Last week, we left our exploration of The Book of Job having learned two things. Firstly, that it is a
dissenting text that challenges the conventions of received wisdom which declare that the relationship
between God and humanity is a kind of contract: in return for being good and obeying the rules, human
beings earn protection and a happy life. Job says instead that God and creation exist in a state of
covenant that is nothing like the contract imagined by receive wisdom; rather, that this covenant involves
a relationship in which an element of risk is decidedly present. Secondly, we learned that Job portrays
God, not as a cosmic tinkerer prepared to let human beings suffer in pursuit of some unfathomable
purpose or outcome; rather, that God is as vulnerable and at risk as we are, precisely because God is
prepared to place faith in humanity in order to make the covenant effective. In short, God is prepared to
make God’s-self vulnerable to human frailty, precisely because the risk runs both ways, and God has as
much to lose (and gain) as we do.
Having learned this, we come now to today’s reading from Job. But in order to explore this
passage, we need to take account of what has gone before, because the Lectionary has left a large gap
between this week’s and last week’s readings.
When we left off, Job had suffered a series a calamities, from the deaths of his children and
servants, through the loss of all his wealth and property, to himself being inflicted with a horrible disease.
In this state of extreme distress, three of Job’s friends – Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar – come to comfort
him. For seven days, the three friends sit with Job in silence, doing nothing more than sharing his
distress; and then, overwhelmed by his suffering, they begin at last to offer comfort and counsel. But the
words they speak, far from bringing relief to Job, only aggravate his torment. And that’s because the
three friends share a retribution theology, one which echoes the dictates of the received wisdom which
The Book of Job challenges. God, the friends counsel, does not punish or afflict the innocent and
righteous; therefore, Job must have committed some sin in order to elicit these terrible outcomes. Let
Job only confess his sin, put himself right with God, and all will be well again1.
The problem is, Job knows that he is innocent, that he has done nothing wrong. And it is precisely
because he shares the retribution theology of his friends that Job is tormented by his experience of
suffering: according to his own “wisdom”, he ought to be happy and prosperous. And therefore, he is
now doubly afflicted: by the terrible suffering that he knows he has done nothing to deserve; and by the
mistaken presumption of his friends, who assume he is guilty, when Job himself knows that he is not.
And so in the passages leading up to today’s reading, we have a long cycle of dialogues between
Job and his friends, in which they insist with increasing stridency that he is guilty and needs to make
amends, and in which he insists with growing bitterness that he is innocent and wrongly oppressed2.
And strange though it may seem, there is a rich – though dark – element of comedy in these exchanges.
For here we are presented with two participants in a conversation, both of whom share the same
retribution theology, both of whom use the same language and concepts to articulate that theology, but
neither of whom can make sense to the other participant. In other words, they spend the entire time
1
Wallace, Howard “Year B: Pentecost – Job 23: 1-9, 16-17”, located at
http://hwallace.unitingchurch.org.au/WebOTcomments/OrdinaryB/PentecostBJob23.html, accessed 10.10.15
2
Ibid.
talking past one another, divided, as George Bernard Shaw said of the British and the Americans, by a
common language.
Anyone who has seen the classic Abbott and Costello sketch Who’s On First? will know exactly
what I’m talking about. And for those of you who don’t, here’s a taster:
Show sketch Who’s On First?
So having reached the impasse of mutual incomprehensibility, Job launches into the bitter lament
that is the subject of today’s reading. And this lament consists in equal parts of Job complaining about
the weight of God’s oppressive presence and of God’s terrifying absence. On the one hand, complains
Job, God’s hand rests heavily upon him; a “hand” that might usefully be thought of as the burden of faith
itself, of the difficulties which entering into relationship with God places in the path of human life. Job
simply cannot do as he pleases; mindful of God – who is mindful of him – Job can only live within the
constraints that relationship with God places upon him. On the other hand, God is not present to Job’s
complaint, to the fact of his innocence in his suffering: God is neither before nor behind, neither to the
left nor the right. God, according to Job, is nowhere to be found.
