The Problems of Job
The Beast and the failure of our goodness on World Communion Sunday
The Lord said to the accuser, “Have you considered my servant Job?”
Job 2:3
Last week I wrote about wrestling with the Bible, and if any text challenges you to wrestle with what you think you know about God, it’s the Book of Job.
In wrestling with Scripture, it’s important to consider the genre of each book (and each part of each book). Job, which the Christian canon places right before Psalms, is part of what’s called “wisdom literature.” Despite its name, it has made fools of many preachers. Do I tremble enough? I don’t know, but I know the “fear of the Lord” is key to it and other texts in the wisdom-lit genre. And I know that despite whatever FDR says, it’s a problem when Christians have a bigger fear of the very concept of “fearing the Lord” than the Lord himself.
While some hold fast to the Book of Job being a historical event, many believe its placement in the wisdom literature genre hints that Job stands in for a type of person.1 Whatever the case, Job’s situation sets up a thought experiment: “What if there was a perfectly righteous man who nonetheless appeared to be punished by God?” This surely does not stretch the religious imagination too far. Who doesn’t know wonderful people who seem to have received more than their share of pain for no reason? The other reason people believe Job to be a composite, typological figure is its opening line, “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.” Uz was an old name for a real place from the Genesis days, but its Hebrew also means “counsel.” This symbolic name fits, given the ample (bad) advice Job receives for his suffering. And so the story opens with something like, “Once upon a time, in the old country, there was a man named Job, who never did any wrong.” And it’s all downhill from there, and it never really seems right.
Why might such a story be preserved in Scripture? Perhaps it is an inevitable outbreath of humanity’s struggles with God. Perhaps it is an acknowledgment that God, too, is conscious of how Scripture seems to fail us, for a man who perfectly upheld the Torah was nonetheless punished in a deathblow to our perception of God’s justice. Perhaps it shows the limitation of any theology of God’s covenant with us that is overly simplistic. Perhaps it is there so that humanity’s struggles with the Word are woven into the Word.
Whatever the case we the reader are asked along with the Accuser, “Have you considered my servant Job?”
Well, have we?
Some of us have. And some of us lost our faith having done so.
Of course, few lose faith because of Job himself, but because of the other living Jobs in our midst. I imagine we all know of some of the most upright people who lived a holy, practically-blameless life, the All-Star saints who got a raw divine deal. Why would a loving and just God let this happen? For my part, I could not help think of all the wonderful Christ-loving people who do have a solid “fear of the Lord” who were nonetheless crushed in the storms of Helene, the North Carolina mountains serving not as a mythological land with typological figure, but a real place with everyday saints who follow Jesus, didn’t chase wealth, served others, and had their lives upended. Why?
It’s cliché to consider where and why God is or isn’t in the face of past and present evils. The specter of the Holocaust is still within generational memory, and (regardless of political analyses) there are still innocent people in Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, and too many more places who die for being merely at the wrong place and time. Are they all Jobs, caught in what seems like an utterly sadistic wager with Yahweh?
While Job was written in the style of an old tale, it emerged out of years and years of such wrestlings in days when God’s people could not so easily turn to what some today might consider common sense atheism: “bad things happen because there is no God.” When Job was written, people might turn to other pagan gods, but they were even more sadistic, and mostly not as powerful.
So they were—we are—invited to consider Job. It is God who invites us.
And we’re not alone in our consideration; for dozens of chapters, we consider Job alongside his friends, who espouse a collection of theological justifications for Job’s situation. They echo other parts of the Old Testament which so regularly tells us of the failures of the Israelites who seal their fate with their failings; disloyalty leads to downfall. Not so with Job. Jobs friends doubt his innocence, but we can’t. We may be suspicious about some of our contemporary Jobs, but as for the one in the Book, we have the inside truth from Scripture that no, Job really was blameless. And yet he suffered immensely.
Then the accuser answered the Lord, “Skin for skin! All that the man has he will give for his life. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.”
The Lord said to the accuser, "Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life." So the accuser went out from the presence of the Lord and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself and sat among the ashes.
Job 2:4-8
The Two Problems
The Book of Job is perhaps the earliest grappling in the tradition with what is known as “the problem of evil.” Classically formulated, this problem is something like, “How can God be all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly benevolent, but allow evil to exist?” Cue centuries of bad theological answers—starting with Job’s friends.
