Job 38:1-6, 10-17 Commentary

In one way, this sequence of lectionary readings have been helpful: setting up a premise — unjust suffering that God’s people throughout history and geography will relate to, Job’s honest response, God showing up and putting the present moment in context and, finally, this week, Job’s acceptance of God’s power and wisdom.  On the other hand, covering 42 chapters in 4 Sundays can obscure the long, winding and bumpy road that leads to Job’s conclusion.

It is about Power or Justice?

The opening line of this week’s text, “I know you can do anything,” is an admission of God’s power.  But the attentive reader to the whole book will know that Job has, in fact, been confessing the All-Powerful God all along.  The power of God is, in fact, the very basis of Job’s complaint, as in: “I believe God can do anything.  So why is God doing … (gesturing broadly to all the world’s brokenness and, in particular his own)… this?”  In other words, Job’s pressing complaint all along isn’t that God is not powerful but that God is not just.  And that is the complaint that is resolved in the following stanzas.

In verses 3-4 Job quotes God’s words in Job 38:2-3 back to God as a way of conceding God’s argument.  God’s purposes are great and, therefore, often inexplicable to human beings.  Note that Job’s answer doesn’t imply he understands God’s purpose but that God’s purpose is rooted in God’s character which is, among other things, justice. So God may be just even if we can only see the unjust underside at any particular moment.

This comes to fullest expression in verse 5 where Job professes to see God.  Bible scholar Robert Alter argues that “the seeing of the eye is a testimony to the persuasive power of the poetry that God has spoken … Job has been led to see the multifarious character of God’s vast creation, its unfathomable fusion of beauty and cruelty, and through this he has come to understand the incommensurability between his human notions of right and wrong and the structure of reality.”

The Healing Work of Wonder

God’s response in Job 38-41 is not a direct answer but it is, even so, the right answer.  It doesn’t lay out or justify God’s purposes. After all, how could you begin to understand the One who laid the earth’s foundations, who knows the migratory patterns and gestational periods of every species and who subdues even the wildest animals. Thankfully, by simply showing up to the debate God demonstrates that we needn’t be God’s equal and that understanding what God is up to is not a pre-requisite to right relationship. In this, writes scholar Francis Anderson, “Job is satisfied. His vision of God has been expanded beyond all previous bounds. He has a new appreciation of the scope and harmony of God’s world, of which he is but a small part. But this discovery does not make him feel insignificant. Just by looking at ordinary things, he realizes that he cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like to be God. The world is beautiful and terrifying, and in it all God is everywhere, seen to be powerful and wise, and more mysterious when he is known than when he is but dimly discerned. The Lord has spoken to Job. That fact alone is marvelous beyond all wonder. Job has grown in wisdom. He is at once delighted and ashamed.”

Whereas his friends rushed in to answer for God, God didn’t defend.  God invited.  Likewise when we are dumbfounded by pain, brought up short and brought down low by sorrow, we might be tempted to answer for God.  But any answer of that nature will not be adequate to the task.  Rather, the pastoral care that Job needed … and received from God was an invitation to wonder, God’s very presence in the not knowing.

But Does that Make It Right?

The final prologue of Job makes a claim that many, many faithful people of faith have found difficult to accept: that after all his suffering, God makes it right by giving him a double portion.  This comes into starkest relief in the “replacement” of one set of children with another, which simply doesn’t correlate to real life.  And that is our reminder to consult the genre of the book of Job, specifically as a work of wisdom literature, a fable of sorts since the etymology of “Ur” as the Hebrew word for “‘counsel’ or ‘advice’ (inviting) one to construe this as the Land of Counsel.” Thus, says Alter, “the book ends in the folktale world of the frame-story, where everything is reduced to schematic patterns and formulaic numbers, and perhaps in this world such a question (about replacing children) cannot be properly asked.”

Illustration:

A common literary form in US during the 17th-19th centuries is the “slave narrative.”  Since not many enslaved people were granted the right to learn to read and write, when one became educated and, often, liberated, they would write about their experiences in slavery.  These eye-witness narratives were critical to the abolition movement.  Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Solomon Northup are classics in the genre.  For a more recent survey, Jemar Tisby’s The Spirit of Justice puts many names and faces to centuries of history.

According to Rodney Sadler, Jr. in The Africana Bible, “Job functions as the story of another people who have lost everything and learned to question everything about their God and their fortunes. Having been stolen from their lands and brought to a new land where they experienced unimaginable brutality, enslaved Africans’ narratives are often inspired by and beholden to the Job story.” Here Sadler points to the doctrine of Providence as a particular comfort wrenched out of the suffering.  “After questioning their loss in life and struggling to reconcile their fortunes with God’s justice, the authors of many of the narratives of formerly enslaved Africans celebrate God’s providence, nothing that even amid their trials and travails, God’s hand is apparent.  Turning to the particular work of Olaudah Equino, Sadler observes, “God’s providence serves as a recurrent motif running throughout Equiano’s narrative, ascribing theological significance to the pathos he endures and offering him the promise of a better life in this world and the next.”