September 15, 2002 Prologue—Epilogue
Prologue: A Dialogue of Heaven and Earth 1:1--2:13
1:1-5: Narrative Introduction to Job Himself 1:6-12: Heaven--One: A Question Which Sets the Drama in Motion 1:33-22: Earth--One: Job’s Affirmative Response to His Calamity 2:1-7a: Heaven--Two The Heavenly Question Given Sharper Point 2:7b-10: Earth--Two: Job’s Ambiguous Response to His Deepened Calamity 2:11-13: Conclusion: Introducing Job’s Friends and Alluding to His Growing Pain
Epilogue: Order and Freedom in Felicity 42:7-17
42:7-9 Yahweh and the Friends of Job 42:10-17 Restoration and More
Introduction
This week I pulled off my library shelf and began to read again a 1987 volume by the Peruvian Liberation Theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. His approach to Job opens with Thomas Aquinas’ “basic principle governing all theological reflection that ‘we cannot not know what God is but only what God is not.” For Gutierrez “theological thought about God is thought about a mystery,” that has to be linked with silence and contemplation, for theology can then be “speech that has been enriched by silence. . . . In prayer we remain speechless, we simply place ourselves before the Lord.” Gutierrez’s standpoint, dear to him, is the identity “between theological methodology and spirituality.”
Gutierrez is writing out of his concern for the oppression and the injustice he sees and the poverty it inflicts on much (he would say “majority”) of the population in Latin American society, producing in his view “a crucified people”! In this setting he asks, “how are we to talk about God within a specific situation—namely the suffering of the innocent?” For him the suffering of the innocent and the questions it leads to are key problems for theology. These questions he proceeds to reflect on “with the aid of one of the most passionate and beautiful books of the Bible: the Book of Job,” which ”offers penetrating theological insights in the enchanting garb of poetry.” Gutierrez seeks to read the Bible as a book that “reads us and speaks to us.”
Narrative—Poetry
As we have already observed the most striking literary feature of Job is that it begins and ends with narrative, a prose prologue and epilogue, which surrounds extensive dialogues set in poetic form:
Prologue: A Dialogue of Heaven and Earth 1:1--2:13 Dialogue: First Cycle 3:1—14:22 Dialogue: Second Cycle 15:1—21:35 Dialogue: Third Cycle 22:1—27:23 Soliloquy 28:1—31:40 A Voice for God, the Voice of God, and Job’s Response 32:1—42:6 Epilogue: Order and Freedom in Felicity 42:7-17
The difference between the two is not merely that one is prose and the other poetry, but they differ also in their portrait of Job. In the narratives Job is a man renowned for his piety and blessed with divine favor. In the poetic section he is a radical figure who hurls his protests against God. Some scholars who see a disunity of authorship between the prose and the poetry find the viewpoint of the author of the book primarily in the poetic sections. Yet as one of them remarks, “the effectiveness of the poems is due largely to their being framed within the folk story.” The author of the poetry set them in the context of a story that had probably circulated orally for many years before being written down.
A recent interpreter, Gerald Janzen, insists that it is impossible “to strip away the prologue and the epilogue and to read the dialogues by themselves.” Those who stress the incompatibility of the two overlook that “poetic/literary modes of expression can tolerate large degrees of dissonance and tension among component parts of a literary whole than is possible in more abstract forms of thought and expression.” In his view the author either composed the stories or adapted for “for fresh purposes a story already extant in form.” So he sees nothing truly incompatible between the dialogues and the prose prologue and epilogue. The book then can be “read as a whole inclusive of much tension and turbulence between its parts, such that the very form of the book itself contains part of its meaning.”
In all forms of verbal communication, particularly in contemporary culture, we need to listen to form as well as to content. Form is an indispensable part of communication. But form is only significant as it enables the content to impact and transform the hearer or reader—and is of course essential to its entertainment value.
So helpful for us is Janzen’s overview of Job as a literary document when he describes the book as moving :
from idyllic beginning through catastrophe and a vast dialectical terrain back to an end which is a transformed version of the beginning. The dialogues traverse the landscape of human experience in all its shifting lights and topographic variety, along with similar varieties of human opinion both orthodox and heterodox, conventional and novel, prudential and reckless. The shape of the book thus corresponds to the shape of the Christian canon, which begins with an idyllic creation story suffused with light and charged with blessing (Gen. 1—2), moves through catastrophe and along a vast canvas of universal and particular history, and arrives finally at an end imaginatively envisaged as a transformed version of its beginning (Revelation 21—22).
The Rabbi
A book that has been on my shelf for many years, one which has sadly remained unread, is one that most of you have probably read. It is When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner, a Jewish Rabbi. This week I took it appropriately with me to the Dentist’s chair and read the first two chapters, one of which deals with the book of Job. I find Kushner’s approach helpful as we begin our own struggle to relate to the book. He calls Job “the most profound and complete consideration of human suffering in the Bible, perhaps in all of literature.”
