You likely have some familiarity with the Book of Job, and some awareness of how it struggles with the mighty question of suffering, and especially undeserved suffering. Way back when (and indeed, still today for many people), the mathematics of God’s blessings and lack thereof were rather straightforward. Obedience to God’s laws and covenants brings prosperity, safety, health and happiness; disobedience brings a curse. Wealthy folk are that way because they are good; where people live in sin, tsunamis strike. And yet here we meet Job, a man acknowledged by all, including by God, to be sinless and blameless – and yet immeasurable suffering lands on his doorstep.

In today’s reading, the prologue to this lengthy book, there is no hint of fairness. Job is blameless and upright, a model of piety. The scene quickly shifts to the heavenly court, where one of the heavenly beings – being neither human nor God – decides to stir things up. God has been bragging on Job, talking about how pious and upright he is, and Satan argues that of course he is, God has blessed Job in every way. Take away all the goodies, Satan argues, and then see what happens. God goes along and lets Satan have his way with Job – he loses it all, but still maintains his piety. Which is where we now take up the account….

And yet we can still relate to the idea of being in the hands of someone we trust. When we sing, as we did earlier, “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands”, many of us find comfort and security in the image of being held in the palm of God’s hand.

“In whose hands?” is the central question of our reading from Job today. In the heavenly court, Satan says to God, “stretch out your hand” and physically harm Job and watch how he will curse God to God’s face; in response God gives Job into Satan’s “power” – the word translated as “power” here is the same word as earlier translated “hand”. Job and his wife are unaware of the cosmic game being played by God and Satan, but as Job takes in hand a potsherd to scrape his festering sores, he unknowingly recapitulates the theme of being in God’s hands, saying, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?”

Mrs. Job is often contrasted unfavorable with Job; many see an impatient Mrs. Job in contrast to her supposedly patient husband. But let’s try to see things from Mrs. Job’s standpoint. In a time when popular religion posited an arbiter-king God, all-powerful and rewarding strict obedience to his laws and meting out punishment when those laws were transgressed, she could read the tea leaves as well as anyone. In the course of a few short days she had lost her seven sons and three daughters, seven thousand camels and three thousand sheep, not to mention all their oxen, donkeys and servants. Her husband, as everyone knew, was a paragon of virtue, upright and blameless. So of course – are you seeing where this line of reasoning is heading? -- it all had to be her fault. Somehow she had transgressed, if not with her lips than at least with her heart, if not in deed then perhaps in intent. And yet none of this causes her to speak up or to complain, to rebel or cry “unfair!”. Because her God was being her God, her God was acting in just the ways he was supposed to.

Mrs. Job’s theological world-view was as comforting then as it can be for some today. In what can seem to be a chaotic and arbitrary and even mysterious world, it provides a sense of order and consistency and predictability. And yet the problem with this sort of mechanistic theology, of this Mechanical God, is that when tragedy strikes or misfortune befalls, we have nobody left to blame but ourselves. We didn’t pray the right way. We had too little faith. God doesn’t like me. There is no God. When we turn the living God into a mechanical God, whose actions are dictated by our actions or failures to act, then eventually we are left to wonder, in whose hands are we, really – God’s, or just our own?

It is not until Job is himself afflicted with loathsome sores from head to foot that Mrs. Job turns on God, that she unleashes her anger, that she is driven to speech. Because she now see that her mechanical God is no longer playing by the rules – despite Job’s piousness, despite his living by all the rules, he has been struck down and they have lost everything. Just as a child, in response to blatant cheating in a board game, might flip the board over and stalk away, Mrs. Job wants to walk away from this unreliable God. “Why persist in your integrity, Job?”, she demands, what is the point? We don’t really know God like we thought we did, and this “integrity” which you cling to no longer matters. So curse God and die, Job, because the God you tried to play the game by was never really there in the first place. The very one you trusted, the primary source of your comfort and consolation, has turned on you without cause.

Mrs. Job feels betrayed and abandoned by God, feels alone in an arbitrary and cruel world.

Carol Bechtel, writing in Glimpses of Glory, conveys a similar sense of betrayal: The sliver was a wicked one. It was deeply embedded in our six-year-old daughter’s index finger. The moment of truth had arrived….Ellen now sat constrained on her father’s lap, while I stood poised between them with the tweezers. The operation commenced, a fact of which our entire neighborhood must have been aware. After several seconds of incoherent screaming (it seemed longer), our daughter wailed, “I want my mommy!” My husband and I exchanged stress-laden smiles. “You’ve got her, honey,” I said, wielding the tweezers. Ellen gulped for air and tried again. “I want my daddy!” “I’m afraid I’m in on this, too,” said her father, grimly. Ellen’s stunned silence was but the calm before the storm. Betrayal. A sense of utter and absolute betrayal was, I suspect, what fed Ellen’s screams the most at that moment. Never mind that we had patiently explained the necessity of removing the sliver. For her, the reality of the tweezers loomed larger than logic. That it was her mother who wielded them made it exponentially worse. (Cited in Resources for Preaching and Worship Year B, Westminster John Knox Press, p.234-5).

Legalistically following the rules has led Mrs. Job to a dead-end, and she has come face to face not with her God, but with a sense of betrayal, abandonment, and emptiness. Following the rules has not shielded her from pain, from loss, from sickness, from humiliation. And so no wonder that she can no longer pay allegiance to a god who she had thought could be controlled by her actions and even the intent of her heart. Now she must acknowledge her absolute vulnerability to a God who is unpredictable and sovereign and out of her hands. She must confront the reality that she is, in fact, on the ash heap with Job and yet, paradoxically, still in the hands of God, from whom she might receive both innumerable blessings and, yes, immeasurable, indescribable loss. She must take her first steps in a journey many after her – including her husband Job -- have been led to take as well.

It will be a long road for Mrs. Job, and a long road for Job as well – at least another 40 chapters. And it can be a long road for us as well, as we struggle, in our lives, with not only the mystery of undeserved suffering, but also with the even larger mystery of how suffering can even bring a person into the presence of God in a state of worship, full of wonder, love, and praise, ready to take not only the good days from God, but also the bad days as well.

Let us pray. Ever mysterious God, how hidden are your ways, and yet how hungry we are for answers that go beyond the conventional wisdom, that get right to the heart of the matter, and of you. Save us from closing off the questions with pat answers and empty platitudes; comfort us in our unknowing and our searching; and whether you speak to us out of the whirlwind or the deep silence or not, stay with us, be present in our strivings to know. Amen.