SAFE IN OUR SKIN, PART II
Public domain.
Adapted from a homily given at Gethsemane Episcopal Church, Marion, IN, October 24, 2021.
In Part 1 of this essay, preparing for Good Friday prompted us to acknowledge problems attending common interpretations of the story of Job. Empowered by those observations, here we begin again, re-reading the story afresh.
Notice how the discourse of chapters 1-2 parallels the mistaken theology Job’s friends parrot. The good life consists of maintaining a positive balance in the cosmic spreadsheet of debts versus deposits. Not just the Accuser but also Job himself operates by this transactional model. Fearing that his socialite children may somehow offend God during one of their many raucous parties, each morning Job wakes early enough to offer as many sacrifices as needed to atone for each person’s possible misdeeds (1:1-5). His attempts to hedge divine judgment, ostensibly on others’ behalf, in fact deny their agency. By discharging others’ responsibilities, Job tramples the boundaries of their own skin and constricts their capacity for authentic relationship. He ensures that his children and their friends remain immature pawns.
These habits also distort Job’s relation with God. By treating holiness as a series of debts to pay, Job neatly confines the scope of his own intimacy with the Divine. When all goes awry, his projections stoke outrage. He has not sinned. He has in fact gone the extra mile to cover for others. He deserved his former prosperity. Why isn’t God playing by the same rules? Job’s purported righteousness relies on over-functioning. His psyche, as ours so often do, whipsaws between loneliness and crushingly exploitive attempts at togetherness, finding no rest, safety, mutuality, or delight.
The first hint of a change comes not in chapter 42, but in the four chapters preceding, when God blazes forth out of a whirlwind. This section is often read as God asserting raw power, but once we notice how God interrupts both Job’s and his friends’ discourses about the Divine by seeking conversation with them, we grasp a different sense. God’s lengthy self-disclosure in chapters 38-41 begins by asking, “who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (38:2) and continues, “I will question you, and you shall declare to me” (38:3b, emphasis added). God insists that Job lay aside his construct of the Creator as the keeper of the giant ledger in the sky in favor of mutual interaction.
The detailed descriptions that follow underscore this point. After laying the foundations of the earth, measuring the seas, creating light, bringing forth shoots of grass, managing stars, and counting clouds (38:4-30), God’s concern ever broadens. God hunts prey for hungry animals, helps them birth their young, clothes horses, helps ostriches learn to run, teaches hawks and eagles to soar (39:1-30). This impassioned speech reveals not a mercurial, vengeful God, but a God who unabashedly exults in fulfilling each creature’s daily needs. Then God reminds Job of Behemoth, another creature of God’s delight, “which I made just as I made you” (40:15).
The penny drops. Amid all the wonders God makes and all the tending they require, the Divine holds a place for Job. A place where he is known, wanted, and secure. This God is tender, neither using creatures for selfish ends nor leaving anyone—plant, animal, or weather system—to languish on their own. And this God wants conversation, connection, intimacy with Job.
When Job finally replies in chapter 42, he abandons his defense mechanisms. He doesn’t abase himself in false togetherness or try to run away. Instead, he echoes God’s words just as in safely close relationship, loved ones mirror one another. Job repeats God’s question, “Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?” as his unspoken acknowledgement: “I did.” The addition, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (42:3), refers not to his complaints but to his previous posture toward God. Now that Job knows God as the One who calls forth each blade of grass and watches over each raindrop, he can honor God’s earlier injunction to “[h]ear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me” (42:4) by quoting it back to God with the reply, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (42:5). Now Job can reject his projections of God as predatory or capricious. He can allow a God who knows and meets all of creation’s needs to safely come close. The Hebrew of the next line usually translated as “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (42:6) is thus better understood as “I cast off that version of myself. I am comforted in dust and ashes.” Quieting his fearful and futile attempts to earn divine favor at a distance, at last Job receives God’s presence as his comfort.
Just as Job’s ability to be safely himself with God expands, so too, does his capacity for relating with integrity to other human beings. In a lovely example of how the Divine redeems the very things about ourselves we most dislike, God next appoints Job to intercede for his friends. Differently from chapter 1, Job does not assign himself this role, nor does he carry it out to repeatedly displace others’ agency. His intercession now supports the ability of others to come to direct knowledge of God. By empowering rather than overtaking their relationships with God, Job’s intercession respects his friends as unique, distinct persons. Likely this shift transforms their own friendships.
Instead of tidying up Job into a neatly packaged rulebook, this account leaves these characters and their story unfinished. Changed by their encounters with God and each other, they head into uncharted territories, inviting the reader to take up the same work of discerning togetherness and aloneness in God’s company. Like us, they are given possibilities opened each day by the God who makes all things new. The tit for tat ending of chapter 42 does not need to be excised. Rather, it serves as a reminder of the ways we so often manage aloneness and togetherness by trying to control ourselves and others. Lest we forget how often we box up our God, ourselves, and others, the ending’s dissonance bounces our attention back to a more faithful reading of the whole story.
At the last, Job becomes a Christ-figure, one who tastes the pain of others and accompanies them into God’s presence. He does so in response to God’s initiative, which Christians find coming into full view on Good Friday. Reading Job on Good Friday teaches us how we, like Job, can soak up God’s tenacious refusal to leave us stuck in our stunted selves and relationships. In Jesus, God most definitively offers up God’s own life for us, tirelessly soothing our ravenous hunger for connection while coaxing us to become more fully the one the Divine calls us to be.
Jesus demonstrates in his cry on the cross that such a life may still hold immense suffering. Like Job, his torment at feeling abandoned is often flattened into assumptions that God demands such dereliction before restoring relationship. But here, too, such a conclusion misses God’s persisting presence. As clear as the descent of the dove at Jesus’ baptism, as faithfully as the sun the Divine helps rise each morning, God answers pain. God shows us how to be ourselves and how to love others by making us safe in our skin, no matter what troubles us. For even before the triumph of Easter morning, on Good Friday the temple curtain restricting access to the Holy of Holies rips in two, most assuredly promising Jesus and all of creation, “You are my beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.”
