The story of Job is a great place to go if you love stories that inspire tough questions, and over the last couple of weeks I’m hoping I’ve opened a few up to you, but, perhaps the toughest lot of questions for me come here at the ending of the story.
Perhaps the response of the friends in Job has frustrated us, maybe because we’ve been in on the bet and know Job is innocent, the friends response is ill informed. Maybe we’ve been frustrated with the friends because we’ve had well-meaning friends offer similar reflections to us when we’ve suffered, or maybe we’ve struggled because the friends remind us of times when we’ve responded to someone else’s suffering in ways that have been unhelpful.
But the most frustrating response, as I reflect on how I first read the story was how I responded as the reader. I came to the end of Job and thought “there’s the happy ending I was hoping for, it all worked out in the end.”
Yet, after a while the story began to haunt me (as many good stories do) and my response became something that made me feel uneasy, and I began to hear in my response the voices of the friends, again assuring that those who are righteous will end up being blessed… that it will always end with a happy ending.
How quick was I to forget Job’s suffering, or the death of his family, all for the sake of a happy ending?
God’s reconciliation with Job is complicated, remember, the story seems to only treat family members as products we own and that are replaceable, the reconciliation also seems over the top… It’s almost like God is saying to Job and us as readers “you want recompense, here’s more recompense than you can handle…” I’m reminded that exaggeration is often a part of Jewish humour, maybe I’m supposed to be laughing at the idea that God can make it all well, that God can erase away one’s suffering like that? Wouldn’t it be nice to just say “hey presto” and have all that suffering just go away?
The working preacher podcast this week reminded me that it takes time for stock to grow, families to form and for children to be born. While for us, as hearers of the story it might seem this has happened within a couple of paragraphs, for Job a lot of time would have passed between God’s response and this ending. Perhaps we’re being reminded that reconciliation takes time, and we’re supposed to come out of this story understanding that the God Job worships is in it for the long haul, and takes reconciliation seriously?
Yet, if we see what happens at the end of Job as restoration or recompense then perhaps we are more like the friends than we’d like to think. Perhaps we hold onto the idea that God rewards the righteous so hard that we are willing to accept the death of his previous family if he’s given payment afterwards for his suffering.
For we can still say “see, our God does reward the good…” and perhaps we can still say “with God all things work out for the best”
Maybe we come to the end of the story and are supposed to continue to be outraged by its conclusion and maybe to continue to sit by Job and argue with God until we’re satisfied, or until God comes to us and responds to our cries?
Maybe the end of the story reminds us that we don’t live in a fairy tale, “that happily ever after” is not the story many of us share. That when we sit with people who are suffering, or when we are the person grieving the last words that should leave our lips are words from a fairy tale.
The story of Job doesn’t give us clear answers, or definite morals for us to follow, or even a list of thing we need to believe in order to have a good life… but it does give us the space to have a lot of time for questions and conversation with God, maybe in this time, this year, this week, or today that in itself is a blessing in and of itself?
Shalom,
Darren Wright