book of job and renovare spiritual formation bible and international renovare conference and loss and hope

When I agreed to write several introductions and commentaries for Old Testament and Deuterocanonical books for the Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible (released May 2005), I was also invited to make a presentation on the Book of Job and the spiritual life at Renovare's International Conference from June 19-22, 2005. This essay describes that seminar, which took place this afternoon. I am writing this both to summarize some of the points I made and because I was humbled and gratified by the gracious response of the (60 or so) seminar participants.

The Participants

Why do people come to a seminar on the Book of Job, when there were others offered at the same time on subjects that arguably were more "upbeat" or accessible (Jesus and the Scriptures; the practice of meditation; Ps. 23)? One man came because he was in my youth group 30 years ago, and I hadn't seen him since the mid-1970s. One person came because she had read my earlier book on Job (Yearning Minds and Burning Hearts-1995) just after her 21 year-old son had died of cancer and wanted to tell me, 10 years later, how much that book had helped her in an exceedingly difficult time. One came because she and her husband went to law school with a colleague of mine 40 years ago and wanted to send greetings. But most came because either they or loved ones had experienced losses of enormous proportions in their lives, and they felt that the church wasn't the place where they could easily discuss their losses.

My Introductory Points

After learning a little about each other, I launched right into my thesis: the Book of Job is the most profound expression of human loss and the emotions attendant upon loss in Western literature. In addition, it shows the way that hope emerges in the midst of great loss. I had four introductory points.

1. The Book of Job is a "lifetime" book. Like an early legal case I worked on, which my firm had had in the office 17 years before I arrived, and which was still alive when I left three years later (and which my partner called his "lifetime case"), so the Book of Job has enough insights for a lifetime.

2. The Book of Job is a very ancient book. I laid out the philosophy behind the wisdom theology, with which the Book of Job takes issue. This theology is articulated most compactly in Proverbs, and even more concisely in Prov. 3:9-10. I stressed that this theology, which is basically that if you honor God, God will bless you materially, is often built into our view of the world and is, in fact, a very powerful and, in many cases "true" theology. The Book of Job takes issue with this theology by contending that profound, disproportionate, numbing loss may be unrelated to one's integrity or faithfulness to God.

3. The Book of Job is also a very modern book. It is modern because it explores the complex and murky world of the emotions. I asked the seminar participants about emotions that attend loss, and the list they compiled was a mirror image of the emotions that the Book of Job explores. Denial, explosion of undifferentiated pain, anger, bitterness, cynicism, despair, grief, abandonment, shame, humiliation, the pain of false hope, are all explored with excruciating care in the Book of Job. I also spoke briefly about the way that loss skews friendships.

4. The Book of Job is an exceedingly difficult book. It is made difficult because of the complexity of the poetry and the compactness of the language. Often one verse, which may represent as few as six or eight Hebrew words, has two or three images in it, images that have to be dissected one at a time to understand the intensity of Job's feelings. The Book of Job is also difficult because it can be "read" in more than one way. Like the loss that often immobilizes and confuses us, the Book of Job has its ambiguities. The primary one, which I couldn't get to today, is how does Job say 42:6--"I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes"? Does the "vision of God" humble him or destroy him?

Exploring the Flow of the Book of Job

For the remainder of the 75 minutes, I decided to walk through a general outline of the Book of Job so that we could see how the "flow" of the book contributes to the exploration of loss and the recovery of hope. The Book of Job is written in "prose-poetry-prose" (1-2; 3:1-42:6; 42:7-17) form. I made five brief points about the 1st prose section: (1) Job was undoubtedly a "big guy," the greatest man in the East; (2) The "deal" between God and the Satan moves the action along but makes it seem that God doesn't know exactly how Job would respond to affliction; (3)-(5) were the reactions of three people/groups of people to Job's loss: Job himself, Job's wife and Job's friends. Each of these subjects repays close study.

The long poetic section of the book is the heart and soul of the Book of Job. I pointed out the contrasting reaction to Job's loss between Job's seeming acceptance to his loss in 1:20-22 and his utter despair beginning in chapter 3. What is to account for this contrast? Emily Dickinson's poem, "After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes," helped me explain Job's initial "quartz contentment," that then changed to a "letting go" of great emotion. Then, I outlined the three cycles of speeches of Job and his friends from 3-27. I argued that of the reasons that conversation seemed to break down was that the friends offered interpretation of Job's distress before he was ready to hear their advice. He was not "talked out" until 31:40. Therefore, any apparently understanding or sympathetic advice of Eliphaz in 4-5 is undermined by the fact that he didn't say his words at the right time.

This insight sets the tone for understanding the crucial role of Elihu in the Book of Job. He waited until Job has finished speaking, and then he launches into his wordy, but helpful, interpretation of Job's condition. Rather than Job's loss being an example of divine discipline, as the wisdom tradition would maintain, or an instance of divine hatred toward Job, as Job would argue, Job's loss was the attempt of God to try to open Job's ear--to get him to listen to God in a new way.

Conclusion

We were out of time before I could finish! But maybe that wasn't so bad. The issue of loss and restored hope is not something that can be fully presented, much less "solved" in 75 minutes. The best classes, in my judgment, end with the feeling that much more needs to be done. And indeed it does. But I felt that through the process of joining the themes of loss and hope today, we were being faithful to the text of that most difficult but engaging book, the Book of Job.

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