Under the Big Top
By Rev. Daniel A. Smith
October 04, 2009
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Lessons: Job 1-2
I wonder how many of you are familiar with the playwright and one-time Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish. In 1959, he won a Pulitzer for his powerful stage adaptation of the Book of Job entitled J.B. Though I have yet to see it myself, what I read of it this week made we want to petition some local theatres to bring it to town. The setting itself would be worth the price of admission. Were it around the corner at the A.R.T. say, the curtains would open to a scene of an old, dilapidated circus tent. Don’t you love it already? Job under the big top! I for one can’t imagine a more fitting venue to hold the almost comically absurd and tragic tensions that lie at the heart of Job’s story.
Act I: Scene I of this play offers a lively exchange between two elderly circus vendors, Mr. Zuss and Mr. Nickels. One sells balloons and the other sells popcorn. In order to amuse themselves, they take to an empty stage in the deserted tent and proceed to inhabit the roles of God and Satan. The two start plucking lines from the opening two chapters of Job, the Book’s prologue. They briefly wonder who will take on the role of Job until they come to a shared realization that “there is always someone to play Job.” Amen to that! Eventually the limelight switches off Zuss and Nickles, and lo and behold, a seemingly devout and successful businessman named J.B. appears sitting across the tent at a table with his wife Sarah and their five children. You can guess what happens next. Tragedy upon tragedy befalls poor old J.B. He loses his bank, his health, his children. His so-called friends come offering so-called advice.
Meanwhile, Zuss and Nickles punctuate the various scenes with a mix of friendly banter and biting theological commentary about the nature of God and human suffering. At one point, Nickles belts out a song that captures the stories central paradox: “If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God!”
Indeed, one of the reasons why I like this play is because it picks up so many of the theological struggles we find in the book of Job and in life. I wonder how many times you have found yourself playing the part of Job in that sometimes surreal, sometimes tragic circus of your own life? I wonder how many times you’ve wondered whether God is really God? For how could God who is supposedly all-good and all-powerful allow us and our good friends and beloved family members to sit in so many dungheaps? The cries of why me, why him, why her are almost impossible to suppress, even when we have the wisdom to ask why not me, why not him and why not her? Another theme that runs through Job and J.B. alike is that of integrity. In particular, how do we maintain integrity as people of faith during times of trial? How do we avoid feeling foolish when we wait desperately for even a drop of God’s mercy, let alone the streams and wells and oceans about which we so often sing?
Over the course of the Book, Job and God both engage this question of integrity and they change considerably as a result. Did you notice how Job starts off here? The first two chapters of prologue read more like a legend, where Job shows up us as this almost repulsively perfect human being, supposedly blameless, morally upright, a man with so-called perfect integrity who turned away from evil. Meanwhile God begins the story looking just the opposite, like some kind of organized crime boss in a backroom meeting. What’s that’s Satan? You think you can turn my Job? Go ahead. Rough him up all you want. Just do me a solid and spare his life! God comes off like a complete jerk in this story! Both God and Job at this point are caricatures of themselves, stick figures that the writer sets up so he can take them down later.
Karl Jung and others have noted that the character of Satan in this story may well be a manifestation of God’s own doubts about human faithfulness and obedience, a “dark side” of God that reveals that while God can control evil, God can never really destroy it! Is this a rare view of God’s own insecurities and shadows?
When it comes Job and his seemingly two dimensional description, the scholar Stephen Mitchell offers this helpful perspective. He writes:
“As Maimonides was the first to point out, Job is a good man, [but] not a wise one. The ascription of “perfect integrity,” which both the narrator and “the Lord” make, seems valid only in a limited sense. The Hebrew says tam v’-yashar, which literally means “whole (blameless) and upright.” Well, yes: Job has never committed even the most venial sin, in action or in thought.…In a broader sense, though, Job is not whole. He is as far from spiritual maturity as he is from rebellion. Rebelliousness — the passionate refusal to submit — is, [after all] one of the qualities we admire in the Job of [the later chapters].”
We can note that neither God nor Job come across here as the models of integrity we should expect, at least not at the beginning. Eventually, though, they start to get real. Their stick figures get fleshed out. Do you remember when the real Job finally appears on the scene, where he gets his courage up and his spiritual mojo working? “Be quiet now,” he eventually says to his friends. “Let me speak; whatever happens will happen. I will take my flesh in my teeth, hold my life in my hands. [God] may kill me, but I won’t stop; I will speak the truth, to [God’s] face!”
