MISFORTUNE


and what we should learn from the trials of Job
 

Job lost everything

Everything: children, house, health, good name, property ... you name it, and Job lost it. Covered with boils from “the sole of his foot to the crown of his head”, he sat upon the ashes he poured over his head and scraped himself with a potsherd. Even his wife reviled him: “Curse God and die.” Three friends came, barely recognizing Job, and sat a week with him in silence. They then proceeded to “console” Job ... by convicting him of his sins ... sins he never committed.

Finally, Job himself uttered what we all have uttered at one time or another in our lives: “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?” In other words, would that his nakedness had never been clothed in honor and glory — for then he would not know the pain of losing what he never had.

But God had, “...  made a fence for him, and his house, and all his substance round about, blessed the works of his hands, and his possession hath increased on the earth?”  (Job 1.10)

God prospered Job.

The evil one, knowing this, tore down the hedge, devastated Job’s house, and tempted Job to despair ... to give up on God.

And yet ... incredibly, “in all these things Job sinned not.” Job was blameless before God.
 

We know Job

We have been Job ... in one form or another at some point, perhaps at many points, in our lives.

We have been devastated, deprived of what we esteemed good, lost our health, our jobs, our dignity, security ... and, for great sorrow, even our families.

How do we console ourselves? Most often, as Job’s friends had consoled him, we tell ourselves that our misfortune is, in some incomprehensible sense, just ... that we are suffering the rigors of an exacting and ineluctable justice that we had somehow eluded for sins or crimes we no longer remember ... from which we had inexplicably managed to escape, and which have finally caught up with us and demanded tribute.

However, the fact of the matter is that — at least in the case of Job — Job’s misfortunes were not just. There was no proportion between what he suffered and what he had done — indeed, Job had done nothing but good!

Job’s misfortunes were not God’s “payback”. And neither are ours.

Even were justice demanded of us for our sins – and unlike Job, our own sins are many – we can never make adequate restitution, never pay reparation, for we are too poor. We had squandered that patrimony of grace which had been given our First Parents in justice, and we forfeited it just as they did — even after Baptism washed us of that Original Sin, that primal effrontery through which our patrimony became our poverty! Only what is without sin can cancel sin. And that justice has already been rendered —  through Jesus Christ on the Cross.

Yes, God is just. But it was not Job — and it is not us — it is God Himself who paid the price of justice in the shattered humanity of Christ.
 

Rendering Justice to God

God did not – and He does not – exact the restitution of justice from us. We do not possess the tribute, the wherewithal — and we are fools, or deceived, if we believe that we can render justice to God. Only God can render justice to God. Why? Because the plenitude of justice that is God and that is due God is infinite because God Himself is infinite. His justice — like His love, goodness, and mercy — is the perpetual act of His being: it is, as it were, the very fabric of His Being: a “Being-good”, a “Being-loving”, a “Being-merciful” ... and a “Being-just”.

Love, mercy, goodness, justice are not merely “parts” of God's Being — rather, His being is a “Being-good”,  “Being-loving”,  “Being-merciful” ... and “Being-just”. These infinite and eternal acts (the acts of being: a-being-loving, a-being-good, a-being-just) do not simply coincide with His Being as something extraneous to it — they constitute His Being! To sin against justice, then, is to sin against the infinite justice of God Who alone is a Being-just ... and note merely a “just" being. How, then, can finite man make infinite restitution?  We cannot. Only Christ, being God, could — on the Cross. That is why Jesus is called, “the Just One.” ^*
 

So what of Job? What of us?

We came into this world with nothing. We will leave it with nothing. We think that we have worked for, earned, all the good things we enjoy, and reckon the day they may be taken from us injustice. Injustice was never done us, for we never merited, deserved, any of these things. What, then, of all our hard work and sweat?

Ask yourself from the depths of the truthfulness of your being:  have you worked harder, more diligently, more desperately, more deservingly, than the poverty stricken farmer in sub-Sahara Africa? Why is he not adorned as you? Why is his plate empty? Because you are “more just” and these things are your “more justly” yours (your “due” in justice?) — but somehow not his?

If you possess power, wealth, esteem, glory, in this world, do not congratulate yourself on your diligence, your “uncanny” insight, your “good luck” and success. Given the blandishment of the evil one — the “father of lies” — which we find in the temptation of Christ,  it is, I suggest, far more appropriate to tremble.

Behold Job. And also behold Christ — Christ Who was also tempted by that same evil one who, in his empty promise, is frightfully revealing:

Ask yourself soberly: whence your prosperity, your power, your wealth? From whom, and to what end? And at the cost of whose dignity and through the poverty of how many did you acquire it? Prosperity, many Protestants hold, is a sign of God’s favor, a token of  His predilection: if you are “just” and “Godly", God will prosper you.

Misfortune and suffering, then, are  — much in line with the reasoning of Job’s “consolers” — afflictions from God. They are the penalty — meted out by God — for “injustice” and “ungodliness”. Material prosperity, on the other hand, together with wealth and power — these are God's blessings for the “just”. It is, in a word, their “reward” ... their “due” in all justice.

But it was not Saint Paul’s ...  nor the “reward” due in “justice” to the other Apostles:

This was the insidious trap set for Job by the devil through his “consolers” ... and by our own self-recrimination in the face of misfortune. We are confronted with misfortune. Who is to blame? With incredible subtlety, the devils suggests that  Either we are guilty — or God is! If we are not guilty for this misfortune, then God is. If God is not, then we are. But neither is the case!

In other words, Job brought it unknowingly upon himself — and God (not the devil, mind you ...) was perfectly willing to be complicit in this injustice —by punishing Job for what he did not do! What is more, He punished Job by “unjustly” taking away “what was his”. It was a masterpiece of illusion! Diabolically brilliant! Job was tempted by the devil to despair in having “unjustly” lost all that was “not his in justice” to begin with!

In a supreme irony, Christ was tempted by the same devil to idolatry through an empty promise to give Him what was already His to begin with.

Remember, who precisely was it who had said that wealth, material prosperity, and power was his to give? And who was it that took it away from Job – that was his to give and his to take?

Misfortunes are not from God. Nor are they the penalty of your sins, for you would then have nothing (given your countless sins and the justice that would be exacted for each.)

Misfortunes, suffering, want, pain, destitution, illness, are not lofty, if cruel, tributes to justice! They are evils! Evils out of which God ever brings good ... as He did with Job who, “in all these things ... sinned not.”

Misfortune is not of your own making — still less is it from God. Saint Paul understood this. You must also:

_____________________________________________________

^* Acts 7.52

Editor
Boston Catholic Journal

   Printable PDF Version