Job is probably one of the best known characters in the Old Testament. The patience of Job is proverbial. Alfred Lord Tennyson, with perhaps a little exaggeration, described the book of Job as the greatest poem of ancient and modern times.’ And yet there is probably no more puzzling, contradictory, repetitive, and infuriating book in the Bible and no book into which commentators have poured so much of their own views on life
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The story is well known; Satan takes out a wager with God on how well his righteous and prosperous servant Job will stand up to misfortune. Will he curse God? God allows Satan to kill Job’s children, to take away his wealth and to afflict him with sore boils. Job accepts his lot. Various friends argue with him about what has happened. Job must be being punished for his sins. Job maintains that he is a righteous man, that this suffering is unmerited, and that God should both exonerate him and give him an explanation. After many chapters God eventually speaks to Job out of a whirlwind, both rebuking and vindicating him but not really giving him any answers. Job is then rewarded with twice as much as he had before.
It sounds straightforward if a little unsatisfactory; and yet the text itself is often very disjointed and must in places be corrupt; there are sudden shifts of mood, bouts of sarcasm and irony, no consistent course of argument; the character of God seems rather unsympathetic to say the least; the ending is very contrived and above all Job seems not to be the model of patience he has been held to be. There seem to be two Jobs in the text ; the enduring and righteous hero who withstands every calamity; and the impatient anti hero who demands a hearing from God and protests the unfairness of what has happened to him. The first character has had the greater prominence as a role model in church history; the anti hero was taken up by Blake and Shelley as the archetype of the romantic rebel.
We shall be hearing more from the book of Job at evensong over the next month. Our concern this evening, however, is not so much with Job but with his so called comforters. After all the calamities that befall him Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar appear to console and comfort him. They weep, rend their robes, sprinkle their heads with ashes and sit with Job in silence for seven days. Their silence is perhaps the most pastorally sensitive aspect of their relationship with Job. Job then breaks the silence with a bitter diatribe against his life he wishes he had never been born. He speaks with passion he is the spokesman for all the wretched on earth; in answer to which Eliphaz speaks the words we hear in our first lesson. He is clearly shocked; he and his friends had come to comfort Job not to participate in a rebellion against divine providence.
He begins what he has to say softly, gently chiding him for breaking down under his calamities. His main argument is a form of what is known as the doctrine of retributive justice. It is found throughout the Bible. The innocent are rewarded and the wicked receive their just deserts. Man is by nature too base to be innocent before God. And short-lived by nature he cannot hope to discover the wisdom to understand his lot. Experience shows that God both disciplines and punishes us all through suffering the wise man accepts what happens to him and repents. If he does so God will relent and reward him. In what he says Eliphaz represents the main argument of all Job’s so called comforters. And yet the whole purpose of the book of Job seems to be to question, even to undermine this argument.
Just as the patience of Job has become proverbial so to has the title Job’s comforters’; but unlike the first phrase the second is always used ironically, meaning an unhelpful source of well meaning but ineffective comfort. As long ago as the 6th century Pope Gregory, accused Job’s friends of insensitivity and lack of restraint. Theirs are windy words not helping Job to find righteousness. According to Calvin these friends lack love even thought their intentions are good. Subsequent commentaries also describe them as unfeeling, with hearts encased in steel, knowing only the general doctrine and not how to apply it in a real situation of grief. They can only hear their own voices they do not truly listen to what Job has to say. Their view is governed by a general picture of the human situation. Job’s vision is shaped by his own experience and the window it gives him onto suffering humanity. For Eliphaz Job must have sinned in order to fit into the general scheme of things. Job will not allow himself to be so fitted.
And so for the rest of the book we see this dialectic explored in more and more detail. Job’s friends each come at him from a different angle even though there is considerable repetition in what they say. The reader has his nose rubbed in the argument going backwards and forwards from the general to the particular, from the Biblical view to Job’s view. We long for a resolution an answer a way out of the dilemma. And when God finally speaks to Job we expect that resolution; but it is not forthcoming. God does not resolve the tension. He forbids the view that he is a moral accountant and so undermines the argument of Job’s comforters. But he refuses to answer Job’s questions and rebukes Job for his presumption. God’s only answer is the grandeur of the cosmos the setting for a debate which can have no answer. We yearn for an answer, we remain baffled, but not stifled the debate goes on in Scripture and in the life of the church. We devise ways of talking about God, we try to explain the ways of God, and we try to apply these accounts to our experience and sometimes they fit and sometimes, perhaps often, they do not and when they don’t we have to learn sensitivity and patience and to think it out again and in the end to be silent before God. And if we like Job find that these accounts of God do not fit our experience if there is a tragic mismatch between faith and experience then we are like Job allowed to argue and complain and protest, but in the end perhaps we too have to find how to be silent before God. And so the debate on and what perhaps we learn in the end from the book of Job is how to conduct that debate.
It is a lesson that needs heeding in the Anglican communion and even perhaps a vindication of the Archbishop of Canterbury in his concern for the way in which we conduct our contemporary debates from seemingly irreconcilable positions. And perhaps there are moments in these debates that swirl so bad temperedly about him when our Archbishop must long to exclaim as God does to Job, Behold the hippopotamus.’