Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
“Storybook Endings”
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Job 42:1-6/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Mark 10:46-52/NRSVUE)
The Disney animated movie The Little Mermaid made its way into theaters back in 1989. If you’ve been living under a rock — or under the sea — for the past thirty five years (sorry, I couldn’t help myself), here’s a quick synopsis: A young mermaid named Ariel is fascinated with the world beyond the water in which she lives. On one of her visits to the surface, she falls for a handsome human prince named Eric (which is kinda strange, because she’s never even met him).
In order to experience life on land and, more importantly, to meet Eric, Ariel makes a Faustian deal with the sea witch, Ursula, that will enable her to live as a human for three days — during which time she must either get Eric to reciprocate her love or permanently surrender her beautiful voice to Ursula (it’s a Disney movie so, of course, Ariel sings). The catch is that, for the duration of their deal, Ariel’s voice is held by Ursula as collateral, thus preventing Ariel from actually speaking with Eric to communicate what’s on her mind.
The film is based loosely (and by that I mean very loosely) on the Hans Christian Andersen story of the same name, but there’s a whole lot of differences between the film and the book. For example: the title character in the former is named Ariel, while in the latter she’s given no name at all (indeed, none of the main characters in Andersen’s version have names); Disney’s Ariel has flowing, red locks but the hair color of Andersen’s mermaid is never mentioned; and while speaking, singing animals (like Sebastian the Crab, and Scuttle the seagull) appear in the film — as they do pretty much every Disney flick — there isn’t one to be found anywhere in the book. Andersen’s tale is also kind of violent: when the sea witch takes the mermaid’s voice, she does so by cutting out her tongue; and when the mermaid trades in her fish tail for legs, she’s told that walking on her new human feet will feel as if she were treading upon sharp knives with every step, which sounds like fun.
But perhaps the biggest variance between these two tellings of The Little Mermaid lies in their respective endings. In the Disney movie, Ariel marries the handsome Prince Eric and the two happily ever after (I know: what a shocker) but in the Andersen story, not so much. Without giving away too much of the plot, the prince, as a result of a misunderstanding, actually ends up marrying someone else (which is all well and good because he never really cared for the mermaid anyway) and poor Ariel dies brokenhearted.
Maybe we should be grateful that Disney chose not to traumatize an entire generation of children with a faithful retelling of Andersen’s original story. But it would be naive to think Disney’s motives were purely altruistic — after all, a happy resolution tied up with a nice, neat little bow is generally what sells in Hollywood; and that’s because its what people want to see. We all know that real life is full of unhappy endings; maybe that’s why we want the stories with which we entertain ourselves to turn out differently.
The ending of the book of Job is kind of like this too. After Job endures unbelievable, undeserved and unjustifiable suffering for forty-one chapters, his fortunes are suddenly and inexplicably restored; in fact, we learn that “the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.”
He receives money, a gold ring, fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. And while Job doesn’t get back the family that he lost at the beginning of the story — and the grief that he experienced over that loss must have been immense — he does go on to father seven more sons and three more daughters. After a really rocky start, things seem to turn out reasonably okay for Job; good for him, I suppose.
But this ending seems weird because the entire point of the story until this very last chapter is that all of our ideas about cause and effect, of people getting exactly what they deserve, don’t hold up in God’s world. And so when Job’s suffering eventually gives way to happiness and prosperity, it appears as if he’s being rewarded for his piety and devotion.
While the text doesn’t actually ever say that, it’s pretty easy to draw that conclusion. But I have to wonder how the story might resonate with us if God had just left poor Job sitting there on the ash heap? At least that ending would have been consistent with what we’ve heard so far, and what we often observe and experience in our everyday lives, which is that bad things can and do happen to good people.
As a result of this dissonant turn of events, some scholars have argued that this final chapter of Job was not actually part of the original story; maybe people back then were also looking for a Hollywood ending, a few thousand years before Hollywood even existed — no one really knows for sure. At the very least, we can say that this strange ending of Job leaves us with a bunch of unanswered questions.
In the passage right before today’s reading, Job confirms what he, unlike his friends, believed all along: that retribution is not the organizing principle of God’s creation; in other words, God doesn’t make bad things happen to us because we’ve done something to deserve them.
But the fact that Job stops complaining to God the very instant that his life is restored really doesn’t help us here. It makes it seem as though Job might see his newfound fortune as his reward for all of the suffering he’s experienced. As a result, we might walk away from this story believing that while bad things do happen to good people, in the end, good things will happen to good people. But that’s not always true.
A pastor received a sudden and serious cancer diagnosis and left her longtime position at the church in a matter of days to begin aggressive treatment for her disease.
Her prognosis was grim but her treatment seemed to work wonders, ultimately enabling her to live far longer than anyone ever thought she would. She came to her former church one Sunday to express her gratitude to the congregation for all of their prayers on her behalf.
She stood up during joys and concerns and thanked the community for those prayers, and then thanked God for answering her prayers (and theirs) too. Her gratitude was heartfelt and sincere. As to whether God had actually stepped in and sent her disease into a seemingly miraculous remission, I have no idea; but she seemed to imply that’s what happened, and many people in the congregation thought so too.
But sitting just a few rows behind her was a woman with a much different point of view. Her husband had received his own cancer diagnosis at about the same time the pastor had. She’d prayed just as fervently for a miraculous cure for her husband and had asked the congregation to do the same. But that cure never came; he died just a few short weeks after learning he was sick.
That woman sat there in silence when her former pastor returned to the church to give thanks for her good fortune. She was, of course, happy for the pastor, but sad too; she wondered why her pastor had received the cure that she and others had prayed for while her husband hadn’t. Had he done something wrong? Why didn’t he deserve better?
The former pastor didn’t realize that the man’s wife felt this way because she never said anything to her about it — and that pastor, who was a really kindhearted person, would have been devastated to know that her words had this effect. But this situation points to the peril in thinking about God this way: I mean if we look at the good things that happen to us as being the result of us having done something right, of us praying enough or praying well enough, of us earning them, of us being worthy of them in some way, then the opposite is also true: when good things don’t happen to us, and when bad things do, we see them as the result of some of deficiency on our part.
But this is not the way it works, and this is not the message that the book of Job is trying to convey. The point is not that Job’s restoration is his reward, it’s that things could have just as plausibly gone the other way. We can certainly hope that life will somehow work out for us; we can hope that all wrongs will be righted, we can hope that we will be blessed with good fortune. But we can’t expect any of these things, and we sure as heck can’t earn them.
Job’s faith in God is exemplary because he believes in God regardless of what God does for him; indeed, God’s blessings are really the inverse of this — they come to us regardless of what we do. We should enjoy them to the fullest, we should be grateful for them, but we shouldn’t read too much into them. And when life doesn’t seem so great, it is perfectly justifiable to despair, to wish it could be different, but we shouldn’t read too much into our misfortunes either.
Celebrate the good things and thank God for them when they happen; lament the bad things and be angry at God when they happen (both of these are completely faithful responses). But good, bad, or indifferent, all that transpires in our lives isn’t a measure of our worth in God’s eyes; it’s just not.
Why does what happens to us happen to us? I have no idea because God is mysterious and complicated. We don’t always (if ever) get what we deserve — one way or the other. But know this: God is always here with us and for us when we get sick and when we are healthy, when we get cured and when we don’t, when we the ending is happy and when it’s not. God is here with us — and for us — no matter how our story here on earth happens to go. For this, and for so much else, thanks be to God.