As we have been considering what the book of Job is all about we began with the views of two contemporary Old Testament Scholars, Bernard Anderson, and Gerald Janzen. We began today’s lesson with the agenda that the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, brings to the book, that of the suffering of the innocent in the Latin American scene.
Now we turn to the heartache of a then young American Rabbi as he starts out in ministry. His first child, Aaron, “a bright and happy child,” was diagnosed with progeria, “rapid aging.” The doctor said he “would never grow much beyond three feet in height, would have no hair on his head or body, would look like a little old man while he was still a child, and would die in his early teens.” Aaron died at fourteen. We can hardly imagine the agony of those young parents, of that Rabbi father, as he asked the questions that focused in the great “Why?” of the suffering of the innocent. At the same time he had the pastoral care of a congregation of six hundred families, many of whose lives were as devastated by personal tragedy as his own—“Can I,” he asks, “in good faith, continue to teach people that the world is good, and that a kind and loving God is responsible for what happens in it?”
Even apart from his congregation when strangers discover that he is a Rabbi and a meaningful conversation on God and religion ensues, all one way or another, are “troubled by the unfair distribution of suffering in the world. . . . why do bad things happen to good people?"
As Kushner reads the narrative prologue and epilogue of Job he asks, “What kind of a God . . . would kill innocent children and visit unbearable anguish on His most devoted follower in order . . . to win a bet with Satan? What kind of religion is the story urging on us, which delights in blind obedience and calls it sinful to protest against injustice?” In his view the author of the poetic sections was so upset by this “’once-upon-a time’ story about a good man who suffered” that he “turned it inside out, and recast it as a philosophical poem in which the characters’ positions are reversed.”
In an attempt to understand the book of Job, Kushner suggests that we take three statements that everyone in the book and most of its readers, including us, would like to be able to believe:
A. God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the world. Nothing happens without His willing it. B. God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they deserve, so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished. C. Job is a good person.
Kushner then reasons:
As long as Job remains wealthy and healthy, we can believe all three statements without difficulty. But when he loses his wealth, his family, and his health, it can only make sense if we affirm any two of them and deny the third. We cannot believe all three at the same time! He explains:
If God is both just and powerful, then Job must be a sinner who deserves what is happening to him. If Job is good but God causes his suffering anyway, then God is not just. If Job deserved better and God did not send his suffering, then God is not all powerful.
If with Job’s friends we give up on C, we deny that Job was a good man, then because we believe that God is good and in control of things, the answer is to blame the victim and believe that there are good reasons for their suffering. This helps the more fortunate people believe that their good fortune is deserved. And when bad things come our way our first question is “What have I done wrong?”
If like Job himself we give up on B, we deny God’s essential goodness--“God is so powerful that He is not limited by considerations of fairness and justice, . . . no moral rules apply to Him.” When tragedy comes our way we just admit that we live in an unjust world, that fairness is not the name of the game, for God is so great that he is beyond the limitations of justice and righteousness. Like Job, we may cry out for an umpire, a vindicator to mediate between us and God. We identity with Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Or if like the author of the book we give up on A, we deny “that God is all-powerful. Bad things do happen to good people in this world, but it is not God who wills it. God would like people to get what they deserve in life, but He cannot always arrange it.” Misfortunes do come to innocent people, but they do not at all come from God! So if we have to choose when our personal good fortune turns to bad, we choose to believe in the goodness of God rather in a God who is all powerful!
AS WE CLOSE LET ME SUGGEST THREE QUESTIONS:
Is Kushner’s analysis of the book of Job accurate? Are these really the three positions that it presents? Let us keep these in mind as we read through the book. If so, which one of the three affirmations are you willing to give up in the face of your own suffering, the personal tragedies you have experienced? Or shall we keep on attempting to believe in all three? That God is all-powerful, that God is good, and that we are not necessarily to blame for the bad things that happen to us?
J. Gerald Janzen, Job, Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 25, 29. Slightly edited. Gustave Gutierrez, Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987). Ibid., xi, from Summa Theologiae, I, 9, 3: “De Deo scire non possumus quit sit, sed quid non sit.” Ibid. Ibid., xiv, xiii. Ibid., xviii. Ibid., xvi. Ibid., xviii. Ibid., xvii, xviii. Ibid., svii. Janxen, 25-29. Bernard W. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice hall, 4th ed., 1998), 531. Janzen, 23. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 24. For Janzen two questions then remain: “Does this meaning make sense of the text? And Does the text, so read, make sense of life.” See Howard T. Kuist, “The Form and Power of Holy Scripture,” Chapter IV of These Words Upon My Heart (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1947), 89-109. Reprinted in 1964 as Scripture and the Christian Response. Kuist was one of my professors at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1959-1961. His courses and this book were a crucial influence in my own teaching career. Janzen, 4. Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Avon Books, 1983). Ibid., 30, and see 36. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 33-34. Ibid., 32, 34, Ibid., 37. Ibid., 37-38, Ibid., 40, 41. Quoted by Jesus in Mark 15:34. Kushner, 42-43.
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Frank G. Carver San Diego, California