The Book of Job

From the Book of Job there are two lessons to be learned, one of which is no lesson at all. The first is that God brooks no challenge. Faced with the question of why Job suffers, there is no answer. But the second lesson is of what we ought not to do, rather than providing us with any easy answers for why we suffer. We ought not to attempt to rationalize our friends’ suffering by offering them consolation. Job’s friends irritate him by saying such things as “It’s not that bad,” or “There are people worse off than you,” because this means not that they are hearing his complaint, but that they are minimizing it.

What Job needs from his friends is a hearing. He needs them to listen.

The problem of the Book of Job is really of what to do in a Creation in which such things are possible as a God who toys with human beings as a Greek deity would, while simultaneously expecting a trust and fidelity that the latter never would. For Satan challenges God to test Job. That is the plot of the drama. And what is Satan but chance in the face of the absolute?

Ultimately, the limitlessness of our willingness to place our fate in God’s hands is the measure of our protection from self-destructiveness. But no one who has never cursed the day of his birth under pressure of circumstances, as Job did, is likely to get to that place.