The lines at the box office stretch all the way around the
block. It is opening night at a play that has left all the critics buzzing. The
audience is curious as they begin to settle in their seats, curiously checking
their Playbills for a hint of what is to come, a look at the cast of
characters, a nervous anticipation of a drama that no review has really been
able to fully describe.
The lights dim and the curtain opens, revealing a man
immaculately dressed in a top hat and tuxedo. He is obviously wealthy, but he
does not carry any of the arrogance the audience might expect in the rich. He
is standing in the midst of a lavish dinner party, surrounded by what appear to
be his many children and grandchildren. He smiles, even as he watches carefully
what is going on around him. The next scene shows him going to church to pray
for his family, just in case they had overindulged or violated their religious
obligations during all that celebration.
The man’s name is Job, and we are left with the impression
that he is as good a man as any of us will ever meet—perhaps event the best.
His life is perfect, seemingly because he has been so good. He was always doing
the right thing and, as conventional wisdom dictates, he was living the life
that he so richly deserved—a life that reflects one who has been completely
faithful to God.
Meanwhile, the curtain closes and the scene changes. When
the curtain opens again we are in the midst of a royal throne room. The king
sits on his throne while members of the court vie for his attention. The king,
of course, is God, and one of the members of the court approaches the throne.
He is dressed like a lawyer, a prosecuting attorney. Indeed, that’s what his name,
the Satan, means—he is the accuser, the one who seeks out people who might be
disloyal to the king. He is not red or carrying a pitchfork as later plays will
characterize him. Here he is simply a pragmatic figure who attempts to remind
the king that people aren’t as loyal and righteous as he thinks.
But this time, God seems to have set him up. “Have you seen
Job?” asks God. “There’s no one like him on the earth. He does everything
right, he is loyal to me and turns away from anything wrong.” The lawyer
laughs: “Really? I’m thinking that Job is only like this because you have
blessed him and made him wealthy. You’re his sugar daddy God. You know, I’ll
bet that if you took back everything you’ve given him he would curse you to
your face.”
“You’re on,” says God. There’s another scene change, and we
see Job in his study at home reading the Bible. Suddenly, his iPhone rings.
It’s one of his servants. “Sir, I have terrible news,” says the servant with a
quivering voice. “All of your classic car collection has been carried off by
burglars, and they killed all the guys in the garage. I’m the only one left.”
Job clicks the phone off, stunned. As he stares at the phone, suddenly a text
comes in, “This is Dale from the ranch,” says the text. “We just had a major
lightning strike here and all your prized sheep and those attending them were
killed instantly. I’m sorry. I’m the only one left to tell you.” He begins to
click a short reply, but he even before he finishes, he gets another one from
his accountant—“Bad news. The stock market just tanked and you’re now
completely bankrupt. I hate to be the one to tell you. Call me.” Job is now
reaching for the Advil when the doorbell rings.
A police officer stands on the front porch. “Sir, he says, I
have terrible news. All ten of your kids were having dinner together when a
tornado came up suddenly and destroyed the house. There were no survivors. I’m
so sorry.” Job collapses in grief, tearing his expensive clothes and messing up
his neatly groomed hair. Through his tears, however, Job doesn’t blame God for
his night of terror. He understands the nature of his life. “Naked I came from
my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and Lord has
taken away. Blessed by the name of the Lord.” The scene ends with a weeping Job
returning to his study, and getting on his knees in prayer.
The next scene puts us back in the throne room, where the
lawyer again comes before God. “See, I told you,” said God. “He is still a man of
faith even though you wanted me to destroy him for no reason.” The Satan was
non-plussed. “Well sure,” he says, “but what if you took away his health? You
give him pain and then, on top of everything else, he will curse you to your
face.” “You’re on,” God says again.
When the curtain opens again we see Job no longer dressed in
a suit, but in a hospital gown. He sits on a hospital bed covered in sores and
hooked up to a bunch of wires and tubes. He has a now useless credit card in
his hand that he is using to scratch his many sores. His wife comes into the
room and looks at him for a long time. “Do you still persist in your faith
now,” she says sarcastically. “Curse God and die.” But through his pain, Job
won’t have it. “You speak as a foolish woman,” he says. “Shall we not receive
the good at the hands of God and not receive the bad?” Instead of cursing God,
Job continues to have faith. Not even his desperate circumstances can make him
believe otherwise. In one of the great lines of the play, Job cries out to no
one in particular, “Though he slay me, yet shall I trust him.” The prosecutor
has no more case. Curtain, applause, end of inspirational story. Well, at least
that’s what the audience expects. But the Playbill says “Intermission,” so we
are left to ponder what is left for the rest of the story.
