SAFE IN OUR SKIN, PART I
Public domain.
Adapted from a homily given at Gethsemane Episcopal Church, Marion, IN, October 24, 2021.
Once upon a time, I found myself listening, as all good geriatric millennials do, to a podcast. The host, a famous author, spoke of how one of their children woke them in the middle of the night crying, “I feel alone.” The author thought, “I am a parenting expert; I can handle this,” so they replied, “Oh honey, I’m right here with you. You’re not all by yourself.” But their child insisted, “No, I am alone. I’m all alone here in my skin.” (1)
The sentiment sticks. Being alone in our skins aptly describes the human condition. It’s just that our feelings about managing the control center behind our foreheads can dramatically shift. While in some contexts—raising small humans or handling a difficult situation—being alone may bring a sense of relief, in others—lying awake with middle of the night questions —aloneness prompts anxiety. These emotional pendulum swings point to our need for a delicately balanced sense of self. Can we develop our own identity but still find community? Conversely, how will our personhood survive if the anchor lines tethering us snap? And, of course, how does God, in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28; NRSV) (2) fit into all of this? What sort of individuality in togetherness does the Creator offer us?
On this Friday that Christians name good, we recall how our Brother Jesus also experienced the tensions of aloneness and togetherness that mark being human. Scripture recounts both his tendency to run off from his friends and his anguish at being forsaken in an agonizing death. Extremes of aloneness and togetherness also haunt many other biblical characters, including one of the very earliest, Job. Reconsidering Job’s experiences helps us encounter Jesus afresh on this holy and somber day.
From the beginning of his story, Job comes to us established in piety and integrity. His affluence and many children mark him as divinely favored. But in response to the Accuser’s goad that Job will stop being a God-fearer if he experiences misfortune, God allows the Accuser to take it all: children, resources, spousal affection, personal health. Afterward, there’s no doubt Job still considers himself connected to God. But this is the togetherness of a chess-piece used by a handler’s roaring ego. The Accuser’s bet reveals the Creator’s tenuous connection to creation: dislodged by the merest curl of a sneering lip. Thus in 2:8, grieving his losses and afflicted by sores, Job collapses at the local junkyard to scrape his oozing flesh. As chapters 3–37 trace his protests, his closest friends betray him, becoming accusers themselves. Job tastes the bitterness of desolation.
Skipping from these events to chapter 42 leads many to enjoin reverencing a God who at any time may visit horror upon anyone. Since Job famously refuses to curse God even while insisting that God has used him ill (2:9), his penitence—“I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes”—seems to be for complaining: “I have uttered what I did not understand” (42:6, 3). Some treatments of Good Friday promote similar self-abasement, suggesting that for sinners such as ourselves, obtaining togetherness with God demands the annihilation of an innocent. (3) We, cognizant that our best days achieve only mediocrity, surely deserve nothing more. So, if at times God allows ruin and agony to overwhelm us, we should simply accept the divine prerogative. (4) After all, once Job submits to divine violence, “the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before” (42:10). Of course, Job doesn’t get back the same children, and we never do learn if his marriage recovers—but he acquires a lot of stuff.
This happy ending should stick in our craw. For one, can the intricate relational webs between shepherd, flocks, and fields; spouse and beloved; parent and child, be so easily reduced to interchangeable parts? Is it right to bury our losses under upgrades to newer models? For another, this God acts like a temporarily contrite abuser love-bombing the one they control. How long does this favor last before God’s next impulsive wager? And third, if Job’s conclusion means he gladly submits to this terrifying dominion, is relationship on these terms any better than our sharpest moments of isolation? Wouldn’t Job, and we after him, naturally recoil from intimacy with such a God, as well as with any others the Divine might destroy on a whim?
Acknowledging these uncomfortable questions opens new interpretive doors. For one, many translations now note that 42:10-17 comprises an epilogue added by scribes long after the bulk of the text was constructed. The urge to compress a tragedy into a discrete moral code is nothing new. Without ignoring the canonical significance of this addition, we can temporarily bracket it to better interpret the whole story. Doing so draws our gaze to the original ending of 42:7–9, where God confronts Job’s friends and commands them to seek Job’s intercession. What was false in their assertions? We look further back. Chapters 4–37 reveal that they preach much the same as many sermons on Job: God’s power entails exploitative control, we deserve to suffer, righteousness consists of abasing oneself to terror. If these conclusions were false within the original story, surely we must not use them for our own theologizing now. So how should we read Job? Part 2 of this essay proposes another approach based in the oft-overlooked transition between Job’s complaints and the story’s resolution, chapters 38-42.
Brace yourselves for strong feelings one way or another: though I cannot now recall the episode in which she shared this anecdote, the podcast in question is Glennon Doyle’s We Can Do Hard Things.
Unless otherwise noted, subsequent Scripture quotations and references use this translation.
In order not to send more traffic to heretical and harmful theology, I’m not citing or linking to any sources here. The noxious fumes from these takes circulate widely through all types of Christianities.
While progressive contexts increasingly reject this take on Good Friday, its resurfacing in sermons on Job demonstrates how hard it is to shake. Scratch the surface of much theologizing and underneath you’ll still find a deity more monster than lover.
