JOB

This is not a piece about your job. It has no advice about life-work balance, although we Americans do all need continual exhortation about our life-work balance. We take work home. We don’t sleep enough. We don’t take as many vacations as Europeans do. And they’re already in Europe.

But no, this is a piece about Job the man, the one God let Satan smite with death, destruction and suppurating sores. As a test. To see if faithful Job would turn on God.

Scholars once believed Job’s story was history, as unbelievable as that may be, but now all but the most committed literalists believe someone wrote it as a morality play. After all, Job has ten grown children and a multitude of camels, donkeys and servants when the story opens, and he ends up with twice as much of everything. All that begetting would have taken several lifetimes even if he wasn’t starting again at age 90. To say nothing of the intervening forty-one-chapter interlude Job spent on the ash heap.

At first, when he loses everything, Job utters the line that goes viral: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord! But when he breaks out in sores and stumbles onto the set that depicts the garbage dump, where he sits down and scrapes those sores with broken pieces of pottery (this is a play, remember), his ever-empathic wife suggests he might as well curse God and die.

Job says that’s a hard no. However, he is willing to curse the day he was born. Which he does for a chapter. The curtain falls as he utters, Everything I fear and dread comes true. I have no peace, no rest, and my troubles never end.

Drama is catharsis. Go Job.

I read the first half of the book of Job during a boring sermon when I was in middle school. When I got home, I sat right back down to finish it, as though I was in the middle of a whodunit.

As Job’s wife exits stage left, his friends enter stage right and start in where she left off. Why the grieving in sackcloth and ashes on the dung heap? They ask him, rhetorically. Why the suppurating sores? Obviously it’s because God is angry with him. You must be a notorious sinner to have this much bad luck, they say.

Job doesn’t mince words. Miserable comforters are you all!

But nobody’s blameless, no matter how hard they try. I certainly knew that already. I had reproach for my besetting sins of petulance and impatience thrown in my face by my mother and younger sisters several times a day. So I read Job’s story gripped by suspenseful anxiety.

I was sure that when God showed up, Job was going to find out what he’d done to deserve being punished. By literary conventions, he was bound to. Boy howdy, he was going to find out. And hopefully God would tell him how to do better. And I could listen in and get some tips.

But when God answered Job, God pretty much said, Who are you to question me? God did say it out of the whirlwind, according to all reports, and in some of the world’s most beautiful language. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth . . . when the morning stars sang together and all the sons (and daughters?) of God shouted for joy?

Very beautiful. Totally unsatisfying. What I wanted was the answer to important questions. First, if Job was so good, why would God let bad things happen to him? And I wanted the answer to that more complex question, since he couldn’t have been perfect, how could he (and I) do better? I didn’t appreciate that a morality play about Job was written to say that life is complex. That the simple platitudes of religiosity don’t hold up.

The conversation between God and Job ends with a whimper. Literally. God doesn’t explain anything and Job apologizes: I talked about things I did not understand, about marvels too great for me to know.

Then God punishes Job’s friends, whose accusations sounded pretty reasonable to a twelve-year-old being raised by Baptist teachers and dorm parents in boarding school. To make amends for their judgey platitudes, they have to take seven bulls and seven rams, sacrifice them, and ask Job to pray for them so God will not smite them for being so trite.

Once all that was taken care of, Job got back all his riches plus ten more children. Poor wife. So that pretty much wraps up her life. And then Job lives for another hundred and forty years and dies at a very great age, all this in one wrap-up chapter. Clearly the playwright ran out of energy.

When I finished my first reading of the book of Job, I came as close as I dared to throwing my Bible down in frustration. I wailed and complained until my pastor dad sat me down. In the Holy Joe voice he prided himself in not having, Dad tried to explain the lesson of the book of Job to me. I have no memory of what he said. A few words about sin would not have gone amiss for that perfectionistic oldest daughter. A mention that life is not the score card that Job’s friends and I clearly believed it to be.

Dad probably said the book of Job was written to say that God’s ways are a mystery. Or maybe he explained that the lesson of Job is that God is good and life is a gift in spite of no rhyme nor reason to what happens to us. But how can a twelve-year-old bear such hard truth? Heck, how can I bear it today?

Photo by Edgar Henríquez, LC on Unsplash