Tell me if you have understanding
The questions of God call us to account. They humble us, to be sure, acting as a check upon the ignorance of our arrogance, but they also open us out to the greater wonder of God and his creation, and to a deeper understanding about ourselves. The great questions of God to Adam and Eve, echoed in the same questions to Cain, are recalled in the questions of God to Job. And, perhaps, nowhere with greater intensity.
We have too small a view of God, of his creation, and thus of ourselves. The questions of God in The Book of Job counter our small-mindedness. They open us out to the grandeur of God which cannot be reduced to the petty little systems of our thinking, to the ghettos of our minds to which we retreat in fear and despair. The Book of Job counters our attempt to capture God within our thinking, to reduce God to us. In a way, I blame Milton in Paradise Lost. The idea of trying to “justifie the wayes of God to men” runs the risk of collapsing God into our thinking rather than raising us into the mystery of God and his creation which is always greater than what we can know. That the world is in principle intelligible does not mean that its meaning and truth can be fully grasped by us. Such is our small-mindedness that can only lead to nihilism and despair, not to mention the capacity for the destructive and misguided use of our reasoning.
Job is the Old Testament type of the best man in the worst misfortune. He loses everything – prosperity and family. He goes from having everything to losing everything. He is the Hebrew paradigm of the man of sorrows and suffering. He demands an explanation from God. The poet, novelist and theologian, G. K. Chesterton observes that the Book of Job is the most interesting of ancient books but equally the most interesting of modern books because in its philosophical wisdom it is eternal. It speaks profoundly to the assumptions of our middle class world. It challenges the old yet common idea that if you do well you will be rewarded materially, with prosperity. This is often the message projected by parents and teachers to their children and students along with the warning that if you do badly you will suffer poverty and material hardship. The Book of Job undertakes to point out the problem with such a way of looking at things; it is too limited, too small a view of the world and of human behaviour. The corollary of these positions shows their dangerous absurdity. If you are rich, therefore you must be good; if you are poor, then you are obviously bad?! The ethical measure of goodness or evil cannot be material prosperity. The Book of Job exposes the folly of this way of looking at things.
It does so through the intensity of questions. Job calls God to account; at first glance a problem. But Job actually desires to know what is the truth of things and will not be satisfied with platitudes or appearances or facile arguments. The great virtue of Job is that he is deeply committed to the goodness of God despite his sufferings. He seeks to be convinced and convinced that God can convince him. Thus he has a profound and deep respect for God, for his truth and goodness. His questions are animated by his great desire to know.
As such The Book of Job complements other great works of literature which also provide a self-critique of human reason; all counters to our small-mindedness by turning rationalism on its head. It complements, for instance, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex where Oedipus comes to question himself and learns to doubt what he thought he absolutely knew. It complements Socrates whose questions constantly challenge our assumptions about what we think we know. It complements the questions of Plato and a whole intellectual tradition of the self-critique of reason after him. Such things speak to the problem of a too limited form of reason, not unlike contemporary technocratic reason in our current distresses. It anticipates Jesus in the Christian Gospels who questions and challenges our assumptions about the ethical. It anticipates Anselm’s great insight into the nature of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”
How? By questions. The outstanding feature of The Book of Job is that God answers Job not with answers but with questions. The questions of God are greater than the answers of men. Job is not comforted by the Comforters who have too small and too narrow a view of God, the Law, and creation. Before God speaks out of the whirlwind to call him to account, Job is not comforted. He is only comforted after God’s great litany of questions. What are those questions? They are embraced, in a way, in the opening question. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?/ Tell me if you have understanding … When the morning stars sang together,/ And all the sons of God shouted for joy.” There is something worthy of our attention that is greater than us.
The questions open us out to what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “God’s Grandeur.” The questions of God are a response to Job’s questions. They reveal the greater wonder and goodness of God which idea underlies Job’s questions. They show something quite wonderful: God’s own delight in what he has made, including our humanity. We are raised up into the wonder and the mystery of God and into the wonder and the mystery of creation. It is greater and more wonderful than what we imagine, “something too good to be told” (Chesterton). This is the necessary check upon the fears and anxieties of our present times whether it is the climate, the unending spectacle of wars and distress, or the loneliness and emptiness in our souls. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” (Hopkins). This is God’s response to Job and to us.
Job is humbled and yet comforted. Comforted really means to be strengthened, not coddled or mollycoddled, not smothered and cosseted, but strengthened into understanding. Job is humbled, we might say, because he is magnanimous, great-souled. As such he anticipates Mary’s Magnificat even as he prefigures the wounds and sufferings of Christ. He is open to the grandeur of God in his truth and goodness. And so might we in all our distresses.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy