Happy endings…I’ve got one for you. Last Sunday afternoon I was unloading my car, and scurrying around the back of it was a spider, and not a daddy-long-legs, but a significant spider, with significant plans, I thought- maybe even plans to cause me some pain. So, what was I to do? It was the Sabbath, day of rest, not a day to smoosh and crush a spider, and feel that sickening feeling of the life going out of something. But Sabbath or not, that spider had to go, and I knew what I had to do, and I comforted myself with the knowledge that I have killed many a spider before, and that initial nauseating crunch- that feeling goes away shortly and life goes on, at least for me. I didn’t like it, but I’m a mom now, a big girl, and time to do my duty. But then the spider did something surprising. I felt as though it was either reading my mind and thought he would help me out a little, or it just really did not want to say goodbye to life just yet. It took a flying leap like I have never seen a spider take before, something I did not know was possible for a spider to do, and out the back of the car he went, crawling away to the greener pastures of the grass. Win-win! All was well, and I could go on with my day not feeling guilty, and the world was the spider’s oyster. Happy ending!
Just like the story of Job- another story with a happy ending. Job realizes he has been nothing but a worm in arguing with God, rubs himself raw in the ashes of repentance, and- wa la!- is rewarded with more than he had before: money and expensive jewelry, enormous flocks and herds, lots of sons and beautiful daughters, and a very long life. Never mind that almost the entire book of forty-two chapters is an argument against retributive justice, a protest against a theology that would have God as one who rewards the righteous and punishes the sinners. Never mind that there is no resonance, therefore, with the theology of most of this book of Job and the last chapter, the chapter in which Job repents and then receives rewards.
Well, of course we cannot never-mind these contradictions, and really, do we feel that this story truly has a happy ending, with Job’s material and paternal fortunes restored? Did not this leave you with a bit of a bitter taste in your mouth, or a stomach not really satisfied?
As we enter the waters of Job, waters that never really become calm or peaceful despite, even, what the last eight verses say, there is a truth to the unsatisfactory nature of the reading of Job that needs to be acknowledged from the beginning. We are not going to find a tidy, coherent theology in this book. There are wildly disparate messages spread throughout the chapters about who God is and how God interacts with creation. So there is a great truth to what Old Testament professor, Kathleen O’Connor writes, that readers are left, “to ponder for themselves”, what is being said about the nature of God. A gift, I think. It is a rare and beautiful thing to be given the space to acknowledge that there is a great mystery to the scriptures, and that we have the freedom and the choice and the grace bestowed upon us to flesh out for ourselves the meaning or meanings behind the story, and the book of Job forces us to do so. Is this a book, this book of Job, about an utterly new, mysterious, personal, and transformative encounter with the Holy, one in which Job must wrestle with, surrender to, and make a choice about the very nature of God, the God whom he has been an evangelizer for and about whom he has had a very coherent, neat theology that has worked for him in the past which is no longer going to work? Or, is this a book, this book of Job, about a God who, in the name of a justice demands an eye-for-an-eye, and, thus, will give good things to those who recognize their helplessness in the face of their Creator, and for those who choose to go their own way, good luck? Or, a third option, is this story about a capricious God, the God represented in chapters one and two, who almost in the name of sport, makes a deal with Satan to mess with and frustrate and nearly destroy Job to see just how much one can endure? All of these possibilities, actually, are represented in this book. Any one of these options could be concluded as what this book is about, and thus we are left to ponder for ourselves the very nature of God.
In the compilation of Job, it can be argued that there are three separate endings to the book that were added at three different times for three different reasons. The first ending is that which ends with verse six, the last words being, “therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” The second ending is that which we did not read, verses seven through nine, in which the Lord confronts Job’s friends and calls upon them to recognize their folly, seek forgiveness, and treat Job kindly. The third ending is the part about the material, paternal, and physical restoration of Job. This is, possibly, the latest addition to the ending of Job. Thus, if we consider, in particular, the restoration of Job with good fortune as a sort of add-on to the book to make it more satisfactory, this restoration, in the book’s original creation, was considered unnecessary, and that the nature of God and God’s presence and interaction with creation is not to be discerned in these last eight verses. These last verses feel very much like an add-on, a distraction, even, a sort of feel-good ending that leaves us saying, yes, good, Job had some good stuff when all was said and done, but…what about all that he lost in the beginning of the story? What about the children he lost in the first place, and the servants who were slaughtered? Those losses do not just disappear nor will they ever, no matter what later goodness is brought to Job’s life.
So if we consider the last verses as the add-on and distraction that they seem, and instead go to what is considered by some as the original ending, that of verses one through six, we are still left with some disturbing images, mainly that of a Job reduced to nothing, sitting in a pile of dust and ashes, overwhelmed by God’s power and otherness and superiority- the fire, that fire within him that enabled him to challenge and confront and grapple with God and demand God’s presence- this fire seemingly smoldered, the argument over, and it seems that God won and Job lost.
There are two significant translation issues in this first ending to the book of Job. Both are in relation to verse six, one of the more disturbing verses in scripture, one in which self-hatred seems to be lifted up as pleasing to God. Verse six reads, “Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” The first part might be better translated, “Therefore I yield,” as in, I yield to the hurling of my arguments against you God, for something has happened in my encounter, in my arguing, in my confronting you that has fundamentally changed me and my relationship with you. The second part of the verse might be better translated as, “and repent of dust and ashes” rather than “repent in dust and ashes”, meaning Job is getting off the ash heap and becoming someone with a new perspective and someone different than he was before. Verse six as a whole might be read, then, as, “Therefore I yield, and repent of dust and ashes”- a much different way to end the book of Job.
If we look at verses one through six as a whole, and if we ponder for ourselves what is being said about the nature of God, the question of a good God allowing suffering to happen still remains. That is not resolved in these last verses. That is an argument in which to still engage God, a conversation to still be had, a troubling reality that will not go away. These verses are not meant to make this ultimate issue tidy or to sweep it under the rug. But what these verses do address is, when faced with an ash heap of disorientation and mourning, how does one’s perspective on God and relationship with God change, and in this shifting, how is one’s interaction with God and God’s creation transformed? In verse five we read, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” Kathleen O’Connor writes about this verse,
In the past, Job knew God from the instructions of others, from his family, from wise sages, from his faith community. Now Job meets God in his own life, on his own recognizance, in the thick of the storm that is his life. Instead of being forced into submission, Job speaks of firsthand experience, a personal meeting, a kind of seeing that surpasses known speech about God. From Job’s viewpoint, this encounter overwhelms and honors him and transforms his life.
Something happens to Job in his very personal encounter with God in the midst of his suffering, and he is not what he was before. This might be all that we get from the book of Job. Job might ask of us to remember the ash heaps upon which we have sat, and to pay attention to our experience of the Holy in the midst of the valley of the shadow of death in which we have walked at different times in our lives. The valley and the shadow did not magically disappear, nor will they in the future- we know that. But what did we come to know of God during these times, or what are we coming to know of God that we could never have come to know by way of another’s preaching or teaching or stories. The theologies of the past that used to work that we have been told are true, no longer find themselves to hold any significance for us. But something more real, more authentic, more life-giving begins to emerge, and whether or not we can name it, perhaps we have had the experience of saying alongside of Job, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” Listen to your story. It matters. It is significant. It is a story filled with meaning, and no one else, ultimately, can distill the meaning of your experiences for you. Listen to your story. Listen for God within the story. There is the promise in scripture that, though suffering is very real, it has never been just your own story, but the story of God’s accompaniment alongside of you.