In the lobby during the intermission, the audience members
discuss what they’ve seen so far. Why does this seemingly perfect man suffer so
much? Nothing in this play seems fair. Why did this God and his lawyer seem to play
games with his life? Perhaps the rest of the play will reveal the answer.
The lights flicker and go dark, the curtain opens, and we
are back in Job’s hospital room, except now he is surrounded by three friends.
There is a long silence of perhaps seven minutes or more, during which we
observe how the three visitors are dressed.
One is in a cheap polyester suit and carries a thick Bible.
The second is dressed in Armani and has the look of a TV preacher about him,
complete with slicked-back hair and a smirking air of moral superiority. The
third is dressed in a tweed jacket with arm patches and sucks on an unlit
pipe—the epitome of intellectual sophistication.
Suddenly, the first man shatters the silence. “Job, will it
bother you if I speak?” he asks in a pious way. His name is Eliphaz, and we get
the sense that he is one of those people who slithers up to someone in pain,
whispering well-rehearsed and cliched prayers in a practiced voice, and then
reaching into his massive Bible to produce a tract spelling out the “spiritual
laws” that will prove Job’s problem. See, Eliphaz believes that Job’s problem
is that he’s a sinner and deserves whatever happened to him. And yet, God loves
him and has a wonderful plan for his life. You just need to pray the sinner’s
prayer and confess your sins and make peace with God and then, as he puts it, “everything you do will succeed and
light will shine on your path.” God will make it all better. Eliphaz has the
formula all figured out. But we know something that Eliphaz does not. Job is
“blameless” before God. Job’s situation isn’t so easy to explain. It doesn’t
fit the formula.
How many times have we heard pious people say that becoming
a Christian will make your life all better, and that nothing bad will happen to
you? And yet, we know that’s not really true is it? We don’t always get what we
deserve. Life isn’t fair. The wicked prosper and the good suffer. There’s
nothing in Eliphaz’s tracts that can explain that reality.
As Eliphaz quietly leaves a tract on the hospital tray, a
man in an Armani suit pushes him out of the way. He knows what Job’s problem
really is—it’s human nature. While he has never been there, Bildad can
confidently tell us what goes on in bedrooms and dorm rooms and anywhere else
the cesspool of humanity engages in sin. Bildad is convinced that every
disaster, from earthquakes to diseases, are all well-deserved punishments from
God for human iniquity. Indeed, every time some disaster happens, Bildad goes
on his daily religious TV show and proclaims that the people who are suffering
deserve it because there are sinners in their midst or their ancestors made a
pact with the devil. He often stands with members of his “church” holding a
protest sign at the funerals of fallen soldiers. This is what happens to people
in a godless culture. They deserve to die. So Bildad has an answer for Job—your
kids must have been great sinners, with all that partying they did, so God gave
them what they deserved. Bildad stands there in his spit-shined shoes and
coiffed hair, “insisting that it never rains on the righteous, even while his
neatly pressed suit is getting drenched by the downpour.”
In the corner, Zophar, the professor, uncrosses his legs and
carefully places his pipe in the pocket of his tweed jacket. He agrees in some
sense with Bildad, but he finds the TV preacher’s way of putting the problem to
be intellectually unsophisticated. Zophar places his hand under his chin and theorizes
that this matter is very complex and that “there are many sides to wisdom.” The
real problem here is that Job doesn’t understand
the theological premise that he is a sinner. He lectures Job on the doctrine of
evil, but he is pretty sure that Job isn’t smart enough to get it. “A stupid
man will be wise,” he scoffs, “when a cow gives birth to a zebra.” He quotes a
lot of books to Job that prove that sin is an ontological problem, and even
offers to allow Job to read his recent paper on the subject. But for all his
degrees, Zophar still doesn’t know what we know: that Job’s situation isn’t a
result of his sin..
So, Job argues with his friends, sometimes thundering at
them, sometimes using sarcasm. “Yes, you are the voice of the people,” he says
to Zophar. “When you die, wisdom will die with you.” Job admits that he often
thought the same thoughts and believed the same things as his friends. But now
his belief system is broken lying there on a hospital bed with nothing to his
name and no one who really cares.
The last, lengthy scene of the play is a long one, with Job
alone in his room crying out a long soliloquy of questioning to God, who stands
off stage. He presents his case to God because he is desperate to know. “I am
ready to risk my life,” he howls, “So what if God kills me? I am going to state
my case to him. It many even be that my boldness saves me.”
As Job thunders away at God, a thought begins to dawn on the
audience. What separates Job from his friends is this: despite all that has
happened, Job still loves God. Unlike his theologizing friends, Job is willing
to give up his long-held theological assumptions. But he is not willing to give
up his God. As Job goes on, everything fades into the background: his friends
have departed, the prosecutor has gone on to other cases. A young hospital chaplain
named Elihu steps briefly into the room, but his answers are no different than
the others and he is quickly dismissed. In the end, Job only wants to hear from
God.
