By Amy Butler
I have a bone to pick with the Coen brothers.
After preaching a 3-week series on the book of Job, I was looking forward to a new take on Job’s story when I went to see the famous sibling directors’ new film, A Serious Man.
The movie is a modern treatment of Job’s story, set in the 1950s in middle America. Because the Coen brothers are generally hilarious filmmakers, there are many moments in the movie that I found side-splittingly funny. The fact remains, however, that the basic story of the film is Job’s — and thus not all that light and funny after all.
Predictably, the main character’s life takes some rather depressing turns. By the end it seemed like every scene adds insult to injury, while protagonist (and Job stand-in) Larry Gopnik tries everything he has always been taught to try to find the answer to those nagging questions: Why do good people suffer? Why do we live with pain and injustice? Why is human life so hard sometimes?
Some of the funniest parts of the movie are Larry’s increasingly futile conversations with three different rabbis, to whom he goes in desperation to try to get some answers.
Having spent so much time studying and preaching on the book of Job lately, I sat on the edge of my seat hoping to pick up some good tips myself — anything that might tie things up in my mind, answer the hard questions that I concluded, in this sermon, series were largely unanswerable.
I guess I forgot this was a Coen brothers movie, because all the rabbis in the movie were completely ridiculous in their various counseling sessions, further giving clergy the world over a bad name. In fact, the most profound quote in the whole movie came not from the rabbis, but from Larry, the sufferer. At one point in the movie he yells, anguished: “Why does he make us feel the questions if he isn’t going to give us any answers?”
When the movie ended I could have yelled the same thing about the Coen brothers — and it occurred to me that maybe everyone listening to my sermons the past three weeks wanted to yell that at me, too.
See, I looked as hard as I could in the book of Job and I didn’t find any easy answers I could package neatly and deliver in 20 minutes or less on Sunday morning. I did notice, however, that when Job shook his fist at the sky and demanded answers for his pain, what he got was … presence.
God showed up in the middle of the anguish — not to wipe it away with a divine magic trick, but to sit right next to Job on his pile of ashes and be there with him through it all.
Some students of the ancient text suppose that the last 10 verses of the book of Job were added to tie up the story nice and neat — remember, those are the verses in which Job gets everything he lost returned to him, even more than he had before, and everything ended like a good Disney movie should.
But if the book originally ended after Job 42:6, as many scholars suppose, then it ends with Job right in the middle of a conversation with God — God and Job, hanging out together. “I’d heard about you before this,” Job said to God, “but now I can see you.”
That right there is the only thing this clergyperson could think to proclaim as good news from the book of Job. Not that Job got everything back in the end, but instead that God was there the whole entire time — when Job had more than he ever dreamed of and when his life was completely decimated. It was a promise that, no matter the pain we feel and could never understand, God is there with us. We are never alone.
Therefore, I would like to lodge a formal complaint with Joel and Ethan Coen, because all throughout such a hilarious and heartbreaking movie they never mentioned that profound discovery — the steady, constant presence of God. By the end I felt convinced that poor Larry Gopnik could have used a reminder. I think I could have, too.