The litany of his losses complete, Job stands up, rips his clothes, and shaves his head. Then, a sentence later—to my astonishment—Job gets over it. In what struck me as the world’s swiftest resolution of grief, he simply shrugs it off. “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb,” he says, “and naked thither I shall return: The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Baffled, I reread that passage—reread it several times, in fact; it didn’t take long. I stared and squinted at the page. “Them’s the breaks,” Job seemed to be saying. “Easy come, easy go.” By the time I’d read his words enough times to memorize them, I was no longer just puzzled; I was also, I realized, angry. I could understand, and I could admire, Job’s tranquility in the face of material losses. Stuff, after all, is only stuff, if you ignore the countless corpses of servants and livestock littering Job’s property. But to suffer such slight, offhand pain—a torn robe, a shaved head, and an “oh well”—at the death of his children? His ten children? I didn’t get it. I didn’t believe it. Was Job a man—an actual flesh-and-blood father? Or was he something else, some colder-blooded creature masquerading as a man?
I decided to give Job the benefit of the doubt, or at least to try. After all, I’d read only the first chapter. Maybe Job would get more real; more believable; more human.
Instead, Job got clobbered again.
In round two, God gives Satan permission to ruin Job’s health. Before you can say “Jack Robinson,” Job breaks out in boils from head to toe. Sitting in a pile of ashes, he’s reduced to scraping his scabrous, oozing skin with a shard of pottery.
It was there, midway through Chapter Two, that I came to an electrifying expression of humanity—but not from Job himself. From his wife. “Curse God and die,” she tells him, practically spitting the words through her tears. As I read those bitter words again and again—“Curse God and die”—it dawned on me that the bitterness must have poured directly from the fissure in her heart: a heart broken not just by her children’s deaths, but also by their father’s offhandedness and aloofness. In just four words, Job’s wife expressed deep, primal pain. Facing the loss of Kathleen, the person I loved best in all the world, I understood and liked and believed Job’s wife, in a way that I didn’t understand or like or believe Job.
And what is Job’s response to his anguished wife? He tells her to shut up. And then he begins to talk. And talk. And talk. For forty chapters, Job and four other guys talk. They argue about God, about suffering, and about Job himself. Why do the righteous suffer? Why do the wicked get off scot-free? How come God’s being such a jerk when I, Job, have played by all the rules?
As I read the debate—as Job kvetched ad nauseum about his undeserved suffering and his spotless conscience (“I’m pure gold,” he says at one point)—I found myself getting madder than ever.
Eventually even the Almighty has had enough of Job’s self-righteous whining. Speaking from a whirlwind in a mighty voice, God puts Job in his puny place, pointing out in no uncertain terms what a tiny, trivial, know-nothing Job is compared to God, the creator of the universe. Job apologizes, and at that point God rewards him: God cures Job’s pox, makes him richer than ever, and gives him a passel more kids. All’s well that ends well.
I closed the Bible, still confused, and still mad—furious, in fact, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Tucking the book back into the rack alongside the hymnals, I stood up, stretched my back, and looked around at the magnificent architecture: the high, vaulted nave; the mighty stone columns; the graceful arches; the stained glass, its blues deepening to indigo in the waning light, its reds darkening into wine and blood.
I stepped outside and let the sanctuary door sigh shut. As it closed, I heard a latch snapping into place with a metallic click. Reaching back, I gave the handle a tug. The door, which had been open when I’d arrived, was now locked tight. Was it an omen? A punishment—banishment—for my cynical response to Job? Or was it simply a spring-loaded piece of steel popping into place, as it was designed to do?