Though Easter Monday does not fall within the normal rhythm of my disseminated writing, I thought the following would be best shared in proximity to the remembrance of the history-defining, cosmos-shaking events of Holy Week. My garden-variety bi-monthly updates will continue as normal on 1 May, 2023.
Never before have I walked through a Holy Week with my imagination so coloured by a Joban hue. What perplexing and gripping meditation. I feel that my mind and heart are grasping at the hazy edges of profundities far beyond me, so please read on with that in view…
Probably the Christianised arrival of the book of Job into the awareness of most Bible readers is via (and confined to) the oft-quoted ‘I know my redeemer lives’ text (Job 19:25–27). I would suggest, however, that the relationship between the book of Job and the Christian gospel is far more robust, given that the gospel is the resounding crescendo of all the promise and aching of the Old Testament, at once realising and surpassing all the expectation that came before. Viewed in light of the book of Job, I conceive of Jesus as (at least) the ultimate Righteous Sufferer (Job 1–2), consummate Friend who intercedes (42:7–9; cf. 16:18–21), and God’s decisive answer—the God himself who answers (38:1ff.).
What is so stubbornly elusive to me, however, is the incongruity at the centre of it all. The premise of the book is such: Job, the paragon of piety, is suddenly struck with comprehensive loss of his wealth, children, and health—‘for no reason’ (2:3). Three friends come to comfort Job, though the dialogue devolves into futility and animosity as they have no room to be mystified by Job’s plight: surely actions and consequences exhibit reliable correspondence (good for good, bad for bad), and therefore Job ought to repent to be restored. Desperate and destitute, Job rails against God, whom he regards as the source of his baffling anguish; is not ostensible divine caprice, the terrible might of a heavenly despot, to blame (e.g., 9:5–24; 12:13–25; 16:6–17)? He vacillates violently between despair of receiving divine answer (e.g., 9:14–16; 19:6–12; 30:19–23) and surprising confidence in God’s just vindication (e.g., 13:15–18; 16:18–22; 19:23–29; 23:2–7), intent on receiving an audience with God. Eventually, after human attempts to make sense of Job’s malady have been exhausted, God at last answers, offering a different perspective.
God’s ‘design’ (38:2) is emphatically brimming with life and divine benevolence, yet it resists the narrow strictures of human comprehension. It is the sort of world where wild creatures frolic freely (38:39–39:30) and rain falls on a desolate land where no one lives (38:25–27). This world accounts for chaos, far too wily for humans to handle yet ever under God’s thumb (38:8–11; 41:8–11). At the same time, God secures order and justice in his world (38:12–15, 31–33; 40:10–14), and his command is uncompromised (40:9; 41:10–11). The grand sweep of the Creator’s governance may remain inscrutable from a creaturely vantage point, but one thing is certain: Job, God is not against his world, and he is not against you. This is a God (still) worth fearing (cf. 1:1, 8–9; 28:28).
Job is utterly satiated with God’s answer, now ‘seeing’ God for himself (42:1–6). But then God immediately implicates Job in another apparent incongruity: thrust into the middle of God’s quarrel with the friends, Job is beckoned by God to pray for the friends, so that divine wrath may be averted from them (42:7–9). How is it that these conspicuously un-interceding friends who deserve God’s judgement for their friendship failure towards their suffering companion should benefit from the intercession of that very man, still covered in boils on the ash heap? Can God’s mercy, mediated by his suffering servant Job, actually realise justice?
Job’s affliction remains incongruous, and God does not respond to Job’s charges on Job’s terms. But if we, as the friends, insist on accepting only what seems comprehensible and reasonable to us, we will not be able to hear God’s answer, to rejoice with the morning stars in God’s wise rule over his world. And we will have to reject intercession, which also bears the mark of incongruity.
While Job suffered inexplicably—short of death—through no fault of his own, and thought God had become his enemy, Jesus walked knowingly into alienation from his Father, into a sinner’s death, through fault of our own, exchanging with us our just punishment for his due reward. Though Job’s incomprehension of his straits may appear troubling, it is subsumed by the searing clarity of Jesus’ awareness. In the end, Job’s reward was God himself—being satisfied by God’s long-awaited answer, by ‘seeing’ him (42:5). And in the end, our reward is seeing the God who answers incongruity by climbing inside of it, metamorphosing it from galling discrepancy to our only hope, and thereby mysteriously imbuing it with meaning. Our reward is seeing Jesus, the God who bore the crushing unfairness of our death so he can be eternally unfair to us by giving us his life we did not deserve, could not earn. This is a God worth fearing. Much as we, like Job, might cry ‘why?’ and ‘how?’, what we, like Job, really need, more than anything, is ‘Who.’