Peace the World Cannot Give

Sermon for Sunday, Nov. 9, 2025
Job 19:23-27a; Luke 20:27-38

In this stewardship sermon series, we’ve been looking at different ways we work with God to let blessings flow through both giving and receiving.  The first three weeks of the series were about giving: giving God thanks and praise, giving others a share of God’s blessings, and giving a share of those blessings back to God.  Now we’re in the “receiving” portion of the series.  Last week, Mtr. Jean spoke about receiving deep meaning and purpose in our lives.  And today, the topic is peace:  Receive peace the world cannot give.

That promise comes from Scripture – from John’s Gospel, where Jesus tells the disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives.  Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” (14:27).  I take great comfort in that.  In fact, that verse is on the wall in my dining room, up there with 20 photos of Ann and the kids, a print of Rembrandt’s painting of the Prodigal Son, and a painting by a parishioner imagining my wife Ann’s heavenly garden.  So, given where that verse is hanging in my house, I put a lot of stock in it – in Jesus’ promise of peace that the world cannot give.

Well, today, we don’t have that passage from John among our readings.  Instead, for our Old Testament reading, we have some verses from the Book of Job.  Job is fascinating – a 42-chapter reflection on theodicy, which is a five-dollar word meaning a vindication of God’s justice in the face of human suffering.  It can imply something like a cross examination of the Sovereign of the Universe.  How can it be, Lord, that some egregiously unjust situation is allowed to exist in your good creation?

Contrasted with that is our popular understanding of the Book of Job – that it’s a character study in patience.  That’s the source of the familiar phrase, “That person has the patience of Job.”  This sense of the story comes from just the first two chapters.  Job is a good, righteous, and very successful man, with a lovely family and deep respect in the community.  Well, Satan comes before God in the heavenly council and talks God into letting Satan mess with Job.  Basically, they make a bet about whether this good and righteous man will crack under pressure and curse the God who had blessed him so richly.  So, God gives Satan permission to ruin Job’s life, though Satan isn’t allowed to kill him.

And Satan outdoes himself.  He takes away all Job’s fortune and kills his children through enemy attacks, a storm, and a fire from heaven.  And Satan afflicts Job with awful, itchy sores all over his body.  Job’s wife, the reasonable voice in the story, tells Job to go ahead and curse God already so God will get it over with and kill him.  But Job’s famous patience shines:  “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” Job philosophizes. “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (1:21)

Our collective memory of Job’s story tends to stop there.  But where the story goes is even more interesting.  First, Job is visited by three “friends” who completely fail to comfort Job in his grief.  A quick aside:  If you don’t know what to say to someone who’s suffering, always choose to say nothing over something.  Or, better yet, just say “I’m so sorry” and “I love you.”  But don’t follow the lead of Job’s friends, who fill the silence with bad theology about how Job’s suffering is his own fault.  Job finds himself arguing with them, and with God, for 36 chapters before God finally gives a divine defense … which is, basically, who are you to be asking me to defend myself?

Along the way in Job’s argument with his bumbling friends comes today’s passage.  Christians hear it with ears tuned to the Easter story, right?  We hear Job pointing toward the risen Christ, God in the flesh, who redeems us from the power of sin and death and stands “on [our] side” eternally (Job 19:27).  But for the Jewish people who knew this story first, the message wasn’t resurrection.  Job simply wants his words to be written down, read into the court record as part of his testimony of unjust suffering.  Even better, Job says, he wants an audience with the Lord God now, on this side of the grave, so he can make his case for justice in person.

Well, here’s the spoiler alert:  Job never does curse God, so God wins the bet against Satan and doesn’t strike Job dead.  In fact, in the end, God restores Job’s earthly life with physical healing, more children, and even greater wealth.  But before the story gets there, Job demands an accounting from the Lord Most High, an explanation to satisfy his need for justice.  In a nutshell, Job’s cry is this:  “God, how could you?”  

Does that plea resonate with anybody else?

Job wants answers.  Job wants vindication.  Job wants justice.  That may seem like a lot to ask of God; but I think Jesus might say that Job wasn’t asking for enough.  Job, along with the rest of us, wants suffering to make sense.  Instead, Jesus offers us peace – peace that the world’s explanations cannot give.

