince him that since God is just, Job's suffering must have been deserved, and all that he is going through must be because of some sin that Job has committed. Job, however, insists that he hasn't done anything to warrant all this tragedy, and he is convinced (or at least he hopes) that at the last, he will be vindicated.
The verses that many of us heard on Sunday are one of those moments in the saga where Job confidently declares his belief that at the last justice will be done, and he will be shown to have been in the right. He believes that his suffering will be revealed not to have been a divine punishment, and that it will be clear that the calamities he and his family have endured will not be the end of his story. Even if his sickness leads to his own death, he says, he believes that his "vindicator" (other translations render this word as "redeemer") will be revealed, and even beyond death, he believes that God will turn out to have been on his side. Job is both confident that he hasn't committed some terrible sin worthy of all this particular pain, and that in the end, God will ensure that things are put right. He doesn't know how that could happen--Job doesn't rattle off some list of reparations or compensation, and he doesn't exactly speak of "resurrection" the way Christian voices of much later times would. But he does have this deeply-rooted conviction that the last word will not go to death or crookedness. Somehow, he believes, life and justice get the final say. That is what leads him to keep going, to endure through times of immense pain, and to keep speaking up over against his friends, or his wife's advice to simply "curse God and die." Job will not, because he believes that death will not get the victory in the world's story, even if he can't prove it or see it.
Now, I sincerely hope that you never have to endure the kind of intense, all-encompassing kind of trauma that the book of Job describes for its main character. I hope you are spared such intense loss, grief, and devastation, and I hope that in whatever times you do have to bear suffering, that you are not surrounded by pompously pious so-called "friends" who think they know it all and invoke terrible cliches like "Everything happens for a reason," or "God won't give you more than you can handle," or "Heaven must have needed another angel." But I do think that Job's words here speak to us on the days when the world feels like a dumpster fire and when it seems like rottenness is winning the day. It is all too easy to see crookedness going unchecked and violence running roughshod over victims and to decide, "There's no justice in the world, and all that matters is who has the most power." It is tempting to believe that there's no point in being decent, fair, or honest in a world where terrible things happen and where perpetrators so often seem to get away with their crimes. It is easy to give in to despair and to give up on the hope that the world could be put right. And once we go down that road, it becomes terribly easy to justify doing whatever we feel we have to in order to get ahead. If I don't have any real hope of justice being done, and if death is going to eventually win out over everybody anyway, then it is very alluring to believe that life is just about seizing as much for ourselves as we can, stepping on as many people as we have to, and insulating ourselves from pain at the expense of others. Read the headlines or listen to the news on any given day, and you'll see just how popular that mindset is. But Job dares us to believe, in spite of the evidence, that crookedness will not win the day, and that death will not get the last word.
That's the choice we face every day: in the face of plenty of examples of violence, suffering, and death, we can either say, "All of this rottenness is inevitable, so there's no point in trying to defy it. And if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right?" or we can say, "No. I won't be complicit in any more of this. I will act as though life wins out against death in the end, and that good gets the last word rather than evil." It is a choice to see the world from a different perspective from what seems obvious, though, and sometimes it is difficult to hold onto that alternative vision. Plenty of folks will tell us we're crazy, naive, or out-of-touch to spend our energy in the work of healing rather than harming, and of seeking the good of all rather than just our own narrow self-interest. Even Job's friends try to get him to give up hope that he will be vindicated in the end and to just confess to some sin he didn't commit. But Job also reminds us that it is possible to keep living our lives even through pain, and even when all the evidence at hand suggests that the bullies win every time (including the biggest bully of them all, Death). Job's witness dares to trust that death will not get the final say, and that crookedness will not get the last word, and to make choices now in light of that hope. Like Douglas John Hall used to put it, "God reigns, all of the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding." Living by that kind of hope will always make us stand out, because it means we will be standing off to a distance from the crowd of common sense on the edge of eternity. But it is possible to see the world from there, and to keep putting one foot in front of the other in spite of all the reasons not to.
Let us dare.
O God, assure us again of your promise to bring life out of death and goodness out of evil.
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