More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We can’t observe the question of suffering from a distance. Unless we’ve felt it, unless we’ve been up against the wall, at a place where, frankly, God doesn’t make sense anymore, the Book of Job is probably going to be only an academic study.
A big obstacle to authentic Christianity is that so much of it has been only secondhand knowledge. All too often, the word of God comes to us as follows: “This is what the church says about God. . . . This is what priests say about God. . . . This is what the Bible says about God.” All that is insufficient evidence. “Hearsay” knowledge has little power, as Job himself will finally recognize (42:5).
When we are truly bereaved, expressions like “God has a bigger plan” fall flat. True, but all wrong. Mouthing such a platitude is sometimes premature when all we want to do, as Job wanted to do, is curse God. All the catechism answers we’ve been given in our years of religious training and all our Bible studies don’t mean much at such times. Unless we find the grace to put ourselves in the sufferer’s place, if circumstances have not put us there already, our reactions will be empty academic answers.
If we wish to enter more deeply into this mystery of redemptive suffering, which also means somehow entering more deeply into the heart of God, we have to ask the Lord to allow us to feel, not just to know. To feel what it means to be empty, abandoned, uncared for. Not only for five minutes and not only about trivia like missing the bus, but rather, an entire life’s stance, a standing-under, so that we can “understand.”
So Job is not just individuals we’ve all met. There is also a corporate Job, a whole people who have been up against the wall. Sometimes groups embody the same struggle for faith we’re going to encounter in this book.*
Religious education has for years given people answers to questions they’re not asking. The people accept the answers quickly and easily. And the answers go about an inch deep. And the people, all too often, spout the answers for the rest of their lives. “God is the Supreme Being who made all things,” or whatever else it might be. But such knowledge can pass away as quickly as it came, because we never thirsted for it. Until we make space inside, what comes is not an answer but an excuse — an excuse not to face the question, an excuse to stop searching, to avoid the journey. There’s too much
...more
Faith is a unique creation of both grace and freedom. It’s a choice we become capable of by God’s love. “A mysterious meeting of two freedoms,” Gutiérrez calls it. A freedom that God is and a freedom that we must become.
When we separate the scriptures from history, we are in trouble. When we separate the scriptures from real life, we distort the scriptures. When we separate the scriptures from the people out of whom the scriptures were written, we misinterpret the scriptures. The Lord entered history. And ever after, history and the flesh are where we encounter the Lord, rather than running from life and history into principles, theories, and the too-quick answers that put us back in control.
The point of scripture is to do the very thing that the writers of scripture did, that Moses and Abraham did: go out on the journey and there meet the Lord. And then continually come back to the word of God for confirmation and hopefully consolation.
The perennial temptation is to scapegoat rather than to carry the dark side of things. Demonizing the other makes us feel superior and “saved.” We compromise the Gospel for the purposes of group solidarity or good management. It is much easier to belong to a group than to belong to God. To belong to a group one usually has to be convinced the group is “right”; to belong to God, one always knows one is as wrong as everybody else. They are two very different journeys.
God walks with us into our fears, to feel them, to own them, to let them teach us. We need to say, “I’m afraid, Lord, how do I deal with this fear?” We tell God we’re hurting and life is falling apart. We’ve lost a job or a loved one, and we don’t know how to believe, hope, or love.
We won’t move, ordinarily, until the old answers don’t work any more. Pain is an activator that forces us to choose between what is important and what is not.
The trouble with so many of us is that we opt to stand in one little system — the American system or the Roman Catholic system or the Christian system or the white middle-class system — and stand in it justified and self-assured. We think we have all the answers, but we’re not very wise. The word of God calls us to greater wisdom.
We will all have a problem similar to Job’s so long as we picture God as “the one who does not suffer.” Job didn’t know about Jesus, of course, so it’s easier to excuse his mistake. But it’s amazing that, even after we’ve seen the incarnation, we Christians fall so readily into the same misconception.
The enfleshment and suffering of Jesus is saying that God is not apart from the trials of humanity. God is not aloof. God is not a mere spectator. God is participating with us.
How do we believe, how do we trust the love of God when we don’t feel love in this world? How do we trust the presence of God when we don’t find happiness in this world?
