Voiceover Voice:
It’s through the people who are present that we then experience God’s love, even in this terrible time.
Helena Martin:
This is Chapter, Verse, and Season: a lectionary podcast from Yale Bible Study. Join us each week as two Yale Divinity School professors look at an upcoming text from the Revised Common Lectionary.
This episode, we have Awet Andemicael, Associate Dean for Marquand Chapel and Assistant Professor (adjunct) of Theology, and Gregory Sterling, the Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean and Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament. They’re discussing Job 42:1-6, 10-17, which is appointed for Track 1 of the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 25, in Year B.
I want to note that this conversation includes a story about infant death. Not everyone will be in a place to listen to that right now. Please take care, and feel free to skip this one and come back next week instead.
Okay, here’s the text.
[Job 42:1-6, 10-17]
Then Job answered the Lord: “I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me that I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”
And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends, and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. Then there came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and they ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money and a gold ring. The Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning, and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters, and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. After this Job lived one hundred and forty years and saw his children and his children’s children, four generations. And Job died, old and full of days.
Awet Andemicael:
Greg, this last chapter of Job is such a powerful end to the journey that we take when we read this book. And you’ve spoken to me before about the ways in which people have thought about this whole book and how the writer of Job brings us to a conclusion. What are some of the things that you find interesting about this particular way of ending this book?
Greg Sterling:
Job is such a powerful and interesting in the sense of complex work. So, it opens and closes with a prose narrative, the tale of Job, and there must have been some kind of story about this figure named Job that people knew. But between the narrative that opens and closes are a series of speeches. And you get Job and his three friends in chapters 3 through 31, you have this figure that comes out of the blue, Elihu, in 32 through 37, and then you get the speeches between God and Job. And the interesting thing about this text, and I wonder if the people who did the lectionary realize this, that in those speeches between God and Job, there are two long speeches by God and two short speeches by Job. This is the second speech of Job responding to God. And I think they’re wise in the choice of that because it sets up the prose narrative that follows. And the narrative is, to be blunt, it’s the classic Hollywood ending or fairy tale ending to a story that somehow everything’s going to be made right. And so Job gets double all of his wealth and he has all these kids again. One might pity his poor wife for having all those kids, but anyway, all of this happens to Job at the end. And one can ask all kinds of questions. But I think we should just set history aside and just think about it theologically. The question for me is, the speeches, especially the speeches of Job, question how does an innocent person or why does an innocent person suffer? And when we read the narrative we know, well, because Satan afflicts Job, not God. But you can just back that up and say, yes, but God allows Satan to afflict Job. So that just backs it up one step is all. And Job protests his innocence and maintains it until here you get this little confession and repentance, which then leads to the blessing. So, it sounds like, if I can express it in Biblical terms, what you would get in Deuteronomy or what we call the Deuteronomistic history. Where if you do what’s right, you’re blessed, and if you do what’s wrong, you’re cursed. And Israel’s story is told that way. So, Job does what’s right, and now he’s blessed at the end.
But that’s not what the speeches say. [laughter] The speeches, I think, are challenging that. And it seems to me that this is an attempt to domesticate those radical challenges. And I have often thought that the challenges are the real genius of Job and the fact that the book doesn’t actually resolve the problem. So, I’m going to put this to you, Awet. I mean, that’s kind of the struggle or the tension in the composition of the book. But the real question is the theodicy and that is, why do innocent people suffer? And do you find the fact that Job, this book, doesn’t really resolve that? I mean, it gives different responses. You can say, the friends say, well, Job, you sinned. And Job says, this is nonsense. And they seem to lose the debate, because they peter out in the third cycle. And Elihu, well, it could be for improving you, for disciplinary purposes. But that doesn’t seem to work too well. And God doesn’t answer. I mean, God responds, but God doesn’t explain.
Awet Andemicael:
Yeah.
Greg Sterling:
So, you’re a theologian. You have to worry about theodicies. How do you deal with this?
Awet Andemicael:
Yeah. One thing I always have to remember is that theodicy is the term we use for the explanation or the account of how it is that a just and good God can permit, or in some ways sort of allow, the suffering of the innocent rather than the question itself. The question is, how can God do this? And then we try to give some sort of an explanation and give an account. And that’s what theodicy is, strictly speaking. The more I think about this theologically and the more I live an actual life and see other people living their actual lives, the more I think that theodicy, in the sense of a rational account of how God could allow this, is essentially impossible. I don’t think this is the kind of thing that we can explain or somehow give an accounting of in words.
And certainly, when we are looking at other people suffering, I’m not sure that it’s appropriate for us to try and explain away other people’s suffering. Other people’s innocent suffering or whatever other kind of suffering, however we describe it. Sometimes when we use the term innocent suffering in order to defend God, we say, well, maybe they weren’t so innocent, right? Maybe they actually deserved it on some level because we are so invested in protecting God from the idea of somehow acting in a way that we can’t explain or understand. But what I find so amazing about God’s response to Job is precisely that he doesn’t say, this is why I allowed this. This was my rationale. This is who I am. This is how it’s about. He, what he says is, this is who I am, right? He doesn’t say, this is why I did this. This is who I am. And the whole journey that Job has gone through in this book is about him encountering God in this particular way. God opening God’s self to Job. So then when he responds in the beginning of this chapter, he says, I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. So, I knew of you, but now I have actually encountered you. And his response is, therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. But maybe the broader way of seeing this is that he’s now experienced a kind of transformation in his way of relating to, his way of knowing God, and that’s opened up a new capacity.