But there is also something that we might call the Problem of Good (not to be confused with Simone Weil’s wrestling with Job by the same title). The Problem of Good is one more plainly asked by the text: how do humans know we are actually righteous? Job’s Problem of Good asks, “Do you love God, or do you just love the gifts he gives you?” It’s a problem that is just as perennial as suffering. Can we really know we love God unless we love him despite what happens to us, despite doing exactly what God asks of us?
If there is no satisfying answer to this or other theological questions, you’re in good company. I think the Book of Job might even agree. How’s that for “wisdom” literature?
If we can’t find good answers, can we learn how we should live? Job sort of gives us this, but also not very satisfactorily. Job takes suffering well at first, giving us one of those passages that many people might not know comes from Job: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). This is, perhaps, the model “right” answer, the perfectly faithful response. He echoes it again:
“Shall we receive good from God and not receive evil?" In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
Now when Job’s three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.
Job 2:10-13
But like most of us, religious platitudes eventually fail Job. As his suffering wears on past the initial traumatic experiences, Job starts getting more honest with God. He does so with his friends. As Stanley Hauerwas and others have said, they do a good job grieving with Job until they open their mouths.2
Job’s friends espouse all the different problems of good and evil contemporary to their day, poetically reciting all the different kinds of wise things and insights people must have said in response to, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Scripture includes them seemingly to show that they are all impoverished.
One of the most fascinating things about Scripture to me is when it seems to welcome us to find cracks in its orthodoxies, probing us for where we have started worshipping religion instead of God. On this, the Book of Job is brilliant. In conversation with other wisdom literature, it both disturbs and confirms for us that you could perfectly follow the Proverbs and still suffer, praying nothing but the Psalms like a monk only to die an unjust death. While Ecclesiastes shares much of this view with Job with the vanity of “everything under the sun,” Job goes a step further by spotlighting our failure to understand God’s goodness at all.
Who Fights The Beast?
Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down its tongue with a cord?
Can you put a rope in its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?
No one is so fierce as to dare to stir it up. Who can stand before it?
Who can confront it and be safe?—under the whole heaven, who?
Job 41:1-2, 10-11
At the end of the Book of Job, God gives off a harsh rebuke to Job’s final wrestling challenge to him, a taste of divine Uz (counsel) that has surprised generations of readers. In surveying the vast scope of his intimacy with the cosmos through a litany of rhetorical questions, God’s underlying questions to Job are, “Who exactly do you think you are, and have you forgotten who I am?” In the final bit of this dialogue, God focuses on Leviathan, the multi-headed dragon lodged deep in ancient Israel’s folk memory. Leviathan here is a stand-in for not merely a single beast, but the Beast; the totalizing spiritual force of evil in all its incomprehensible power in our lives.
If Leviathan is more than Leviathan, God’s response to Job is more than his words. Nor is it his final Word; God would continue to consider his servants like Job. And people of faith believe he still continues to consider all those servants innocently suffering, those who generals call “collateral damage,” those whose names are never even known to be forgotten in a mudslide of violence, swept away by one cruel injustice or another, courtesy of the Beast. We consider them today on World Communion Sunday, whether they be innocent flood victims, innocent Palestinians, Israelis, Haitians, Sudanese, Lebanese, Ukrainians, Russians, or innumerable other innocents. We could not possibly consider all the people suffering in the world right now, so we must consider them all in one collective servant named Job. We Christians may remember that countless of them come to the same table of the Lord today, the table of the One who invites us to partake of his body and his blood when we are also broken and bloodied.
Between Leviathan and Satan (before he was, you know, Satan, but that’s for another post), the Book of Job only hints at the big cosmic battle. When God invokes Leviathan—the Beast—he tells us that the fight for the universe is so complex and wrenching that the main thing we need to know is that we cannot face it ourselves even if we could understand it. “You think a theological exercise is the problem of evil? You have no idea the real problem of evil,” saith the paraphrased Lord. For it is not just ancient beasts in the ocean or the beasts of the animal kingdom, but the beasts that rule spiritual forces of the air, the beasts that conquer through human kingdoms, and the beasts that lurk in the human heart waiting to recruit us into the Beast’s battle.
And if that’s the true Problem of Evil, the true Problem of Good is that we can never be good enough alone to tame evil ourselves. God knew this problem back in the Garden at the dawn of time, when he was recruiting us to help him steward his still-forming world that it might be as beautiful of a home as it could be. Instead, humanity conspired with the Beast to try and be like God, kicking off a drama which all of us only get to live in for a slice of time. And as this drama is testified to in Scripture, we are warned that wherever there is power, principality, and the whiff of humans trying to seek self-deification, Leviathan lurks; beware the Beast.
