have you considered my servant job?
chapter 9 of "wandering in darkness"
I once had a friend who saw it as his mission in life to reduce everything to its barest, simplest terms. This practice had served him well in the business world where he built a technology company worth a couple of billion dollars. It served him less well when he tried to condense (true story) the narrative of Scripture to a 3x5 note card. Some things just resist reductionism. Some of the best things in life are simplicity-proof. And God bless that.
I’ve often told my students that one of the errors we make in reading epic poetry or great novels or dense works of theology is imagining that the goal of the reading is merely information extraction. If this is true, why bother with reading Paradise Lost when you get the plot summary on Wikipedia and the most famous quotes on Sparknotes?
Thus it is that I find myself in a bit of a bind when I consider how to reduce Stump’s chapter on Job to a manageable blog post. The narrative of Job resists such simplification of itself. It is stunningly complex, head-scratching, and, even, anxiety-inducing. What Stump accomplishes in this chapter is a reframing of the story that took this otherworldly narrative in directions I never imagined. I have started sketching the beginning of several responses and I just can’t quite settle on anything that does it justice.
Some of this I can doubtlessly peg to the chapter’s length. Whereas the previous chapters ranged from 15-20 pages, this chapter clocks in around 50 densely packed pages. In the interests of time and space, I want to settle on two things to explore in what follows: 1) Stump’s argument for the fatherhood of God and its unique expression in God’s answer to Job’s complaint “out of the whirlwind”; 2) her argument in the latter section of the chapter on the “fractal” nature of both Job’s narrative and all human suffering. Hopefully, this amount of (reverent) reductionism does justice to Stump’s argument and makes an enticing (and digestible) amount of reading for you, dear reader.
God the Father
Stump begins her analysis of Job at the end: when God answers Job’s complaint and silences his “friends.” In some ways, it would be easy to say that God’s words to Job contained in chapters 38-42 of the biblical book, do not exactly present him with an answer to the problem of his suffering. All God talks about is his own power. How does that address Job’s accusations?
However, as Stump points out, it doesn’t appear as if Job would agree with that interpretation. Rather, after being dressed down by God and hearing him explicate the extent of his power, Job responds with these absolutely stunning words:
2 “I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 ‘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.
4 ‘Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.’
5 I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
6 therefore I despise myself,
and repent[a] in dust and ashes.” (42:2-6)
Job concedes that whatever God says in the preceding chapters of rebuke sufficiently answers his earlier accusations. As Stump shows, for each of the areas in which God highlights his power—over the act of creation, his gentle subjugation of the sea, his conversations with darkness and light, his direction of each lightning bolt, his personal care for animals great and small, etc.—his control is not that of a dictator but that of a father. He doesn’t command the sea like a tyrant; he restrains it like it’s a rambunctious child and he is its loving and understanding father. He guides the lightning bolts and the drops of rain, showing them where to fall. His omnipotence is gentle.
Once he shifts his focus from inanimate creation to animals, the language of fathering and mothering grows more personal. He makes a home for the wild donkey and teaches the hawks how to fly. The ostrich may forget her eggs but God does not forget them. The young ravens cry to God for their food (not their mothers). God can constrain the buffalo, the behemoth, the leviathan. Whatever these latter two creatures are, and there has been no end of scholarly debate on the subject, they are big and unmanageable by humans. Here is the beginning of chapter 41:
“Can you draw out Leviathan[b] with a fishhook
or press down his tongue with a cord?
2 Can you put a rope in his nose
or pierce his jaw with a hook?
3 Will he make many pleas to you?
Will he speak to you soft words?
4 Will he make a covenant with you
to take him for your servant forever?
5 Will you play with him as with a bird,
or will you put him on a leash for your girls? (41:1-5)
The Leviathan speaks gentle words to God and makes covenants with him, the Lord can play with him and put him on a leash. Can Job do that? Clearly not.
