In the Merry Old Land of Uz

Ha, ha, ha
Ho, ho, ho
And a couple of tra - la - las
That's how we laugh the day away
In the Merry Old Land of Oz



Uz.

It's where Job is from.

Idea for a 3 Stooges short:

It starts out merry, and ends up merry (all's well that ends well); but in this tale the boys meet a man named Job and all hell breaks loose.

Title: A Job's a Job, but that ain't my Job

Moe, Larry and Curly play Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar (they are affectionately called Eli, Bil and Zo in our treatment). I'm wondering if this should really be a Shemp. I'll leave it to casting.

Closing scene (theme music): Eli, Bil and Zo riding into the sunset on Leviathan, who's spurting out sparks and fire from his mouth and nostrils as the boys squeal wo-wo-wo-wo-wo.

Cut. Print.

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The Book of Job presents a problem of genre. Wise people place it among the Wisdom literature. But there is nothing in the Wisdom literature that contains this level of burlesque. God and [the]Satan, the one not so bright, the other a cunning knave, conjure several challenges for an unflappable Job. This is the stuff of comedy: financial catastrophe, violent death, horrific disease. God and [the]Satan--just what will those guys come up with next?

The standard reading of the book emphasizes the inscrutable knowledge, power, will of the Lord, and the smallness of human comprehension in the face of such a Lord. This reading is known as 'theodicy,' from the Greek roots, theos and dike, God and justice: God's justice. But what justice is this that abuses Job to show [the]Satan, the mischief-maker, just how just Job is?

Job never asks God to justify himself (he does ask audaciously for an explanation, but this never rise to the level of theodicy). He wonders what he or his family could have done to deserve such divine wrath, but cannot discover any guilt. Job wishes he had never lived, and he despairs in his profound loss and unspeakable suffering.


Job receives visits from his 'friends' who heighten his suffering through their presentation of traditional belief in retributive 'justice.' Talk about salt in the wounds. Job is grief-stricken beyond human endurance, though he does indeed endure. There must be something to Job's complaint, as the whirlwind appears, and God himself enters the fray. But this is not the Yahweh who held court in the opening lines of our text. This is no blow-hard: at this climax of the comic opera, we do not get the pompous ass promised in the overture. We do indeed get the inscrutable God.

Job 38 contains some of the most magnificent poetry in the library we call 'the bible.' Yehovah, speaking in his own name, recapitulates the beauty and terror of creation. Beginning in the cosmic order, God recounts the architecture of the world, all phenomena visible and invisible, the sentient and non-sentient universe. God underscores Job's absence from the terrible beauty of the world, from the dew to the fiery breath of Leviathan. Job, of course, acknowledges his absence from the events of creation and the reality of the created world (40:4-5). Finally, God humiliates Job with the imagery of Behemoth, the river horse hung like, well, a horse. Completely broken, Job surrenders to mystery of the world and its creator (42:2-6). Still, God makes Job present to the process of creation in the redux: he is made present to his absence, and present to a slightly widened aperture upon the wonders of the world. Job therefore retreats to a more strategic place, the docta ignorantia, the learned ignorance of apophatic space that, as Catherine Keller has pointed out in her Cloud of the Impossible, Nicholas of Cusa will carve out from the infinity of God. 

None of God's words address Job's complaint. There is no explanation for the capricious treatment visited upon Job's existence. God does not want to speak to the suffering he has allowed to be inflicted on his servant. God changes the subject[ivity] into intersubjectivity. Job gets a tour of the universe, and receives final vindication for his investigations; his friends are convicted for their 'theodicies,' pay their retribution to Job, and in good comic fashion, Job is restored to his rightful place in the land of Uz.

All's well that ends well. 

The traditional reading of Job will forever stand in its incoherence. The farcical elements of this book, its dark and dreaded humor, have no place amongst the so-called 'wisdom literature.' Job is sui generis, a comedy bordering on a satyr play that breaks the tension of a full day at the amphitheater. 

The book's 3 stooges want to make the matter one of theodicy. God and Job want it to be one of growing closeness between the human and the divine. God gives no answer to Job's suffering because there is no answer. But Job's restoration to even greater existence and fulfillment is telling. Is it just that some redactor couldn't stomach some original version of the text where Job simply dies of grief and disease? I think not. Job is about the reality of the horrors of life, the ugliness embedded within a good world. These things cause immense suffering, but they are generated within a world made with intelligibility and integrity. The restoration is something of a resurrection for Job, an allotment of more time, of more sacred space. The apophatic position is the winner in this comedy, and this deepening relationship between God and Job comes to fulfillment in another act of creation, of reshith. 'Where were you' becomes you are with me. The times of presence and absence blur into something new moving into another horizon.

The answer to Job is the Christ-event. I am with you always until the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). God comes to man as man, and interdigitates his nature with the human. Why do we suffer in this world? God says I suffer with you. There are no more Jobs after Christ because such Jobs will have their answer before they even ask: the Cross of forsaken suffering witnessed in the first person by God. So where is the consolation in that? It is no consolation at all if such forsaken suffering stays on the Cross. The insistence from the Cross is a call from a distance to the hearer of the message. It is an invitation to release the event of love in the presence to the Other, a presence of human contact. Job's restoration is his contact with the divine. Suffering asks us to knock on the door of the neighbor who suffers. Visit, stay awhile. That is sacred time and sacred space. Solid time: reshith. It doesn't make suffering less painful, or less mysterious. It does make it a little less incomprehensible, in a learned ignorance kind of way. And it may lighten the burden of suffering by sharing in its presence through presence, for a sacred moment.