So, my response to the question of, how do we deal with innocent suffering is, for other people who are in our own lives, we come up, you know, you do what you need to do to survive and get through that. I have no judgment on that. But when we see other people suffering, which is sometimes a really hard position to be in, and you want to give them, you want to explain it away. You want to somehow say, well, your loved one is in a better place or, all the pat phrases that we give, whether pastorally or just as friends. And it seems to me, maybe putting our hands over our mouths and being quiet and just being present with the people that we’re trying to comfort would be the wisest thing. And supporting them until they’re in a place where they can be open to the work that only God can do in helping them navigate this process and coming to a different way of engaging with God as they navigate that suffering.
Greg Sterling:
So, I’m going to tell a story that frames the way that I read the book of Job. It’s very personal. When I was getting ready to go to Berkeley to do my doctorate, our younger daughter was born and we had some very close friends and they had a daughter two months after or born two months before Amber. And I stood in the hospital when Lindsey was born, and was, other than her two parents, was the first person to hold her. And when she was four months old, they found a lump under her arm. And we moved to Berkeley, and they started taking Lindsay to Stanford for cancer treatments. They have a special center. And for two years, we would see Brent and Rhonda as they would go back and forth. You go through Berkeley to get to Stanford and went down to the Stanford hospital. But when Lindsay died, I sat in the waiting room with Brent and Rhonda and with Rhonda’s parents. They were, these were all devout people. Rhonda’s father was really mad. He was like Job. And he was, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and a very loud voice saying, “How can God do this?” And I didn’t have anything to say other than, I love you and I care for you, and I’m here for you, and I hope that you will feel God’s love through me, in my presence. Since then, I’ve read a good number of philosophers of religions attempts to explain this, but I have never read an adequate one. So, I have personally always been deeply grateful that Job doesn’t try to answer the question. Because I don’t, I mean, the ancient Stoics tried to answer this. They had all kinds of answers. Cicero records them. But I’ve just never found it. I think it’s the greatest challenge for anybody who’s a monotheist in the world. But there are reasons to believe in God and in God’s goodness. And I think what you said, it’s through the people who are present that we then experience God’s love, even in this terrible time. So that’s my way of reading the text.
Awet Andemicael:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny, we talk about the various mysteries, theological mysteries, like the mystery of the incarnation, the mystery of the Trinity. I think that human suffering is itself a kind of mystery. Not a good mystery, but it’s a kind of mystery and not a puzzle to be solved. But a mystery that we can only experience and enter into and somehow encounter God in. And through that, to be opened up to new possibilities. Not a path that I would choose for anyone or for myself, but when suffering comes, which it inevitably will to a greater or lesser extent, it’s only the reality of the presence of God that can carry us through. I think it diminishes it to try to explain it. Again, no criticism of people who come up with rationalizations for themselves. You do whatever you need to do to explain. And sometimes those are actually valid for you. But I don’t think it’s helpful. I think your response to that situation, especially when you were carrying your own pain for them, was, it sounds like exactly the right thing to do. And it’s exactly what we learned from a book like Job.
Greg Sterling:
Yeah. I just think we have to be honest. And I do think there are reasons not to believe in God, but there are greater reasons to believe in God. And an experience like this can be a reason not to. My friends never lost their faith, and they found the reasons to believe in God in spite of Lindsay’s death. So that, I think, and I think that’s why Job’s in our Bibles. It’s there, it’s there to help us with our faith, with our struggling to realize this is real. This is what we have to wrestle with. This is what we have to struggle with. So, I’m very grateful it’s in our Bibles.
Awet Andemicael:
Yeah. It’s okay for us to say, I don’t know, right? Yeah. And to ask the question and let the question itself just be an opening. An opening to the divine. An opening to what’s beyond. That’s my sense. One last thing I want to say, as I’ve been thinking about Job and this passage in particular, I was looking online at the visual commentary on scripture that Kings College London has put out. It’s a really wonderful resource and they have, for this chapter they put a, a series of illustrations by William Blake. Illustrations of the Book of Job, and I think it’s, I have to check who it was who did the commentary, I think it was Christopher Rowland wrote a commentary on it. So, it’s a really wonderful resource. Again, for something that goes so far beyond what we can rationally explain, having art, visual arts and music and other modes of knowing can really be valuable in helping us access that. Access some aspect of meaning and truth beyond what a rational discourse can provide.
Helena Martin:
Thanks for listening. You can visit our website for more Bible study resources: YaleBibleStudy.org.
Chapter, Verse, and Season is a production of the Center for Continuing Education at Yale Divinity School. It’s produced by: Creator and Managing Editor, Joel Baden; Production Manager, Kelly Morrissey; Associate Producer, Aidan Stoddart; and I’m your Host and Executive Producer, Helena Martin. And our theme music is by Calvin Linderman.
We’ll be back with another conversation from Chapter, Verse, and Season.