Is the story of Job relevant to high school Sophomores (and the rest of us)? This question was on my mind this week. I’m going to say the answer is yes – as the following lines will try to show.
Today is the end of week 8. It was our third and final class on Job. In the first class, we discussed Job’s initial encounter with deep suffering. We examined his marvelously pure reaction:
“Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb,” he said, “and naked I shall go back there again. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21)!
We saw how this reaction gave expression to a heart that loves God beyond any created thing. We were witnessing, in these lines, a soul that loves God wholeheartedly.
In the second class, we skip ahead to Job Chapters 38-41. Here, at last, God responds to Job’s anguished pleas: ‘why has this suffering fallen upon me?’ We see God pose to Job a string of marvelous questions about the wonders of creation. We see God drawing Job to glimpse the wisdom that governs the created world, and to see that this wisdom governs each individual soul, as well. We see Job awakening to the view that there may be a wisdom, a purpose animating his suffering. We see God stirring up in Job a deeper attitude of humility and trust. This attitude, we recognize, is one of the deep fruits of this book.
At this point, I decide to pivot. In my opinion, the molten core of the book of Job, the electromagnetic center, is found in Chapters 16-19. This is the point of maximum spiritual intensity, where the bandages of the human soul are peeled back and one can see, unmasked and undisguised, the face of spiritual suffering, the dark night of the human soul. I originally thought this section was too intense for my kids. But, on second thought, I decided: I need to teach my students things not just for today. I need to teach their 30-year-old selves as well. To teach, in other words, the kids who will keep their notebooks long after high school (as I often beg them to do); the kids who will refer to these notes down the road when they first taste spiritual affliction.
So I dive into those marvelous chapters. Here I have time to say just a few things.
It is commonly thought that the book of Job is about the mystery: how can a good God allow suffering? I think this is a shallow view. The book of Job goes much deeper; it is a lens, 6-700 years in advance, into the mystery of Christ’s passion and the transformation of the human soul that arises when a soul takes up Jesus’ Cross; when the human soul passes through the dark night of spiritual affliction and moves toward the dawn of Theosis.
Consider Isaac beneath the raised knife of Abraham, the scene, in Gen 22:9-10, from which most of us avert our gaze. This incompleted prophetic act was a foreshadowing of the sacrifice of Jesus beneath the sorrowful gaze of his Father. In the same way, Job images the intense yet redemptive suffering of Christ; as well as the suffering of a soul that, with Paul, makes up “what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ.” (Col. 1:24).
What? The Christian soul must suffer to reach its ultimate goal?
We may not wish to hear it, but as there is no athletic excellence without suffering, so there is no Theosis, no transformation of the soul into Christ’s image, without the mystery of the Cross. In this, Job is a type of Christ in a way that is unique in the Old Testament. He foreshadows the suffering of Christ centuries before Christ came. He sets forth a puzzle and a mystery that is not answered in Job Chapters 38-41, where God provides a preliminary response to Job. No: Job’s deep plea is only answered 600 years later, in the resplendent dawn after the night of Christ’s 3-day passion. Job prefigures that 3-day night where Christ’s flesh was torn, his temples ripped by thorns, his back torn by flayings; his hands and feet punctured, his disciples scattered, callous soldiers standing all around, mockeries filling the air; his own cry piercing the heavens then his side pierced by a lance; and finally the dark night of death descending in pitiless mercilessness, carrying Jesus down into the well of a silent, mournful tomb where the hopes of Israel were momentarily dashed.
Job foreshadows this. He forces us to think about it. To reckon with it. And so we shall.
Here I present just two scenes from Chapters 16-19.
First, in a compelling and disturbing metaphor, Job describes his plight as one hunted by God, attacked by Him as though by a military foe.
Speaking of God, he writes:
“He has kindled his wrath against me; he counts me one of his enemies. His troops advance as one; they build up their road to attack me, encamp around my tent” (Job 19:11-12).
Earlier he says: “[God] has barred my way and I cannot pass; [He has] veiled my path in darkness. . . he has uprooted my hope like a tree” (Job 19: 8,10).
In these two texts, the adversarial dimension of the metaphor is unambiguous: God is taking up an attacking position toward Job’s soul.
