Is There An Answer For Job?

Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual optimism
by Joan Borysenko

(Page 4 of 4)

The Book of Job goes on to provide considerable insight into how people think about the question of whether the universe is a friendly place or not. After Job's stirring soliloquy of suffering and misery that we read a few pages back, his three friends sit with him in silence for a week, pondering his situation. It is clear from the subsequent conversation that Job's friends are absolutely terrified. After all, Job is supposedly a just man, but he has been sorely afflicted. Why? What are the implications of his suffering to their belief system?

In commentary that accompanies his translation of The Book of Job, Stephen Mitchell points out that if Job is suffering even though he is a righteous man, then the friends are left with only two conclusions. Either God is unjust (and the universe is therefore a very unfriendly place) or suffering has nothing to do with whether or not a person has sinned (the universe is also potentially unfriendly since anything can happen to anyone). The most popular explanation among the friends, and the only one in which their limited thinking perceives safety, is that Job is a sinner who is therefore being punished. As theologian Elaine Pagels points out in her book Adam, Eve and the Serpent, and as Jay demonstrated in his response to AIDS, most people prefer guilt to helplessness to the extent that it feels empowering. At least if something bad is happening it's your own fault; by extension, if you're really, really good, then bad things won't happen.

Since the belief that God is just and people suffer only when they sin is the explanation that superficially minimizes helplessness, Job's three friends take turns haranguing him and trying to get him to confess his sins. Eliphaz the Temanite speaks to Job of the harshness of God, the inevitability of human sin and the intrinsic worthlessness of human nature. Once again, the imagery of the Old Testament poet is strong and vivid: "Can mortal man be righteous before God? Can a man be pure before his maker? Even in his servants he puts no trust, and his angels he charges with error." Bildad the Shuhite continues to discourse on the inevitable wages of sin: "Yea, the light of the wicked is put out. . . . Terrors frighten him on every side, and chase him at his heels. . . . His roots dry up beneath, and his branches wither above."

Job, however, is having none of this. He knows that he hasn't sinned and is thus confronted with the unsavory possibility that there is no justice based on righteousness: "Though I am blameless, he would prove me perverse. . . . therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent."

Then, much to Job's astonishment, God speaks to him from a whirlwind and asks, "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? . . . Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" Job's ego is getting its comeuppance. What hubris to think we can know the divine plan and, with our limited sight that sees "but through a glass darkly," as the Apostle Paul put it, create a blueprint for God to obey.

God goes on to enumerate all his powers and to speak of both the majesty and terror of nature at great length. Job is essentially speechless, and we are left to imagine how he was affected by this powerful meeting, based on the strength of just a few lines that he utters in response to God. His simple comment, "Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know," says volumes about how it is impossible to comprehend the infinite with a finite mind.

Job's last words to God in standard translations of the parable are "I had heard of thee by hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee, therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes." Mitchell, in stark contrast, comments that the verb that has been translated "despise" actually means "reject" or "regard as of little value." Furthermore, the object of the verb is not "myself." Mitchell proposes that a sounder interpretation, first suggested in an ancient Syriac translation, would be: "Therefore I take back (everything I said.)" As for repenting in dust and ashes, Mitchell's interpretation of Job's last words have to do instead with comfort in his mortality.

"I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I take back everything I said, comforted that I am dust" suggests that the wonderful new understanding of which Job previously spoke has revised his previous ideas about God. The standard translators, however, rather than being true to the Hebrew text, rendered Job's last words in line with the religiously pessimistic preconceptions of orthodox Christianity. This viewpoint holds that self-deprecation, guilt and shame are the appropriate responses to avert the wrath of the righteous, ill-tempered Jehovah.

Groveling in submission before the hideous power of the Almighty, a kind of "Yes, Boss, I'll do anything-just lay off" mentality, would be an anticlimactic end to the power of this poetic First Story. Mitchell has a different interpretation:

When Job says, "I had heard of you with my ears; but now I have seen you," he is no longer a servant, who fears God and avoids evil. He has faced evil, has looked straight into its face and through it, into a vast wonder of love. . . . Job's comfort at the end is in his mortality. The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, that whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin (pp. xxvii-xxviii).

Your Own Answer to Job

Through the years I have had the opportunity to talk with dozens of near-death experiencers who, like Job, have found comfort in their mortality. After returning from clinical death, these people-whether Jews, Christians, atheists or agnostics-have described the experience of dying as "like taking off a heavy suit of clothes," "waking up from a dream," "encountering indescribable radiance and bliss," "being connected with all things," "having total knowledge," "seeing how every event in my life made complete sense."

I believe that the First Story of Job is an invitation to come face to face with our own ideas about suffering and death, and, like Job, to see God with new eyes. Do we suffer even though God is loving, as Rabbi Harold Kushner suggests, because the universe is still incompletely formed and pockets of chaos exist in which bad things happen to good people? Or is the universe a perfectly ordered freedom play in which there are no accidents? Do we suffer because an authoritarian father God punishes us for our sins, or because we are the helpless/hapless authors of our own fate?

If, like Job, we plumb the depths of our dark nights and catch a true glimpse of the divine, perhaps we will indeed be comforted that we are dust. The drama of this body we hold so dear may then appear to be but one act in a cosmic play of epic proportions. Transformed by the eternal radiance in whose stories we grow and ripen, perhaps we might then accept our suffering as the seeds of an awakening.

I hope that in the course of the chapters that follow, the way in which you have added your own stories about suffering to God's, and come closer to or moved further from that radiance, will become evident. For if we are willing to give up our stories of fear and gaze with new eyes into the face of love, perhaps someday we will find a new meaning in our suffering and, as Kahlil Gibran promises in The Prophet, "come to bless the darkness as we have blessed the light."

Copyright © 1993 by Joan Borysenko