October 11, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

Job the Patient and Job the Person

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 22:1–15
Job 23

I believe in the sun, even when it doesn’t shine.
I believe in love, even when I don’t feel it.
I believe in God, even when he is silent.

Inscription on the wall of a cellar in Cologne, Germany,
where Jews hid during World War II

The twenty-third chapter of Job portrays a man who has been suffering and cannot make sense of it. He cannot understand why he suffers so unjustly. It also portrays a man who knows the loneliness of suffering. Though his friends pay him visits and try their best to console him, nothing they say about his condition resonates with or makes sense to him. If only he could get a hearing from God, he would surely, he insists, come out as gold. But God is nowhere to be found. Though Job has been making his complaint known loud and clear, God does not seem to care.

When we jump into the middle of the story, it is hard to grasp the depth of Job’s suffering. We need to start at the beginning and go to the end. You will find that the first two chapters of Job are in prose. Except for these beginning chapters and the very last chapter—chapter 42—the rest of the book of Job is in poetic verse. Having compared the poetic center with the narrative beginning and end, most biblical scholars agree that the narrative frame probably existed first as a simple tale about a man so pious that even when God strikes him with terrible suffering, ruining first his property and then taking away his children and finally afflicting him with a painful and disfiguring disease, he nevertheless continues to praise and worship God. In the end God rewards the man for his faithfulness by replacing his family and granting him wealth greater than before. So patiently does he suffer that we can call the man in this tale Job the Patient.

Some time later, a poet converted this simple tale about Job the Patient into both a literary masterpiece, by adding a series of dialogues composed in poetic verse, and a significant religious work, by portraying the figure of Job the Patient as a real person whose suffering resonates with every man and woman. Whereas in the narrative beginning Job is a patient figure whose attitude toward all that he has undergone can be summed up by his stating the aphorism “Should we accept the good from God and not accept the bad?” the poetic dialogue is launched by Job cursing the day he was born and demanding to know why he was put on earth if all he is meant to do is suffer. This curse launches the back-and-forth debate between Job and his friends, a debate that continues for twenty-four chapters of verse, a debate on the meaning of Job’s situation.

This morning, let’s dwell a while on Job’s situation, for this is what the author intends for us to do. Unlike many other books in the Bible that have been composed of separate, self-contained stories tied together, the book of Job is one story designed to be heard and reflected upon as a whole.

The situation, while specific to Job, can be generalized to apply to every person. There is no mention in the story of a specific time or place and no mention of a particular people about whom the story was written. And even if there were, there is nothing to prevent our imagination from putting ourselves in Job’s shoes, from asking the questions that Job asks—questions like why do the innocent suffer, and since we know that they do, why do the pious bother to be pious?

The Job to whom everyone can relate raises these questions, and he does so angrily and messily. His anger arises from a demand for meaning, and until he can find satisfying answers, his anger will not be contained. He is a man in dire need of consolation, and yet nothing can console him.

Religions have been criticized for being essentially concerned with the need to console people. Probably best known historically among the critics of religion is Karl Marx, who characterized religion as the “opium of the people.” It does seem that the worlds’ religions would need to address human suffering in one way or another. Without recognizing the profound need to be consoled, how could religious traditions endure? In part, religions endure because they meet people in the pit of despair and offer consolation. The critical question to raise, it seems, has to do with the form of consolation offered, not the fact that consolation is offered. To gain this critical perspective, we don’t have to look outside our religious resources, for the struggle to find a genuine form of consolation is squarely in the Bible. Among other places, it is found in the book of Job.

In the ancient world, consolation meant assurance that whatever a person suffers fits into a universal pattern that is predictable and dependable. To console someone required not only tact and empathy, but also conventional wisdom—that is, knowledge of the proverbs, maxims, and formulas that people had been using over the centuries to explain the way the world operates and how human beings fit into the overall order of things.

Religions and philosophical schools had been reservoirs of the conventional wisdom by which people made sense of the world and their place in it. A righteous man like Job would have lived in accordance with such wisdom, and he would have done so expecting that by living wisely he would live well. The suffering that Job undergoes is all the greater precisely because he cannot fall back on the conventional wisdom on which he himself had always relied and with which his friends now try to console him.