So, how does this answer any of Job’s questions? How are his complaints of injustice addressed by a nature lesson? Here is how Stump explains it:
What Job wanted was an explanation of God’s relations with him, and he does get it, but in the form of a second-person account. He had demanded goodness. What he gets is something of what caused the sons of God not just to find God good but to rejoice in him and in his relations to his creatures.
If God is a parent, then he can interact with his creatures like a good father who might at times allow suffering. If he seeks the good of the raven in its nest, surely he seeks the good of his human creatures made in his image. Surely, he can ensure that any human suffering can be turned “to some outweighing good not otherwise available to the sufferer.” Because of what he has heard about God’s dealings with his other creations, Job can trust that God will deal beneficently with him.
Furthermore, God speaks to Job. He addresses him directly, face-to-face. This is significant, too, when you think about how to go about restoring a relationship. There is something about this type of “second-person” interaction that speaks more forcefully than a more philosophical, third-person explanation of suffering. God is present with Job. “It explains Job’s suffering to Job not by giving him knowledge that, but by giving him Franciscan knowledge of persons with respect to God and God’s relations to Job.” Job wanted goodness; he gets goodness and love.
Fractal Suffering
One of the interesting features of this chapter is Stump’s focus on the character, Satan. She argues that God is not just after Job’s good in this story but after Satan’s good as well. Satan is clearly estranged from the other sons of God who gather at the beginning of the narrative. His heart is clearly set on evil and restlessly wandering the globe. She suggests that “Satan is an alienated and internally divided son of God.” Even God’s initial question to Satan— “From where have you come?”—reads like a father’s question to a prodigal son.
Of course, Satan rejects whatever good God has in mind for him. He is unsatisfied with going after Job’s property; he wants to maim the man and kill his loved ones. But Stump argues that even in the midst of this God still desires Satan’s good. Could Job’s brave response to his suffering sway Satan from his position of cynicism and pettiness?
I am glossing over a lot here to get to the point on which I wish to conclude. The fact that God desires the good for Satan, as well as the good for Job, suggests what Stump calls the “fractal nature” of the book. God is not just seeking Job’s good but Satan’s good. Some of Job’s suffering might be for the good of Satan rather than his own. The suffering of Job’s children might be for Job’s good rather than their own. Stump explains: “A graphed fractal is thus a picture within a picture within a picture, and so on, each picture of which is similar to the picture of the whole, only reduced in scale.”
Applied to the story of Job, Stump argues for the following effect: “God is able to use those creatures whom he treats as ends in themselves within their own stories also as means to ends for other creatures, who are ends in themselves within their stories.” I am an end in my own right but a means to an end for, say, my kids and students and friends. But this fractal pattern can continue indefinitely. The book is about Job, not Job’s children, but another story could be told about them where their own stories are ends rather than means. And the people who their children knew well could also receive the same treatment.
Even parties opposed to one another can fall under this fractal nature of suffering. “Because the ultimate aim of God’s providential care in the narrative is closeness to God and the greatness consequent on that closeness,” he can care for each party even in a battle.
I find this a fascinating explanation. I remember as a young man being stuck in traffic on I-25. I was working in Denver and living in Fort Collins, so this was a recurring problem in my life. However, I remember sitting in my car one of these days, not moving, and realizing that the Lord had something for me during this time. There was something I needed to pray about and the gridlock of traffic had slowed my mind enough to make me open to prayer.
Now, up the road, someone completely unknown to me was suffering. There was a car wreck which, even if it didn’t result in any grievous physical injury, surely resulted in a lot of pain and bureaucratic frustration. And yet here I was, a mile back using the opportunity to commune with God.
This was probably my first conscious glimpse of the fact that God is always doing more than we can imagine in any situation. For the thousands of people stuck that day, there was a different intention for each of us. God is vast and outside of time. In our overlapping fractals, we shared a patch of tarmac. We were simultaneously ends and means and our good Father directed our steps with love and care.