Rumor Has It
Job 40:6 -42:6
Now God knows that God has Job’s attention. Not just Job’s attention, but Job’s open attention. Job’s not looking for God with an agenda in mind; rather Job is looking to see what God has in mind. This is a whole ‘nother kind of attention. I think it’s probably the most productive kind of attention.
So with Job’s full attention, God continues to display and define God’s power, challenging Job to a series of Herculean tasks that are clearly rhetorical and also clearly designed to put and keep Job in his place. God is God. Job is not. End of story.
God’s earlier rant relied on the same types of images that Job and his friends used to describe God’s power: light and dark, stars and storms, earthly creation type of stuff. It included a number of birds and animals, too. But this rant is different.
God’s second rant is oddly focused on two large creatures, apparently far less common than hawks, horses, and donkeys. God challenges Job to attend to or contend with Behometh on the land and Leviathan in the sea. The bulk of God’s speech revolves around Leviathan, a sea monster-dragon-ish creature that is covered in armor, sneezes fire, and has a glow-in-the-dark tail.
I suspect God knew we’d all been bored out of our minds listening to the ash-heapers blabber on and is now trying to make up for it. It seems entirely fantastical and wildly entertaining.
Yes, God has created things Job knows and experiences in real life. But God has also created things Job cannot even fathom, much less approach, and much much less subdue or control. That’s the point. We aren’t in charge; God is. Lay your open hand over your closed mouth. Listen.
There’s a weird transition from the end of Chapter 41 (where God is talking) to the beginning of Chapter 42, (where Job is talking). God is talking about the amazing Leviathan like a circus barker in terms of marvel and spectacle, and Job suddenly brings it all back to the very present now:
Job 42: 1-3: Then Job answered the LORD: “I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” (NRSV)
Job 42: 5-6: I admit I once lived by rumors of you; now I have it all firsthand—from my own eyes and ears! I’m sorry—forgive me. I’ll never do that again, I promise! I’ll never again live on crusts of hearsay, crumbs of rumor.” (The Message)
When I sit in the ash heap, sometimes the idea of God does feel like a rumor, like there’s some truth to it, but it’s somehow distorted and removed. God can start to feel like a distant thing rather than an immediate presence. Like a divine rumor that happened somewhere else to someone else.
The weird thing about this divine rumor, though, is that it’s the opposite of a regular schoolyard rumor. In the schoolyard, we make the truth bigger as we pass it around to make it more entertaining. On the ash heap, on the other hand, we make the truth smaller. We make God smaller. We have to. We don’t have a choice. Anytime we put God in words, we make God smaller.
And then we repeat the divine rumor in a strange game of Telephone until we don’t even recognize the original words anymore, and we think we are in control. We think our righteousness is the thing that matters most. We think we need to understand.
The truth of God dwarves the rumor of God. The truth is the same for us as it is for Job: there are things too wonderful for us, things we do not know. The truth of God unfurled at full wind removes us from ourselves and puts us in our place, and we are all the better for it.
It humbles us. It satisfies us. It frees us up to move again.