If you haven’t noticed, I haven’t written much here lately. The simple reason why is that my sleep schedule has shifted, swallowing up my normal writing time. But as always, the real reason is a lot more complex. The fact is, I had a rough September. Work frustrations, a recurring water leak in my apartment, and a career setback that both derailed a lot of momentum I was feeling over the Spring and Summer and reopened a lot of old psychological wounds, have conspired — together with the normal seasonal lethargy of Autumn that’s only getting worse as I age — to create a perfect storm that’s simply made it hard to care, hard to want to try, hard to get out of bed in the morning. Now I’ve said all this not to complain: There’s really nothing special about my circumstances at all. We all have times in life where things are going well and times when things go sideways, despite our best efforts and even despite the odds. That’s just life on Earth. But the thing is, we still need to deal with those times. We still need to reconcile our hearts to them, and do the heavy spiritual lifting it takes not to let them negatively impact our relationships with ourselves, our loved ones, our communities, and God, relationships that are at the heart of what we call faith.
And it’s times like these that the book of Job, from which today’s Old Testament reading is taken, was made for. This ancient folk tale is among the first in Western literature to wrestle with the question of divine justice in a world that is inherently hard to live in. The framework of the story is well-known: One day, God is sitting with the mysterious heavenly council, when Satan (who is more of a Trickster figure in the Bible than the powerful ‘Prince of Hell’ of late medieval and early modern Christian imagination) shows up. God brags to Satan about Job’s faithfulness but Satan questions this on the grounds that Job, a wealthy and successful man by any standards, has never had any reason to complain:
‘Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face. (1.9b-11)
God succumbs to Satan’s mind games here and accepts the challenge. Within a matter of minutes, enemies come and steal the animals working Job’s fields and kill his field workers, a lightning strike destroys his house and livestock, raiders steal his pack animals, and a freak storm kills his children.
Job is understandably beset by grief, but even in the midst of all this disaster, he does not curse God, but rather continues to worship: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (1.21). This verse has had a profound influence on Christian spirituality, providing a biblical basis for equanimity — a philosophical outlook that refuses to let success or failure, blessings or curses, change our belief about ourselves or God. Things come and things go. That’s just the way of the world.
All this sets the stage for the reading assigned for today, in which, having succeeded in remaining faithful amidst the unbelievable losses he’s just suffered, Job is tested again — this time with an attack on his health. Now, with his body covered in painful sores, his wife (who alone among Job’s family escaped the first attack) asks him:
“Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.”
But he said to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips. (2.9-10)
If we take this at face value, it feels a lot like spiritual bypassing — where the ‘right’ religious answers are used to mask problems and justify not addressing them. But the book of Job is more sophisticated than that. Today’s reading sets the scene for the famous interactions between Job and his (so-called) friends, who come to offer pat religious answers to the question of why all this has happened to him. They insist that it must be divine punishment and he must repent in order for it to stop. But Job stands firm in his belief that this is not a punishment and that he has nothing for which he needs to atone. But throughout these discourses, we see that Job is not spiritual-bypassing at all. He feels his grief and pain and isn’t afraid to express it.
It’s really a master class of ‘feel the feeling and drop the story.’ Job grieves and suffers but he refuses to attach any of the meaning or stories society places on it. He refuses to blame God. He refuses to blame himself. He refuses to become a ‘cautionary tale.’ He simply stands firm in his belief that the good and the bad in life are inseparable. When in the end he is able to confront God directly about it, it ends in a rather narratively unsatisfactory stalemate; the message seems to reinforce what Job’s been saying all along: The world is a vast and mysterious place and it’s not for us to have an opinion on any of it. The one thing it does is help him to zoom out and focus not just on the wins and losses of his own life, but on the vastness and mystery of creation and God.
So what’s the takeaway here? I think Job is generally right; the correct response to times when things are going well and when things fall apart is the same: They’re not statements of us or our worth or our faith. They’re not statements about God’s love or even God’s blessing. Things come and things go. And that’s just what life is. “Blessed be the name of the LORD.”
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And what’s next for me and the blog? Well, I have a lot of ideas for series I’d like to do going forward, but I need my sleep schedule to sort itself out — or find an alternative set of routines if it doesn’t! — before I can really dig into anything. If nothing else, I’ll be popping in periodically with some fun, one-off posts, and I’ll stay as much as possible in my routine of these Sunday morning reflections. For everything else, stay tuned!
Matthew Root 