As many of you know, before my wife, Ann, died nine months ago, she’d struggled with lupus for 24 years.  There was a time – in fact, there have been several times – when I wanted explanations, when I wanted to know why.  Of course, you can answer that question several ways.  Ann had a positive family history, ancestors who had “the rheumatiz”; so that part of her genetic inheritance was … suboptimal.  Maybe that DNA would have expressed itself as lupus eventually anyway.  But the presenting circumstance 24 years ago was more direct.  She received an infusion of a new medication for her diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, and a couple of weeks later she was in the hospital with a raging lupus flare, which nearly killed her.

We never pressed it.  We decided pretty early on not to invest our time and our spirits trying to prove that this drug had induced lupus for her.  From one point of view, maybe that was stupid.  Maybe there would have been a nice settlement.  But we decided that wasn’t how we wanted to spend the remaining time we had together, striving for legal justice and trying to get even.  We invested in living instead.

Why am I telling you this?  Because of the point I hear Jesus making in today’s Gospel reading.  What I hear is this:  There’s more to finding peace than meets the eye.  In fact, what truly brings us peace is precisely not what meets the eye.

In today’s reading, Jesus is being questioned by Jewish legal scholars from the sect of the Sadducees, the opponents of their more-famous spiritual cousins, the Pharisees.  What sets the Sadducees apart is that they didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, while the Pharisees did.

So, these Sadducees think they’ve pinned Jesus to the wall theologically by presenting a case that turns resurrection into a joke.  You can almost hear these guys chuckling as they pose it.   If a woman marries seven brothers who die in sequence, whose wife will she be in the resurrection – “for the seven had married her” (Luke 20:23).  Huh, huh, huh.

Jesus responds not by joining their argument from the absurd but by offering deep trust in the greatest hope God offers: eternal life, on God’s terms.  What’s important isn’t whose wife the woman will be, Jesus says.  In fact, those in heaven “neither marry nor are given in marriage,” Jesus says, so the point is moot anyway (20:35).  What’s important is that “those who are considered worthy of a place … in the resurrection from the dead … cannot die anymore because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:35-36).  “And the fact that the dead are raised” is proven by the lawyers’ own Scriptures, Jesus says, which name Yahweh as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – not long-dead historical characters but living dwellers in God’s paradise – “for to him, all of them are alive” (Luke 10:38).

Hmmm.  Now, I don’t know about any of the rest of you widows and widowers out there, but I want to take Jesus aside for a second.  I’ve always kind of assumed one of the benefits of eternal life is getting to continue building relationships with the people you love most.  I’d like for that to include my spouse.  But marriage as we know it apparently doesn’t simply roll over into marriage eternally, based on what Jesus says here.  And what should we make of that?  Well, it makes sense, actually.  Given that we can’t know the specifics of anything about heaven, why would we think we can know the specifics of how heavenly relationships work? So, given that, I’ll trust God to work out the details of my eternal relationship with Ann.

What I do know is this:  It sure can seem satisfying to put God in the witness stand and demand answers for the mystery of unjust suffering.  It sure can seem satisfying to make someone pay when life goes sideways, when caregivers’ best efforts fail.  It sure can seem satisfying to shove eternity into a little box, demanding answers in our suffering because meager certainty now seems to beat astonishing hope later.

For me, I’ll take hope over certainty any day.  I’ll take the Christian spin we put on Job’s cry to God, proclaiming what we say at every funeral:  “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth”; and that “after my awakening, he will raise me up; and in my body, I shall see God … who is my friend and not a stranger” (BCP 491).  I’ll take releasing my bitterness over Ann’s illness rather than working for a check from a legal settlement.  And I’ll take the assurance that this life is just a warm-up for the eternity of loving relationship that awaits us, despite the fact I don’t know what that looks like.  

I’ll take all that because, at least for me, the world’s answers are overrated, and “certainty” turns out to be nothing but today’s best guess.  Instead, I’ll choose to trust that God makes good on God’s promises, even if I can’t quite see how.  And in that trust, with my heart untroubled and unafraid, I’m glad to take a breath and say thank you for peace the world cannot give.