Please, God Says to Job
It’s just a particle, a tiny word normally untranslated, but it is there. When you hear God say to Job (as he does at the beginning of chapter 38, one of the options for this coming Sunday, and again at the beginning of chapter 40), “Gird up your loins like a man,” there is an untranslated “please” in the sentence. Which is to say, God is not commanding Job; he is not telling Job what to do. Rather, God is issuing an invitation.
To answer the invitation, Job needs to gird up his loins. This just means, Get dressed. You’re a human, you are in fact a male, you need to get dressed for movement, for action. It doesn’t mean, at least at the first, getting ready for a wrestling match or some other sporting competition; it doesn’t mean, as we say, to “man up.” God is not telling Job to stop being a wimp and be a man. Rather he is saying, Please come talk with me. Let’s talk: you, a man, with me, your God.
To talk with God is exactly what Job has desired for most of the 37 chapters that have come before. Job thinks there are things he and God need to talk about. And at the end of it—in chapter 42—God will say that Job spoke rightly about him, unlike his friends. It seems that Job was right to want to talk with God.
Of course it makes no sense to want to talk with God. It is like a character in a book wanting to talk with his author. It is impossible. His friends are right: you can’t question the author about the story. All you should do—the only thing that makes sense—is to live your life in submission. You are a character; the story is the author’s.
And yet, Job knows something. He knows he is innocent, and he knows that the calamities that have fallen upon him are not justified as punishment for anything he has done. He wants to talk with God even though (he also knows) there is no way he, a mortal man, can stand before God his creator. How can they talk with each other? Can a man talk with God?
What is wonderful about seeing that “please” is this: It shows that God also recognizes the problem. God wants Job to stand before him “as a man,” but he cannot command it; it can only happen if he invites Job and if Job accepts the invitation.
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The substance of God’s speech to Job is at once awesome and frightening. God takes Job on a cosmic tour on the wild side. He shows him how vast the universe is and how inhospitable to humans. He introduces Job to creatures that are powerful and dumb at the same time, beings that would crush Job and not even think about it. One of them has a hide so tough, there is nothing Job could do to hurt it even a tiny bit. Job, the man, who is seeing this in conversation with God, is of course afflicted with a hideous skin disease. Job has a hide that is terribly vulnerable.
This is what it is to be a man, a woman, any of us. We are vulnerable. And for God to talk with him and reveal his vulnerability to him is Job’s satisfaction. He can go back home to his family, neighbors, and friends and enjoy communion with them.
I think the reader can easily understand this in terms of the vulnerability, the wound-ability, revealed in the Gospels.
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Out & About: This Sunday, June 23, I am preaching at Good Shepherd Church in Cedar Hill, Texas; the eucharists there are at 8:30 and 10:30 a.m.
Contrary to all expectations, yours truly recently wrote in praise of the movie Barbie. See https://humanlifereview.com/barbie-breaking-through/ . This is consonant with my speaking Saturday, June 29, at a “Breaking Through” conference in New York City, although there I will be speaking on fiction.
The next Good Books & Good Talk seminar will be Sunday, September 22, on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
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On the Web: Father William of St. Gregory’s Abbey in Michigan starts out with vampires but then gets to a very good prayer, “Lord hear all good prayers for us, for Jesus’ sake.” He has some wise thoughts concerning our prayers for others (intercessions) and for ourselves (petitions) and how both are important and, in fact, not always easily distinguished. It’s a short piece: go to page 4 in this, their most recent newsletter: https://www.saintgregorysthreerivers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/al298.pdf
—and be sure to read the last paragraph.