Shift

Job 40:3-5

This.  This is, I think, the crux of it all.  At least it is for me.

Job 40:3-5:  Job answered:  “I’m speechless, in awe—words fail me. I should never have opened my mouth!  I’ve talked too much, way too much.  I’m ready to shut up and listen.” (The Message)

Job 40:3-5:  Then Job answered the LORD:  “See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?  I lay my hand on my mouth.  I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further.” (NRSV)

This is where it all shifts.  This new perspective, this feeling of God in your teeth and your bones and your gut, this is where Job changes. 

For 506 verses in the first 39 chapters of the book, Job has both praised God’s power and sought God’s presence.  Job’s primary motive for seeking God’s presence is to defend himself to God, to change God’s mind, to make God see that God has made a mistake.  When you think about it, that’s quite cheeky of Job. 

If that divine conversation had happened the way Job thought it would, would God have told Job the real reason why Job suffered?  That Job was a pawn in some odd face-off between Satan and God and that Job’s righteousness that he so desperately clings to is actually the very reason that he is oozy and starting over from scratch?  How would that make Job feel about God?  That might be the true test of Job’s righteousness. 

If it had happened that way, I don’t think that conversation would have gotten through to Job.  Job would have still felt that he was somehow equal to God in some weird way.  Or if not equal to God, then at least clearly above the rest of us and somehow deserving of more.

God is smart, though, even OT God who doesn’t make any sense and sometimes seems to wander through this story like a great, bumbling puppeteer who is clumsy with the strings and doesn’t seem to realize when God’s own strings are being played. 

It would appear that God gets it right this time, because God’s showing up in this way shifts something in Job that was very firmly anchored down, something that would likely not have shifted any other way.

After what appears to be a lifetime of extolling his own righteousness (and what has felt like a lifetime of listening to him talk about it), Job simply lets it go.  When faced with God’s power in actual real life, that’s all he can do.  Job shuts his mouth and opens his hands and his ears.  You can almost see Job’s heavy righteousness releasing from his clenched fists, absorbed in the power of God. 

In my mind, Job’s posture changes.  The clench that held him up relaxes, and his shoulders fall away from his neck a little.  He is in a storm, and he does definitely and actually and physically fear the Lord, but he has already felt much of God’s power, and he’s still here.  That was the one caveat, remember?  Leave Job here. 

As weird as it sounds, I imagine some sort of comfort in God’s violent and mighty presence, even when it’s presented as all power and chaos and teeth, especially when that power has shifted something fundamental in yourself and you somehow know that you are even more fundamentally better because of it.  Letting go of your certainty can be a release.

Job was right, at least in the telling of God’s might.  But Job could never be right in what God is actually like.  No human can.  Our feeble little imaginations can’t do God justice.

And when God does God justice, Job doesn’t need justice anymore.  He lets go of his need to defend and be justified. He is speechless.  He lays his open hands across his closed mouth, and he waits.

Maybe that’s the point of it all.  For all of our blathering and big talk, for all of our self-pity and self-loathing, for whatever human constructs we’ve clung to as we process through our ashes, we get to the point where we just have to accept it.

This happened. 

We don’t know why. 

We can’t change it.  

It just is.

It seems anti-climactic, particularly when juxtaposed to the storm, but that makes it even more brilliant.  It is as simple and as difficult as this:

Somethings we don’t get to understand.

It sucks. It a million percent sucks because it was God who gave us this huge desire for story, for filling in blanks, for putting puzzles together and making a whole. 

Sometimes a whole just has holes.

It just does.

After we sit on the ashes and ruminate enough, maybe this is where we end up.  Speechless, with our hands over our mouths, fully aware of our own selves but also of God in a new way. 

Maybe the shift of these 3 verses is the crux of it all, not just for Job but for all of us.