When Job’s friends come to offer their consolation, they are so overcome by his suffering that they themselves grieve, weeping loudly, tearing their robes, and throwing dust upon their heads. When Job says nothing for the first seven days, they remain with him, carefully waiting for him to speak first. When finally Job speaks, cursing the day he was born, they proceed to tell him that all he is undergoing is as it should be. What he is enduring, they tell him, is in harmony with the way the world works. The wise know that a good person will be rewarded with success and a bad person punished with failure. Having no other wisdom to fall back on, Job’s friends assume that Job, or his sons, must have done something wrong. At first insinuating this and later coming right out with accusations, Eliphaz receives a defensive and angry response from Job. Job maintains that he has lived a righteous life, and we know from the first two chapters that this is in fact true. In speaking about Job to a group of angels in heaven, God calls Job “a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.”

Given the truth that Job is blameless, consolation for him cannot come in the form of sound reasoning. Job engages in sound reasoning throughout, and yet he cannot explain why he suffers. Genuine consolation for Job also cannot come in the form of formulas, maxims, or simple rules of life, for the existential questions that arise from suffering are rhetorical; they cannot be and are not meant to be answered, much less by simple formulas.

Sometimes true consolation has to come in the form of the sublime. By chapter 37, everyone has spoken—that is everyone except for God. The debate over the meaning of Job’s suffering has exhausted human intelligence and conventional wisdom. At last, in chapter 38, God intervenes. “Out of a whirlwind” God speaks, laying out a description of God’s magnificent works and leaving the very vocal Job stunned into silence. For the first time in the story we find Job’s resentment replaced, and it is replaced with a sensation of the sublime.

The sublime: we may not know exactly how to define it, but I suspect we know what it is, because we have on occasion experienced it or at least something close enough that we call it sublime.

When I am not in the city, experiences of the sublime usually occur in nature, when I am confronted with breathtaking views of mountain peaks. When I am not in nature, experiences of the sublime are for me most often musical. This may be true for some of you too. Every now and then people on their way out of the sanctuary say to me, “Oh, the music was sublime.”

For a musician like Daniel Barenboim, it must be painful to see the opposite take place with some of the world’s greatest music. In his book Music Quickens Time, Barenboim tells this story:

One day, while watching television in Chicago, I came across the most extraordinary example of the offensive usage of music in a commercial for a company called American Standard. In this commercial, a plumber was shown running very fast in great agitation, opening the door to a lavatory and demonstrating the superiority of a particular toilet. The whole visual sequence was accompanied by the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem.

As a musician who intimately knows the power of music, Barenboim wants us to be aware of how we experience, appreciate, or depreciate music not simply for the sake of musical integrity, but more so for the sake of human life. Barenboim knows that living lives of meaning depends sometimes on being able to experience the sublime.

In a recent conceptual study on the sublime, Philip Shaw explains,

In broad terms, whenever experience slips out of conventional understanding, whenever the power of an object or event is such that words fail and points of comparison disappear, then we resort to the feeling of the sublime. As such, the sublime marks the limits of reason and expression together with a sense of what might lie beyond these limits; this may well explain its association with the transcendent. (The Sublime, p. 2)

In the face of Job’s existential crisis, a crisis that neither sound reasoning nor conventional wisdom could resolve, God intervenes by stunning Job with the sensation of the sublime. God’s consolation comes in the form of the sublime. Notice that in his speech God doesn’t answer Job’s existential questions. Instead of answers, God puts forth [God’s] questions: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? . . . Who determined its measurements? . . . Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? . . . Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?” With one question after another, God silences Job, and God reorients Job.

In the penultimate chapter, when Job does speak again, he has very little to say—just six verses—and yet his brief response makes it all too clear that he is a changed man. The tone, the brevity, and the words of Job’s response and the final prose chapter of the book of Job portray a man who has been transformed. Not only does he reengage himself in relationships and in the business of living, but he also reorients his existential quest. No longer just demanding answers to his questions, he listens for the questions that God might ask. Though they may not be immediately answerable, through the questions—not just his own, but also God’s—Job seems in the end to find genuine consolation. And may it be so for us also. Amen.