Job's Repentance

In Sunday's RCL Track 1 OT lesson, we will hear the end of Job. The righteous man has had everything stripped of him. His wife has told him to "curse God and die." So-called friends have urged him to repent for whatever wrong he has committed. Through it all, Job has remained faithful, which is to say that he has remained in relationship with God despite all his suffering, but, as his frustration grew to an understandably unbearable level, he finally has demanded an audience with the Almighty. The wise Elihu has rebuked Job's "friends" for giving him bad advice, and he has rebuked Job for his insistence that he get a hearing from God. And God himself has appeared to Job out of the whirlwind to question him and expose the fruitlessness of his pursuit: "Where were you when the foundations of the world were set?"

This week, it all comes together in what might feel like a surprising and ultimately unsatisfying way: Job repents, and God restores his fortunes. Both actions--repentance and restoration--and the suggested link between the two have the potential to leave us less faithful, less confident, less trusting in God than when we started the whole book...if we miss the point.

When I hear the word "repentance," my culturally preconditioned understandings interpret that to mean "saying sorry." In the beginning of his story, Job is introduced to us as a righteous man. Not only did he say his own prayers, but he offered prayers and sacrifices for his children just in case they did something bad. We might want to pick that apart, questioning the integrity of such cultic practice, but that's not the point. The author wants us to know that Job was a good person--as good as any person on earth. When calamity befalls him, Job's "friends" show up and tell him to repent. "You must have done something wrong," they say, "otherwise this never would have happened to you." They urge him to confess an unknown fault to God so that God will forgive him. Job, however, knows that he has done no wrong, and so he refuses to confess.

Now that we get to the end of the story, it is tempting and short-sighted to think that maybe the "friends" had it right the whole time. Maybe someone who experiences an unexplained tragedy should repent of some unknown sin so that God will stop punishing him or her. But that's the OPPOSITE of what the Book of Job is trying to teach us. Job isn't written to show us that bad things only happen to bad people. Job testifies that bad things sometimes inexplicably happen to good people. That's not the repentance that Job is performing here at the end of the story.

This repentance is the true turning-around, returning-of-the-heart, changing-direction that the word repentance means. Job isn't turning around from some unperceived unrighteousness. He is turning around from the proposition that he would find an answer, a justification, if given an audience with God. Job has claimed that he will plead his case before God and force God to answer him, but that's not how God works. That's not how tragedy works. Through it all, Job must learn--we must learn--that terrible things sometimes happen to wonderful people who don't deserve it in the least, and we must learn to accept that there is no answer for that--from God, from philosophy, from ethics, from statistics, from anything. If we place our hope, our future, our faith in finding that answer, we will come up empty. It is from that fruitless pursuit--the thought that reconciliation will only come when God discloses the answer--that Job repents. And that means that we, too, must repent from the self-satisfying yet false belief that we can understand how God works and that only by understanding will we have faith.

The only thing more instinctively frustrating to me than Job's undeserved tragedy is the act of restoring all his fortunes at the end of the story. Nothing makes me angrier than thinking that someone who has lost everything--even his own children--would be happy to have a new start with more land, more possessions, and more children. Again, I'm missing the point. God is not rewarding Job. God is not making amends for allowing Satan to take everything away from him in a Trading Places kind of wager. The author is inviting us to have hope even in tragedy. At the end, Job's brothers and sisters and distant friends come back and comfort him--not ignoring his loss but comforting him in it. Something happens when Job lets go of his demand for an answer on his own terms, and that something is tomorrow. The loss is not gone, but the future still unfolds. There are blessings to be found. The author does not pretend that they undo the loss even if they exceed what was lost. It only invites us to see that Job's identity is not forever imprisoned in his loss. We may not have our fortunes restored when we stop pursuing an answer and learn to live in the present moment with God, but the invitation is to trust that unexplained, undeserved tragedy is not the end of our story or our relationship with God.