Have you considered if you can you tame that?
Can you conquer the cosmic war at the heart of the spiritual universe?
After he finally considers himself, Job concludes, “No.” He cannot. Nor can we.
Can The Problems Be Answered?
As far as “once upon a time” stories go, Job’s story ties up nicely enough in a bow (though Bart Ehrman remains disturbed by it).3 Job gets restored and passes one form of test: we can know that he loves God and not the gifts God brings him.
But in the Christian view, the full Answer to Job (as Carl Jung titled his controversial book) would not come until much later. God’s full response to his servant from Uz would not come until the cross. And through Jesus Christ, we Christians live with all believers in praise that God has conquered the Beast “already and not-yet.” It is on the cross when the New Adam, the Son of Man, showed the way to defeat Leviathan’s master was not by building a bigger Leviathan. When we fight dominant power with dominant power, we become the Beast’s unwitting feeders and slaves.
The Way of the cross is to allow the one who defeats the Beast to rule in our hearts and to follow his humility, service, and embrace of suffering when we are called. And it is so much easier said than done when we find ourselves brushing up with evil; for thousands of years, nominally Christian rule has ebbed and flowed with the Beast, sometimes ending slavery and feeding the poor in his name, other times enslaving more and enriching the powerful in his name. The Beast is nothing if not clever.
If we consider God’s servant Job, we Christians must always then re-consider his servant Jesus Christ, who came to serve us so that we might then serve others. While Job was an upright servant, he was not like Jesus, for while Job was a servant who suffered, he was not the “suffering servant” as prophesied. Christ did not live his life avoiding suffering until he was struck by it, rather he faced it head on.
And Jesus, as one with the Father, showed that God was not a distant ruler over the Jobs of the world and in our midst, but that God suffers with us. If cosmic forces can afflict us in their sick games, then God will be in solidarity with our pain and suffering in Jesus Christ.
If the ripple effects of the cross surge both forwards and backwards through time, then Christ has redeemed even his servant Job’s suffering. When we say Christ defeats death, we risk the kind of platitude that joins the ignoble company of Job’s friends. This, I think, is partly because we sanitize death so much we forget that the “defeat of death” is a tremendous metaphysical statement. The defeat of death is not defeating the need for funeral parlors and the pangs of loved ones being gone, but evil itself, the same evil that inflicted Job and his well-intentioned friends.
If the Father is beyond our comprehension and Leviathan beyond our capability, Jesus Christ came that we might comprehend something of him and what he’s up against. While Ecclesiastes points out the occasional failure of the wise things Scripture says, the Book of Job says Wisdom is not something at all, for we can grasp things. It is someone. And it is through Jesus Christ that God invites us into True Wisdom through a relationship with him.
If Job finally (and still-healthily) relates to the Father with a daunting, awe-inspiring fear of the Lord, Jesus is the Brother embedded into the fabric of his world. This heavenly brother did not love God for the benefits begat to him, but loved God through a route that wandered through hell and humanity. In doing so, Jesus shows how God so loved us through his own servant-suffering. As people in Jesus’ life came to know him through relationships, his love continues in our relationships, living on through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Christ is thus how God “solves” the problems of evil and problems of good in the same Person. Not in a way that gives us a satisfying logical explanation—if we want that, that’s our problem. When our goodness fails, and we love what God does for us more than him, Christ still invites us back to his table. When evil seems to win, Christ shows that he has not abandoned anyone to it. He does not want to live afar, but dwell within. And so he invites us to the table.
At the table, this God says we are puny mortals are still a perfectly fit temple for him. In taking his broken body and poured-out blood, we join all those who do not claim the ways of the Beast. And why would we? His reign is temporary. As Scripture says in its wisdom, “As often as we eat this bread and drink that cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”4
Brainstorming for this sermon courtesy of converations from the Bible Project, At Home with the Lectionary, and my grad school notes.
https://cct.biola.edu/love-suffering-theology/
1 Cor 11:26
This was so beautiful and insightful. Saving this quote: "One of the most fascinating things about Scripture to me is when it seems to welcome us to find cracks in its orthodoxies, probing us for where we have started worshipping religion instead of God."