The image of Job under assault by God and his armies may surprise us – except for the fact that the experience parallels one we have already seen. We recall David: anointed by God at 15, chosen to be the future King of Israel, successful vanquisher of Goliath, winner of many military battles. This same David, along his path of spiritual development, draws the unjust jealousy and ire of King Saul (current King of Israel), who, over a 15-year period, tries to kill David some 9 times, once sending 3,000 of his best military men to ambush David and his 600 rag-tag loyalists. It is a parallel image of military assault.
‘Why would God allow this?’ we asked in class. Why does David suffer attacks at the hands of the King of Israel?
It is a puzzle. We came to reconcile it by remembering that God tests his dearest friends (like Abraham, Jacob, Joseph & Tobit before him); that through these tests, like a Coach testing his athletes, He is instilling new skills, new gifts, He is imparting spiritual intelligence. So while at the surface David appears to be suffering, at a deeper level, he is undergoing a paideia, a discipline, a form of instruction, an experience through which spiritual intelligence is being infused into his soul. Through this path, God is forming in David a deeply humble, trusting and spiritually intelligent soul. He is forming David into a King after God’s heart. One who will image, in many ways, the kingship of Christ.
So maybe, we said in class, God is doing something similar to Job. Maybe what, at the surface, appears to be a military onslaught is actually, at a deeper level, an infusion of spiritual light. A kind of spiritual chemotherapy. Causing one mode of cells to die while another spiritual mode of cells rises in their place. Maybe it’s the darkening of a human mode of knowing and the awakening of a spiritual mode.
Something like this must have happened because, in verse 25, a mere 13 verses later, we encounter a lightning strike of spiritual insight. A flash of understanding which has few equals in all the Old Testament.
Out of the heart of his darkest spiritual night, Job cries out:
“As for me, I know that my vindicator lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust. This will happen when my skin has been stripped off, and from my flesh I will see God: I will see for myself; my own eyes, not another’s, will behold him; my inmost being is consumed with longing” (Job 19: 25-27).
Now, know this: this is Job at his lowest point. He has lost his children, his cattle, his property. He suffers from physical diseases for which there are no remedies. His wife has turned against him. His peers assume he has been judged by God. He has become an outcast.
And yet, in this dark night, Job sees a light no child of Israel has yet glimpsed. He sees that a redeemer shall come – like the rising star of Israel glimpsed by Balaam (Num. 24:17). The Redeemer will stand upon the dust, upon the rubble of Job’s shattered human life. Job, whose skin has been stripped away, whose human life seems to have been snipped, like a spider’s web; this Job, broken, taken beyond the edge of human existence; this Job will see God; will see him from his flesh, from this flesh which today is broken and stripped away. Job, in his flesh, will look upon God. Not as an angel looks upon God. But as a man looks upon God. The eyes of a man, the eyes of Job, will gaze upon God.
This appears to be an absurd overstatement, an overreach. How can human eyes look upon God? The Old Testament is careful never to say such things. Yet Job says it. His human eyes will look upon God.
That’s because Job here has been given a glimpse of the Resurrection, 600 years before it happens. It is unthinkable spiritual sight from a man whose human life has been clinically unraveled before our eyes.
“Whoever wishes to follow me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” (Mk. 8:34)
That’s the quote with which I opened this final Job lecture.
“What does Jesus mean by cross?” I asked the kids.
I was surprised that none of my 100 students understood that the cross is a metaphor for spiritual suffering, the kind of suffering Job carried, as well as the smaller kinds of crosses we might have to carry in our life.
So I decided to look to the future.
“Try to remember the story of Job,” I told the kids. “A day will surely come when hardship knocks on your door. When that day comes, remember Job’s story. Remember that Jesus said all his disciples will one day need to confront an experience of the cross. Like Shasta and Aravis in CS Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy, chased and slashed by an apparently cruel lion that, upon a deeper reading, was revealed to be mysteriously benevolent.
“May your encounters with affliction be a road by which Jesus draws you to His Kingdom. May you remember that there is, in the heart of human suffering, a path that leads to Theosis. A road that leads to God.”
And the bell rang, and notebooks slammed shut, and backpacks zipped up, and a river of youthful kids poured out into the hallway, like popping popcorn poured into a funnel.
Would they remember?