And yet, despite this, Job insists on his innocence; and insists that if only God could be presented
with the facts, God would vindicate Job against the allegations of his friends. This rather judicial image
of evidence being presented to God, and God weighing up that evidence and pronouncing judgement
upon it – as though God were somehow ignorant of Job’s innocence – may seem strange to us; but it fits
perfectly within the framework of a retributive theology that depicts God in judicial terms. Moreover, the
“scandal” of Job daring to challenge God reflects the scandalous nature of Job as a dissenting text: the
assumed authority of conventional wisdom was such that any questioning of its dictates was considered
reprehensible. Job the character and Job the text both do the unthinkable: they question that which is
believed to be beyond questioning.
And yet here is the irony: Job the rebel is also Job the conventional thinker. In other words, Job’s
challenge to God is conducted from within the framework of conventional wisdom, from within his own
understanding of God as one who punishes the bad and the disobedient. Job is prepared to rebel
against God precisely because he thinks that those who rebel against God ought to be punished; his
sense of his own innocence, of one who has been obedient to God, pushes him into the position of
being a rebel – if only to prove that he isn’t rebellious and isn’t therefore deserving of punishment!
Once again, the dark, ironic humour of Job reveals itself: we are presented with a portrait of a
rebel who rebels to prove he isn’t a rebel. But what does this irony point us to: what does it reveal about
the nature of our relationship with God, or some of the assumptions we load upon that relationship?
The first is that when we speak with a confidence that is also a mask for ignorance, we invariably
do an enormous amount of damage. And nowhere is this more true than in the realm of pastoral care.
So often when confronted by the grief of others, we complain about not knowing what to say. But that
not knowing is exactly the point: it directs us to the truth that, insofar as others’ suffering is concerned,
often the best thing we can do is to say nothing. Job’s friends sit with his grief for seven days without
speaking a word; and in that seven days, they offer more solace than in all the discourse that follows.
Indeed, trouble only starts once they open their mouths. Job’s friends genuinely care for him; they
genuinely want to help him overcome his suffering. But their good intentions are exactly the problem:
because they come to Job with nothing more than good intentions, they become a source of further
aggravation and torment. The theological assumptions that colour their good intentions only add to
Job’s suffering; and part of the critique of conventional wisdom which Job makes is that it re-victimises
people by making them responsible for their suffering. In attempting to assert the loving goodness of
God, it assumes a relationship between sinfulness and suffering: it assumes that the experience of
suffering is retribution for human sinfulness. But this assumption is an ignorant assumption; and it does
more harm than good.
The second thing that today’s reading reveals is the dark side of the notion of the suffering
innocent. Job knows that he has done nothing to warrant the calamities that have befallen him; indeed,
the whole basis of his complaint to God is that were God to give him a fair hearing, God would have no
option except to vindicate Job. But this knowledge of innocence, coupled with the experience of
suffering, does not cause Job to re-visit his theology or revise his understanding of the relationship
between God and creation; it only entrenches him in his stubborn insistence that he be found “not guilty”.
In other words, Job’s declaration that he is a suffering innocent is a declaration, not of his righteousness,
but of his self-righteousness.
That may seem like a harsh thing to say; some of you might even think it’s pastorally insensitive.
But here’s the point: the notion of the innocent sufferer implies a notion of the guilty sufferer. In other
words, for every person we think of as “not deserving” to suffer, we think there is someone who does
deserve to suffer. Afterall, how often, when confronted by another’s misfortune, have we said or
thought: Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person? How often have we said or thought: Well, they got
their comeuppance, or They got their just deserts? The notion of the innocent sufferer springs from the
same retribution theology that says God does visit the wicked with death and destruction; and despite
our denials to the contrary, every time we indulge in thoughts or words about “just deserts”, we reveal
that retribution theology is as much a part of our understanding of God today as it was for the ancient
Hebrews. But today’s reading from Job tells us that there is no such thing as the “innocent” or the
“guilty” sufferer – there is only suffering. And it is to the suffering that we respond, not the guilt or
innocence of the one who suffers.
And so here we pause again, with these two confronting and perhaps disturbing insights. The first
being that so often when we think we’re doing good, we’re doing harm; and the second being that we
are more aligned to the retribution theology shared by Job and his friends than we perhaps think we are.
These are both insights that give us pause for thought, because they alert us to the uncritical and
unchallenged assumptions that underpin much of our thinking and daily living. But inasmuch as they
disturb us they also call us to action: to re-think all the things we take as a given or as obvious; and to
proceed with our relationship with God and with one another on a basis that does a lot less assuming
and a lot more listening and a lot more paying attention.