And then, almost as if on cue, God himself steps on to the
stage—a voice speaking out of a whirlwind. God answers Job in a way that first
seems harsh to the audience: “Where were you when I planned the earth?” God
thunders at Job for page after page of the script. Job listens, humbled, but
God’s speech to Job is not designed to cow him and make him feel small. Rather,
what God is doing is deconstructing what Job and, indeed what everyone in the
audience, believes about the world. Before his tragic story, Job believed, as
his friends believe, that the world is essentially fair, that people receive
what they deserve, that righteous is a panacea against evil, that categories of
right and wrong are clear cut, that human ideas of justice are always equal to
God’s. But God reveals another way to Job—the way the world really is.
As if to illustrate this, two hideous creatures float across
the stage: the behemoth and the leviathan, two fearsome creatures who represent
the sea monsters of chaos—the symbols of ultimate disorder in the ancient
world. These were the monsters of evil that everyone feared and wanted
destroyed, but God presents them before Job and says, “See, I created these
just like I created you. Evil exists, but I will have it under control.
This realization finally drives Job to his knees. With all
the stock answers swept away with the whirlwind, Job begins to see things
differently. He knows that his hope is not found in answers, but in God
himself. And so Job utters the only response he can offer, “I have heard of you
with my ears, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore, I will be quiet,
comforted that I am dust.” And yet, for Job, being dust does not mean being
reduced to nothing. He had instead become what he truly is, a human being, a
creature made of dust, living before God in the real world—a world where evil
and suffering exists and where life isn’t always fair. And yet, Job knows, God
is with him. And that’s enough.
The last scene of the play shows Job in a very different
place—almost a new world. Job’s friends are chastised by God for their bad
theology, but they are forgiven because Job prays for them. Job’s fortunes are
restored, but things are different somehow. In the beginning of the story,
Job’s sons are featured as the ones who hold the feasts and invite their
sisters along. At the end it is the new daughters who take center stage—the
most beautiful women in the world, says the narrator. Their names are Dove,
Cinnamon, and Eye Shadow, and they receive the inheritance from their father.
The audience whispers approval. Could it be that the playwright is making a
statement that Job has learned to surrender to the male compulsion to control
and has instead given himself over to searching for beauty rather than answers?
The curtain closes with Job showing a look of calm assurance
on his face. Job has learned to trust the God he loves and love the God he
trusts. He has learned to see who he is before God, and even though he never
fully understands what has happened to him, he is still, and always, a man of
faith.
We leave this play not fully satisfied with it. It doesn’t
wrap up by telling us everything in a great denoument, explaining everything in
the last ten minutes like we’re used to in the movies. While Job may be the
greatest theodicy text in the Bible, it is really not about that. Job doesn’t
explain the problem of why innocent people suffer, and we must not take the bet
between God and Satan as a paradigm for how bad things happen to us. The rest
of Scripture reveals that God doesn’t actually work this way, making bets with
Satan over our lives. Job is really a parody of that theological worldview. We
also know that we are not fully blameless like Job, but nor are we as godless
as Job’s friends would have us be.
No, the point of the story is that we sometimes find
ourselves in Job’s place—in the midst of suffering, the hospital room, the
doorway of the house talking to a policeman, the graveside of a loved one. We
want to cry out and call for justice—our sense of justice. We want the world to
work according to our rules, and when it doesn’t, then what are we to do?
The answer for many people is to abandon God or, perhaps
even worse, rationalize God. Job’s friends had a God they could predict and control,
a God who worked according to their rules. A God who is capricious, vindictive,
and vengeful. A God who has no grace. Many people in Job’s situation abandon
their faith. They cannot believe in a God who acts like the God of Job’s
friends.
But the story tells us that Job doesn’t believe in that God,
either. Job’s answer to God is a faith that doesn’t always get it. As Tom Long
puts it, “We do not get to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘OK God, when I get
this problem of suffering worked out in my mind, I’ll step over the line toward
you.’ Or, ‘OK God, when you begin to honor my sense of justice, then I will
trust you.’ No, we have to step over the line and fall on our knees in prayer
and faith. Only in the light of our trust in God is there anything to see. The
promise of the Book of Job is that there is much indeed to see in that light,
that awe in the presence of God is, indeed, the beginning of wisdom.”
For Job, the only answer to suffering is faith—a steady
trust in the midst of all the questions. How about for us? What does this story
say to you?
Source:
Long, Thomas G. What Shall We Say? Evil, Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith. Eerdman’s, 2012. Dr. Long’s image of Job as a play inspired this message.
