Job Revisited

Why must the wicked always appear to be prospering, while the virtuous are left to miscarry? Not a new question, to be sure, an unnamed Hebrew poet having taken up the tale of unmerited suffering some twenty-five hundred years before, naming it the Book of Job, a text which has remained every bit as timeless as, say, the tragedies of Sophocles or Shakespeare.

So, it’s not likely to go out of print anytime soon. Who, then, was Job and why was he made to suffer? Was he a Jew? What do we know about the nature of his travail? Did it end happily or not?

Well, he was not a Jew; nor was he a pagan. In point of fact, his allegiance was to a single monotheistic God, whose sovereignty over the universe was absolute and unquestioned. And yet this supreme Ruler of the universe, whose edicts were instantly implemented everywhere, allowed the most awful things to happen to a perfectly good and blameless man. Why would God enter into a contest with Satan, the avowed enemy of all that God had made, letting him put to the test the innocence of a good man? Should it altogether surprise us that such miseries as were then visited upon Job—stripping him of all his possessions, including the loss of the people he loved most in the world—might move the needle just a little bit in the direction of his doubting the goodness and power of God?

Welcome to Theodicy 101, which aims to justify the ways of God to man. Can it be done? Does the suffering of Job provide any sort of clue to solving the problem of pain? Is it soluble? Or, like the immemorial inhabitants of the high Castilian plain, are we forced to admit, amid the harsh vicissitudes of life, No hay remedio? How is it possible to reconcile belief in an all-powerful God, who could quite easily rid the world of injustice—a God who because he is no less good than he is powerful would surely wish to do so—with a world awash in wickedness? A world where, more often than not, the good have no power whatsoever, while the powerful are not the least bit good? Is it because the God we profess to believe in is neither all-good nor all-powerful? Which leaves us with no alternative but an atheism of absolute and unremitting despair.

“Curse God, and die,” his wife tells him. And yet he will not. Even as he wishes in the midst of all his torments that he had never been born, he will not charge God with the injustice he has been made to suffer. “I know that my Redeemer lives,” he insists. Indeed, were God to send him down into the netherworld where there is neither light nor hope of escape, even then he would continue to trust. However painfully inscrutable his ways, God always remains the one rock to whom it is finally worthwhile to cling. Whose “riddles,” as Chesterton would say, “are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

And yet Job does cry out, begging God for something which he does not have, something without which life cannot go on, cannot endure. It is not his wife he pines for, nor is it his health, or the children he has lost, or the land he no longer has. These things do not finally matter. There is something yet more elemental going on here. It is justice with God himself that he requires, that will determine the outcome of everything else. And only God himself can give it to him, only he can restore the relation. “For he is not a man, as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together.”

In a word, what Job needs is an umpire, a mediator, someone to stand in the breach between himself and God. If God, the Lord of hosts, if he is to be our fear, our dread, as all the prophets of the Old Testament tell us, then there must be Another to whom we can make an appeal.

Would that there were an adjudicator
between us,
who might lay his hand upon us both.
Let him take his (God’s) rod away from me,
and let not dread of him terrify me (9:33-34).

Here is the deepest anxiety of all, one which simply cannot be resolved by ourselves alone. Nor is there anything in the Old Testament itself that can answer the cry. And thus, like the Hebrew Psalmist, we all cry out to God: “Give ear to my prayer!”

Fear and trembling come upon me,
and horror overwhelms me.
And I say, ‘O that I had wings like a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest’ (Psalm 55).

Putting it another way, the wings we require can only be woven by One who is no less God than God himself, yet as God will turn to man in a wholly human way and thus raise him up from below upon those same wings. In short, a God who will draw so near to man, so inconceivably close, that between the two there is only the freedom of the Infinite God to do this, and that of the finite creature to receive in gratitude what God has done. Justice for Job, therefore, can only finally consist of a God who is willing not merely to take his hand and lead him out of his suffering, but who will actually enter into that suffering, taking on all the travail inflicted upon him.

“God is always on the side of the suffering,” declares Pope John Paul II in a sweeping passage from Crossing the Threshold of Hope:

His omnipotence is manifested precisely in the fact that he freely accepted suffering. He could have chosen not to do so. He could have chosen to demonstrate his omnipotence even at the moment of the Crucifixion. In fact, it was proposed to him: ‘Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross that we may see and believe’ (Mk 15:32). But he did not accept that challenge. The fact that he stayed on the Cross until the end, the fact that on the Cross he could say, as do all men who suffer: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mk 15:34), has remained in human history the strongest argument. If the agony on the Cross had not happened, the truth that God is Love would have been unfounded.

This is the truth Job longs to hear, the truth we all long to hear. The irony, of course, is that when it is finally spoken (shown rather), Job will be dead, which is why the redemptive mercy of Jesus Christ, the God-man, includes not only the living, but the dead too and, yes, even those yet unborn.