Job and John Wayne: A Meditation for Father’s Day

I’m over at Stand Firm this morning.

It is Father’s Day and there is a light and gentle rain ushering in the morning. After so many weeks of thinking about the conspiracy of wicked men to kick strong and independent women out of their proper spheres—the factory, the office, the convent, and the pulpit*—and of enduring The Book of Longings wherein “Jesus” helps his dear wife Ana** “find the largeness inside her,” when I clicked on the lections for today, I must say I was a little bit shocked. The vagaries of Sunday morning Bible reading being what they are, many of the exhausted faithful will be treated to a taste of the sorrows of Job without having had to endure the whole book over the course of many weeks. Mashed up against Jesus calming a storm and healing a demoniac, we get God’s sudden arrival on the scene to finally have it out with that poor beset and ruined person.

You remember Job, don’t you? Sitting there in the ash heap, scraping himself with a broken piece of pottery. He has lost everything—his children, his wealth—but his wife. And his faith. Though, in the long and terrible conversation with his “friends,” that too has gotten to be painful and difficult. ‘I’m not bad,’ he says over and over, as they press upon him that he is, indeed, very bad. He is the very vilest of men, else none of the evil that has fallen upon his head would have. That’s how the world works. Good people get good things, bad people get bad ones. Toxically masculine men are the very worst of all, crushing orphans and widows under their booted heels and taking food out of the mouths of the poor. For thirty-seven chapters this goes on, which, for the modern person trying to read it, must be a worse suffering than that of Job himself.

Finally God comes along to straighten them all out. And this is the part that really shocked me. “Who is this,” asks God, though surely he knows, “that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me.”

Like a man? What is that? Is that like a woman though not as good? Doesn’t God know that what anyone wears is only up to them? What sort of action? Will it be violent? Or contentious?

Job lifts his weary and defeated head and considers the wonder of the God who comes to question him, to put him in his place, his proper sphere, which is always a painful kind of experience. The questions come fast, one upon another, and are all unanswerable. What about the foundation of the earth? Who laid it down? Who measured it? What about the morning stars? The sea? The clouds? The waves? What about the dawn? Divine sarcasm drips down upon Job’s sick and sorry head. Surely this wise and righteous mortal man has been down to the source of the very oceans themselves. He must know how it all works, and how to sustain it. Surely he must know how to make the sunrise, the earth spin, the animals on the heights give birth, the sea creatures in the depths find what they need. What is his problem? Why doesn’t he stand up and do something about it all?

And Job, as you know, though that part won’t be read in church this morning, bows his head, and repents. Already ruined, he admits his own defeat and accepts that God is God, and that he doesn’t know or understand or have control over anything—even his own possible or impossible goodness…read the rest here!

Photo by Rosan Harmens on Unsplash