Job 23:1-9, 16-17 Commentary

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It’s been over four years since the world learned the technology of online meeting software.  And still, not a meeting, class, or conversation goes by without someone saying, “whoops, you’re muted.” And sometimes all it takes is a simple click to unmute.  Sometimes the discovery that we can’t hear someone leads to a whole tech-support portion of the meeting.  And sometimes the problem is even on our end.  We can’t hear because of something glitchy with our technology.

You might frame the whole Job narrative as an attempt for Job to be unmuted or, rather, for his friends to stop trying to mute him or maybe even for God to hear and respond to what Job has to say.

Commentary:

It’s important to note, briefly, the context of this Sunday’s lectionary text, especially what has happened since last we met our unlucky hero, Job.  After seeming to lose everything, it seems Job has not, yet, lost his friends (though he might wish he had.). Three friends come to commiserate with Job.  At first they do a marvelous job because, in the words of a country song made popular by Allison Kraus, “you say it best when you say nothing at all.”  They sit with their friend.  They sigh with him.  They let their tears fall.  They sustain his sorrow and support him in it.

But they grow tired of grief before Job is done grieving.  So they begin to offer solutions — tech support for his mute button problem. What they are clear about is that something is wrong with Job.  How could a terrible thing like this happen unless he’d caused it by his sin.  If God is just — and it is powerfully important for Job’s friends to defend this thesis — then Job’s suffering cannot be unjust.  Job refuses these simple answers and even calls out the fact they are offered to the benefit of the comforters not to console the one in need of comfort.

Although his friends won’t hear his complaint, what Job really wants to know is whether God has muted him too.

So Job doesn’t just mute himself as his friends would prefer.  He refuses to say anything other than the truth he can see in this moment: his suffering is unfair, it is completely out of proportion to any sin he may have committed. It is the pain of illness, grief, desperation, complicated by bewilderment, aggravated by the insensitive assumptions of his friends and especially aggrieved by the apparent absence of God. So, in chapter 23, Job lays it out nice and clear. “Even today my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy in spite of my groaning. If only I knew where to find him; if only I could go to his dwelling I would state my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. I would find out what he would answer me, and consider what he would say to me. Would he vigorously oppose me? No, he would not press charges against me.”

In this, says Bible scholar Robert Alter, Job is reprising a refrain he’s used over the past 20-odd chapters.  “Job again resorts to his fantasy of meeting God for a fair legal argument in course.” Despite the fact (or perhaps increasingly because of it) that Job feels like he’s been muted in this call, Job wants to be heard.

The raw need expressed by Job resonates with most Christians at some time or another in our lives. The story of unjust suffering does not belong only to Job. Walking through the valley of the shadow of death hasn’t gotten any easier over a couple millennia. So, when the diagnosis of cancer comes, when the marriage falls apart, when the smooth, unblemished veneer of our lives is peeled back to reveal hidden secrets, pain smothered by layers of polite denial, our voices may send up a howl to heaven, not unlike Job’s.

The idea of Job demanding his day in court may cause us to shift uncomfortably in our pews. Job doesn’t pull his punches. He engages God with all his anger. It is a bold move. Audacious. We might even want to call it disrespectful or sacrilegious. Can we really speak to God in such a tone? Isn’t Job out of line?

His friends certainly think so. But, in fact, Job isn’t out of line. Job stands directly, shamelessly, in line. In a long line of God-wrestlers, lamenters, doubters and scrappers. Genesis 32 tells us the story of Jacob, the man who wrestled with God through the ultimate dark night of the soul. He, too, refused to give up the fight, “I  will not let you go unless you bless me,” is what he audaciously demands. And God responds, calling him Israel, the one who strives with God and Jacob, now Israel, responds: “I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved.”

While Israel, the man, physically wrestled with God, the Psalms, the songbook of Israel, the people, engage God with poetic fury. “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” We might call such language disrespectful or sacrilegious and yet the Psalmists’ language of lament, of anger, of distress is just as canonized as those psalms filled with praise and thanksgiving.

And so, rather than a bolt of lightning, God responds to Job with the same grace he provides throughout the Old Testament story of Israel – both the man and the people. God eventually engages Job in debate…but that story will be told next week.

This week, we might remember another of God’s chosen ones who prayed alone, abandoned and afraid. In the Garden of Gethsemane, in a moment of cosmic paradox, we have the story of God wrestling with God. The Gospel writer, Luke, says that, “being in agony, Jesus was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.”

The Good News that is coming over the next two Sundays is only faintly here foreshadowed.  But perhaps it is enough for God’s people to hope and to sing: “Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer.”

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Sympathy cards are … often not great.  Sympathy cards often sound a lot like Job’s comforters, which is to say not very comforting at all.  In my own ministry, I have found help in the Emily McDowell’s line of “Empathy Cards.” Fair warning, some are a little salty.  But they make room for honest lament like Job’s in a way that many supposedly “Christian” cards don’t.