He has identified the meaning of his life within himself, in terms of his relatedness to the Lord, rather than drawing it from without. His “ontological mooring,” as Gabriel Marcel would call it, is in his union with God and not in his private or autonomous self-image.
If how we feel each morning depends on whether people are nice to us, if we can’t be happy without outside approval, we’re not really happy or fundamentally free. Happiness is finally an inside job. We are too often “reeds swaying in the breeze” (Matt. 11:7), dependent moment by moment on others’ reaction and approval. This is the modern self: insubstantial, whimsical, totally dependent and calling itself “free.”
Without ontological grounding we can only react from womb to tomb. Life becomes an eternal hall of mirrors. We can never be stable in a life of reaction, because our significance is dependent on others or on our own cleverness and self-talk. “Salvation from God,” by contrast, is a gift of self, from the one who is more truly me than I am by myself. Think about that — for the rest of your life perhaps.
The Book of Job proclaims from the beginning that there is no correlation between sin and suffering, between virtue and reward. That logic is hard for us to break. This book tries to break it, so that a new logos, called grace, can happen.
There is a term in moral theology called “retributive justice.” We expect retribution of God and of one another: We do this or that good and expect this much back; we do this much bad and expect that much punishment. Our horribly expressed doctrine of purgatory was a perfect example of poorly understood retributive justice: We did so many things wrong, and we got ten years in the fire; we did some more things wrong and got fifteen years in the fire. As if fire were ever going to make things just or repay a debt to anybody.
Untested faith tends to produce a very mechanistic and impersonal spirituality. Mature faith, however, almost always has a quality of paradox and mystery about it — as if to leave room for the freedom of God.
In some ways the story of Job is the ultimate climax and the final frustration of the Hebrew scriptures. It longs for a justice that we seldom achieve in this world and artificially creates it in the final chapter.
Whereas most of the Old Testament is preoccupied with corporate morality, with the people as a whole being good or bad, punished and rewarded, Job is concerned with one individual’s moral dilemma.
Yet the reason Satan is mentioned only four times, and only late in the Old Testament period, is because in much of the Old Testament God is seen as the cause of evil just as much as good. Only a developing of doctrine and philosophy of causality would lead us to make distinctions. Don’t let anyone tell you that theology and belief have not evolved.
What we need today are people who have a sense of order (left brain) but also a sense of creativity (right brain). And when those two aspects inform and respect each other, we have whole people. Most people in Western civilization are left-brain oriented. Right-brain-dominant people are too creative or too chaotic to fit in our system, as most of us would be too “rational” to fit into primal cultures.
Two words of Greek origin are important at this stage: “symbolic” and “diabolic.” Symbolic means to throw together. Diabolic means to throw apart. Evil is always dualistic, always separates: body from soul, heart from head, human from divine, masculine from feminine. Whenever we separate, evil comes into the world.
God can set us right only by breaking us down. As long as we remain in a self-assured, righteous, left-brain position, there is no way we can be bridge-builders or reconcilers.
Sometimes people who don’t know God well presume that God would use power the way they would use power: as a dominative force. They want a deus ex machina, a magician God who appears out of the wings to solve the problem.
Theology does not provide the answer to this dilemma, only spirituality does. It’s disappointing that we Christians have emphasized theology so much more than spirituality. We have emphasized catechism and religious education much more than prayer. But for the predicament we have here, there is no answer, only a prayer response, only the willingness to remain in communion, to hang in there, to keep talking.
Job tries yelling at God He yells at God, accuses God of all kinds of things, speaks sarcastically, almost makes fun of God. “If this is a game you’re playing, then you’re not much of a God! I don’t need you and I don’t want you” — it’s that kind of prayer that creates saints. You can’t pray that way, with that authority, unless you know something, unless you are assured at a deep level of a profound relatedness between the two of you, unless you know you can venture into that arena where we say angels fear to tread.
Our history together is our truth, undeniable; the events of a lifetime are there, they can’t be withdrawn. That’s what Job is relying on and never really doubts.
There has been a great temptation in many modern religious movements — like some in the charismatic movement or the “gospel of success” — to have the resurrection without the cross, to enjoy part of the mystery and to avoid the pain that necessarily goes with it. On the other side, many moralistic, stoic, or Jansenistic types suffer their crosses diligently but refuse to recognize or enjoy Christ already risen in all things.
