Bro Job
Beginning in January of this year, trouble began falling
on me like bricks tumbling out of a dump truck one after another. I won't bore you with the details
except to say that I've had nine months of pain and aggravation and now enjoy a
certain kinship with Brother Job.
Job is one of my patron saints. I see him—a man bereaved,
humiliated and stripped of all this life has to offer; his skin is blistered
and festering and his nerves are on fire. I ask, "How will this best of
all men respond?" "What great truth can I learn from him?"
"After this Job opened his mouth and cursed..." (Job 3:3)
Job is my kind of man.
I haven't always thought that way. I stand in a long
tradition that confused the Christian virtue of endurance with the pagan ethic
of stoicism. I was taught to curb my emotions, or at least the outward
expression of them, and to never complain.
Ours was the virtue of the stiff upper lip. It's little wonder that I never
took well to Job, his overmastering sorrow, his angry outbursts of frustration.
Job was a whiner.
I've been told that stoicism found it's way into Western
thought via the Renaissance and the notion
that reason must override passion, but the Renaissance is not our mother. We go
back to an older, richer, inspired tradition: The lament psalms in which
Israel's poets pour out their emotions with groans and loud complaints.
Biblical endurance, the chief virtue in times of testing,
is something quite different from stoicism. It has to do with steadfast trust
in God's goodness and love despite all counter-indications, but it says nothing
about our emotional state while doing so.
Job is no Stoic, striving to be pure mind
with no passion. Job's was not the strength of stones or of bronze (6:14). The
man is an emotional wreck. The Lord’s testing is not to find out if Job can sit
unmoved like a block of wood, but will he continue to hope in God despite his
suffering and the emotional turmoil that surrounded it.
The example of Jesus should forever
silence those who criticize emotional outbursts and consider them to be sinful
or signs of immaturity: ”In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and
supplications, with loud cries and tears..." (Hebrews 5:7)
Jesus experienced the whole range of
human emotions, yet he did not sin. His strongest desire, even in agony, was to
surrender himself wholly to his Father.
We are drawn by our suffering to that
same point of giving in to our Lord. Going through a wrestling match with God
is not an indication of spiritual weakness, but of the intensity of our desire
for wholeness. We have a God who lets us be angry at him and accepts our
emotional pain as his own. It's okay to fume and fret o'er our troubles; okay
to wish they were gone.
What I long for, pray for, therefore, is
not bland, vapid, phlegmatic calm, but absolute and undoubting confidence in
the love of God in the face of all my troubles—and someday to say with Job,
"Though He slay me, yet will I trust him."
David Roper
11/22/15