And do you remember when the real God finally shows up, in chapter 38, bearing almost no resemblance to the God of the prologue? In response to Job’s plea for God’s presence, God ushers forth some of the most majestic poetry in all the Bible. Speaking from a whirlwind, God asks the plaintiff Job “and where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth, when I shut the seas with doors, when I fathered the rain and gave birth to hoarfrost of heaven?” The Book of Job may end up being about the scale and the mystery and the majesty of God’s creation and about our relatively small place in it. But the Book of Job begins though with some basic lessons about how bring integrity and honesty into a relationship with a God who doesn’t always play by our rules.
One more character who is notable for how real she is right off the bat is Job’s wife. Given the unbelievably distorted, funhouse versions of a perfect Job and a downright cruel God which begin the story, Job’s wife offers something of a hinge on which the questions of integrity turns. Though she is sadly nameless, though she speaks but a few lines that Job immediately puts her down as sounding like “any foolish woman,” she ultimately utters more wisdom in this passage than Job and God combined! In chapter 2, verse 9, Job’s wife says to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity?” It’s a double-edged sword that goes right to the heart of the passage. She knows Job is good, but she also knows he’s naïve. She’s waiting for him to break through his perfect integrity, his well-protected self image, and the fact that he’s always gotta be right. She wants him to find a deeper, more down-and-dirty life of faith that doesn’t have all the answers. She wants him to shed his stick figure God that is too quickly defined as all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. While neither of them see the absurd circus of conversation that is taking place above them on that heavenly stage, Job’s wife knows in her gut that God is not as Godlike or as good as Job would like to think. Come on, man, she says! Get real! Look around at the devastation of your life. Stand up to God. Curse the freakish albeit divine being who made these things happen. Die to your stick figure piety! Take the freedom God has already given you and rebel already! You might just find it moves you and God into a relationship that has more integrity for you both!
The question Job’s wife asks him and all of us is how can we have integrity as people of faith given the calamities that befall us? Its not by some soft acquiescence. Not by capitulation nor complacency to the injustices of our world. It’s not by letting God off the hook through references to God’s so-called mysterious ways. It’s not even by thinking that the suffering we endure is meant to teach us something. What we learn from Job who was good and from his wife who was wise, is that integrity and spiritual maturity aren’t so much about doing right as they are about being real. It’s not so much about being righteous as allowing ourselves to be rebellious! It’s about naming our fundamental resistance to the kind of existential injustice and suffering that comes out of the blue, for no apparent reason. Taking these lamentations and concerns to God, and trusting that God can bear them may be the most faithful posture we can muster!
Only when Job lets his hidden anxieties to the fore, only when he confronts the whirlwind of pain and chaos within himself, does the voice of God respond, bellowing from the whirlwind. This is the Job we love and respect. Gone are his upright ways and his moral superiority. Gone is his so-called perfect integrity. What takes its place is a beat up and broken down faith, one with a far deeper sense of integrity that no one can take away from him. “He becomes decidedly not-whole - broken in body and heart. He becomes not-upright: pulled down into the dust by the gravity of his anguish.” Most importantly, he gets real with himself and with God.
Sisters and brothers, there is always someone to play Job. Even if we haven’t had our turn yet, chances are we will, and the role is likely to evolve for us too. The wife’s question will speak to us. How do we persist with utmost integrity? How do we bring our full and most broken selves to the table, even to this table where Jesus meets us and models for us a broken body, a life outpoured, a vulnerable and even angry cry to a God who he felt had even forsaken him. To have integrity as persons of faith in this world is not always about doing right or striving for blamelessness. To have integrity as persons of faith in this our broken world means having moments of deep-seated rebellion. It means finding that momentary mojo to speak our deepest, most heartfelt truths, come what may.
If you are still feeling some stage fright, why not try rehearsing the role when you come to this communion table. Shed whatever stick figures you may have of yourself and of God. Bring your most vulnerable and even rebellious selves. Receive the very gifts of God’s presence in this bread and cup, and find that deeper life and integrity that is more lasting and real than anything you could ever hope for or imagine. Amen.