True joy is not authentic unless achieved through pain — not under it, not to the right or left or over, but through it. That’s the only authentic Christian joy. Any other joy is a covering up of pain, an escaping and denying. There is much denial in religion. The old ostrich maneuver — pretend it’s not happening. That’s not what the Lord is calling us to; it’s not the whole paschal mystery. It’s not the mystery to which Job is submitting here. “If we take happiness from God’s hand, must we not take sorrow, too? And in all his misfortune, Job uttered no sinful word” (2:10). So, again, he
...more
If someone is near death or has just lost a loved one, there’s not a great deal to say. All words fall short. Often, all we can offer is our presence, just being there. But strength is communicated, caring is communicated.
We must go through the stages of feeling, not only the last death but all the earlier little deaths. If we abort these emotional stages by easy answers, all they do is take a deeper form of disguise and come out in another way. So many people learn that the hard way — by getting ulcers, by all kinds of internal diseases, depression, irritability, and misdirected anger — because they refuse to let their emotions run their course or to find some appropriate place to share them.
People who do not feel deeply finally do not know deeply either. Because Job is willing to feel his emotions, he is able to come to grips with the mystery in his head and heart and gut — he understands holistically.
For the purification of our faith, it is important first to be “Jews in spirit,” to have that kind of faith. The life of virtue and God-centeredness is an end in itself, and not for the sake of some future reward. To do what God wants simply because God is God. That’s what Job is dealing with. What a profound faith that many Christians have never even considered.
Forget heaven and hell. Pretend that the day we die, that’s it. How many of us would bother to study scripture at all? How many would bother even to be good? Our training in the reality of heaven and hell has influenced our entire way of thinking, and not always for the good.
No one can take the consolation and gift of immortality away from us, yet such promises have also made Christian people rather sloppy in our thinking and faith. It has allowed us not to take history seriously. It has allowed us to be, as it were, absentee landlords in this world, to just muddle through, to make sure we go to church on Sunday so we get the reward later — or avoid some punishment. Fire insurance is not happy or healthy religion.
Job draws his satisfaction from truth and justice, not from hope of future reward or fear of future punishment.
The general belief of the scriptures, however, is that God’s justice is not achieved by punishment, but by the divine initiative we call grace, which enables us to bring about internal rightness, harmony, balance, and realignment with what is: God.
Our most basic theological problem is that God is God and we’re not. Most of us in effect are terribly upset that we’re not God. It really ticks us off that another is in charge and we’re not, and that we’re only creatures. We spend much of our life railing and complaining because we’re not in charge and we can’t call the shots — at least I do.
Ideology is a very common masquerade for real faith because the agenda looks so good or religious. This is similar to efficient church operations masquerading as loyalty to God.
Remember that the opposite of love is not really hatred, but control. God remains in love and therefore out of the control mode. When we are not in love, we are invariably trying to control everything — it’s a good litmus test. God seems to be fully in control only when we give it back to God. That is the beauty and limitation of those who love. They can give up control, and they can weep instead of explain.
We also think that if people don’t get angry, the problem will go away. But this isn’t necessarily so. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with anger. Don’t tell them to take away their anger: It’s only by working through it and understanding their anger and owning their anger that people understand what’s going on. We need to exercise our emotions and should not listen to Eliphaz’s advice about anger.
It’s hard to protect oneself from bad teaching when it is presented with sincerity, good intentions, and a certain degree of believability. Thus our frequent dilemma with fundamentalists and Catholic restorationists.
In the spiritual life it’s much more important to know how to listen than to know how to talk.
Most of us are not trained in redemptive listening. We’re trained to give answers. In the counseling context, this listening mode is often called nondirective counseling. It is based on the premise that one can’t ultimately provide the answers for others. All one can do is walk with the other and help others rightly to hear themselves. What people long to have happen is to be somehow received, understood. When they are heard, it seems, they can begin to hear. The most redemptive thing one can do for another is just to understand.
When we are understood, when we feel another person really cares, it’s surprising how the problem, for the most part, can fade. We don’t need the answer any more. The mere fact that someone is carrying the burden with us, walking with us on the journey, for some unbelievable reason — it’s not logical at all — takes care of much of the problem.
