Job, Tragedy, Natural Disasters, Lament

Tragedy in America brings a predictable set of cultural responses, a sort of cathartic theater.  News channels offer breathless on-scene reports, with helicopter shots of the devastation and interviews with survivors and family members of victims.  Celebrities send shout-outs of support on Facebook and Twitter.  Government and law enforcement officials make measured public statements about the recovery and restoration of order.  Hotlines allow those distant from the devastation to call or text in donations to the Red Cross.  And a group of usual suspects from the chattering class of preachers remark on the tragedy’s connection to God’s providence and justice, and hint at or identify some sin in the community.  They may even vividly describe the tornado, flood, hurricane, bomb, bullets, or other agent of destruction as God’s own hand tearing apart a seemingly peaceable landscape corrupted by sin.

These preachers are like the Greek chorus that never enters the drama directly but proceeds through the strophe across the stage chanting its knowing exposition at the main characters.  From the perspective of the suffering victim, there is only one response to these preachers:

I have heard many such things;
Sorry comforters are you all.
Is there no limit to windy words?
Or what plagues you that you answer?
I too could speak like you,
If I were in your place.
I could compose words against you
And shake my head at you. 

This was Job’s response to his friends, who wrongly assumed his suffering traced to some hidden sin.  (Job 16:2-4 (NASB)).  Job’s friends thought they were defending God by blaming Job.  In fact, their claims would make God’s defense of Job before the satan into a lie (See Job 1:8).[1]  The satan at least accepted that Job acted righteously in good times, even if the satan’s function was to peel away the security of prosperity and test Job’s character in adversity, perhaps with a cynical eye towards Job’s inner nature.  Job’s friends should have known better.  The satan at least faithfully performed his role as an inquisitor.  Job’s friends failed in their role as comforters.  One of the main threads of wisdom in the book of Job is that self-righteousness is never a faithful response to another person’s suffering.

There is another theological lesson in the book of Job about providence, causation, and suffering.  God sets things in motion by first mentioning Job’s righteousness to the satan (Job 1:8; 2:3), and God gives the satan permission to afflict Job and sets limits to that affliction (Job 1:12; 2:6).   By mentioning Job’s righteousness to the satan, it seems that God knew the satan would take the bait. 

But the satan is pictured as a genuine agency, not merely as an impersonal puppet.  The text states that the satan is the immediate agent of Job’s suffering.  Job’s family and possessions are put into the power of the satan.  (Job 1:12).  It is the satan who “smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.”  (Job 2:7).  It seems clear that God is the king within the heavenly court, but the satan freely roamed the earth, and periodically, along with the other “sons of God” (“heavenly beings”) appeared at court to report on his work (Job 1:6-7; 2:1-2). 

The sense here is that of the Assyrian, Babylonian or Semitic court politics with which the redactors of the canonical text of Job must have been familiar.  If, as some scholars believe, the scenes in the heavenly court originated with a folktale or play, we could easily imagine the performative nature of these tropes, staged like an ancient King Lear or a Semitic Prometheus Bound.  The book of Job does not offer a neat and tidy picture of a God who, solely by His own implacable will, directly orders everything to some particular, identifiable, dualistic outcome of judgment or blessing.  It dramatizes, at the very least, a God who gives initiative to agents within creation and allows some things to happen for reasons that ordinary commoners outside the heavenly court could never hope to comprehend – indeed, for reasons that don’t seem like “reasons” at all.

It is impossible to discern all of God’s specific “reasons” for something like the Oklahoma tornadoes, and it is foolish to personify those tornadoes as God Himself acting directly in the world for some simple and evident reason.  Weather patterns have a causal integrity of their own.  That causal integrity is statistically stochastic and a contingent feature of the sort of universe and planet we inhabit.  In their own causal integrity the weather patterns do not compromise God’s sovereignty as creator, nor does God’s sovereignty as creator diminish the causal integrity of forces, elements and agents within creation.  Within the group of people immediately affected by the tornadoes, there are thousands of detailed life narratives, set within webs of thousands upon thousands of related life narratives of friends, relatives, ancestors, and so-on, implicating myriad upon myriad of choices by interacting human agents set within uncountable multitudes upon uncountable multitudes of events in “natural” history.  No ordinary human being can presume to suss out the depth of God’s counsel over all of these variables.

Yet we can hope for something glimpsed only darkly even in the face of tragedy.  At times, in the poetic portions of the book, Job seems to see this as well.  Human beings, in Job’s theology, die and are no more.  There is no redemption in their suffering, and the best they can hope for is the abyss of death, which ends everything. (See Job 14:1-6, 13; 17:13-16).  Job says that trees are therefore in a better position than humans,

For this is hope for a tree,
When it is cut down, that it will sprout
again,
And its shoots will not fail.
Though its roots grow old in the ground
And its stump dies in the dry soil,
at the scent of water it will flourish
And put forth sprigs like a plant.
But man dies and lies prostrate.
Man expires, and where is he?
As water evaporates from the sea,
And a river becomes parched and dried up,
So man lies down and does not rise.
Until the heavens are no longer,
He will not awake nor be aroused out of his sleep.   (Job 14:7-12.)

Job has no theology of resurrection, but here he seems to grasp at the idea of new life coming from death in a way that wants to transform the “hope” of the tree into a human hope.  The text of Job will not finally offer this as a firm hope.  As Christian readers of the text, we may take it to hint at what is made more explicit in the death and resurrection of Jesus:  that all of creation will one day be renewed and will find its final end in God (see, e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28).  Even for us as Christian readers, we glimpse this only “through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12).  It is a hopeful glimpse, even if still tensioned by the reality of sin and death. 

Even in the storm, these three, faith, hope, and love, remain (1 Cor. 13:13).  And the greatest of these is love (id.).  The response of love to another person’s suffering and loss is lament.  Faith and hope only come slowly, after lament.  Job’s friends were true “friends” when they sat with him in mourning on the trash heap (Job 2:11-13).  The lessons of lament should have tempered their subsequent advice.