The Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25), October 27, 2024

“A second’s relief, and then another burst of green light. The owl screeched and fell to the floor of the cage.

….

‘Hedwig – Hedwig –’

But the owl lay motionless and pathetic as a toy on the floor of her cage. for only a few seconds. Then she stirred and popped to her feet, ruffling her feathers.”

The death of Hedwig the owl in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows saddened many fans, to the extent that one fan took it upon themselves to save Hedwig’s life by overwriting J.K. Rowling’s original words (as shown above). The same instinct may have led a redactor to append Job 42:10-17 to an initial ending of the book at verses 6, or 9. We love a happy ending, and in this one God gives him new friends, new possessions, new children, and a happily-ever-after ending with an eventual death “full of years” and surrounded by four generations of offspring.

This may be the most offensive part of the book.

At the beginning of the story, the pious and blameless man Job loses everything he has – most shockingly, his children. For almost forty verses, Job demands a hearing before God and vehemently rejects the conventional theology of his friends who insist that God only gives us what we deserve. Finally, God answers him, and Job realizes that he only comprehends a tiny fragment of the ways of God. Whether he – or the audience – ever come to understand or agree that the deaths of his children were justified is another matter.

In verses 1 to 6 Job has a conversation with himself in which he seems to imagine God’s response. In verse 2 he announces that he understands the freedom of God; in verse 3 he loosely quotes God from earlier in the book, chastising himself for earlier presuming to speak of what he did not understand. Verse 4 is God’s demand (request?) that he be quiet and listen; whether Job is imagining God’s interjection or whether God is actually speaking is unclear. Job finishes by declaring that where previously he knew only what he had heard about God, now as a result of his experiences he sees God with his own eyes; therefore he repents “in sackcloth and ashes.”

In verses 7-9, excluded from the lectionary, God responds to Job’s confession by affirming Job for his faith, and condemning Job’s friends for their shallow theology. But if we are to take the Epilogue (verses 10-17) at face value, then Job’s friends are ultimately proved correct, because God seems to reward Job’s faith – a faith based on insistence that God does not work like this! Furthermore, Job – and the reader – seems to be encouraged to simply forget about the dead and innocent children for whom Job spent forty chapters demanding justice.

If you’re like me, we rebel against this happy ending. The frequent injustice of death is on my mind given the recent loss of a neighbour and of a colleague, to a heart attack and a car accident, respectively. I recall the experience of my mother’s passing: it seemed incredible that an event which forever transformed my inner world could leave the outer world unaffected and seemingly indifferent.

I find myself wishing that Job had remained in his sackcloth and ashes. It would feel more pastorally useful as I accompany people in their grief. The ultimate refusal of the book to explain or justify his children’s death is a useful antidote to the offensively simple platitude that “God needed another angel in heaven or “at least you can have more children.” I much prefer “Sometimes bad things just happen” – it feels truer to our experience.

But why should I be any more entitled to a pat theological answer, than those who are comforted by the “easy” answers? “Sometimes bad things just happen” is as much a definitive theological statement as “God will reward the faithful.” Maybe, instead, the Epilogue’s insistence on giving Job a happy ending provides one more hermeneutical twist. It reminds us to have a sense of humility about any answer, including the answer that denies the possibility of answers.

There is always more to the story: life goes on, regardless of whether we want it to or not. Regardless of whether it makes a better story or a more satisfying sermon to leave Job on his ash heap. If this story is about the freedom of God, then God is free to give the good as well as the bad. Despite our sense that the world has ended when grief crushes us, we are not the centre of the universe. Why should we insist that Job (or we) refuse the good things that come to us, out of a sense of entitlement to misery? The translation of verse 6 is uncertain; Job may instead be repenting of sackcloth and ashes, and resolving to move on.

Process theology declares that “the many become one and are increased by one”: current events become part of our past reality, out of which we greet the new moment, again and again and again. Sometimes we are glad that events do so; sometimes we wish they would not. We cannot rewrite the past. But we are given the means, in collaboration with God, to write the future when we are ready to do so.

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Tim Bowman is an Ordained Minister in the United Church of Canada, serving Gladwin Heights – St. Andrew’s Pastoral Charge in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. He is currently a ThM student at the Vancouver School of Theology, focusing on Process Theology. Tim is a contributor to Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God, Edited by Jeff Wells, Thomas Jay Oord, et. al., and lives in New Westminster with his wife, child, and two cats.