The Book of Job as a Path of Transformation

Five steps to transform the path to God

Job is in the midst of an inner battle, overwhelmed by suffering and discouragement. He wonders whether there is any point in continuing to live in such a condition as the one in which he finds himself. He is going through personal disintegration, to the point that a primal tear grows stronger and stronger within him: “Let the day perish in which I was born” (Job 3:3), he mournfully wishes. He asks with evident bitterness, “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?” (3:11).

Job questions the very fact of his existence, screaming at God a question that is ultimately rhetorical, one that often recurs in those who suffer. In addition, over the course of the book’s 42 chapters, he becomes angry with God, disputes with God, attacks God. But at other times he keeps silent, listens, allows himself to be touched by God’s word, allows the Lord to correct him. In short, he goes through a personal journey that leads him to the point of transforming the trusting relationship with God that he had lost. In that journey he does not try to avoid the difficulties that come when shrouded in the fog of sorrow.

In the Book of Job we find one man’s experience attesting to how suffering is not inevitably doomed to turn into a pathway that, as it collapses, makes the journey to God impossible.

Even today we witness many cries that human beings continue to address to God from the depths of their pain.[1] Therefore, respectful of the complexity inherent in the Book of Job, we have selected some passages that are useful for pastoral ministry and accessible to non-specialists with the intention of helping to reconfigure relationships with God that pain has damaged. We believe with the eyes of faith that ours is a God who does not abandon us, but rather responds when we call and listens when we are afflicted.

These are simple paths, paths which involve charting a possible way to encounter God in the circumstances in which many may find themselves in fostering their spiritual relationship with the Lord.

These steps do not follow an entirely linear path, because sometimes some detours and changes of pace will also be necessary. But hopefully they will help reorient people on the path and aid them to understand that much of what suffering generates in the inner self is “normal” and gives no excuse to stray irretrievably from God.

We embark on this journey with the author of the book, who, by conceiving Job as a non-Israelite character – “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job” (1:1) – allows us to take some theological risks in dealing with suffering in all its rawness. Indeed, the author exposes Job to the charge of blasphemy: “Job makes many bold and certainly not very orthodox statements, behind which are important theological questions.”[2]

Step one: accept that there is distress

Job is so distressed that he not only curses the day on which he was born – “Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth” (3:1) – but even expands his suffering to a cosmic dimension: “Let that day be darkness! May God above not seek it, or light shine on it” (3:4); “Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light, but have none; may it not see the eyelids of the morning” (3:9).

He thus exposes not only his own inner laceration, but also his doubt that in the cosmos, understood as a whole, there is any meaning. This pain is so great that it is insufferable, for “Job experiences his suffering as abandonment by God.”[3]

As is also so often the case in pastoral ministry, the text presents Job’s suffering – especially in chapter 6 – as overwhelming, indescribable: “O that my vexations were weighed, and all my calamity laid in the balances! For then it would be heavier than the sand of the sea; therefore my words have been rash” (6:2-3). Job experiences the situation that haunts him with great anguish. On the other hand, he has no consciousness of having been negligent or having done anything wrong.

This is why the speeches of his friends add to God’s apparent silence, anger him and initially render what is good in him worthless. Indeed, for them the answers and the knowledge from which this situation of suffering should be understood and dealt with must be found in the tradition of the ancestors.

And yet for Job, the experience he is going through does not at all fit the framework supplied by that tradition. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zofar seem insensitive to their friend’s suffering. For 22 chapters (4 to 25) they make salvation almost entirely dependent on the recognition of a presumed sin.

Something very similar happens with the four speeches by Elihu (chapters 32-37). As Gustavo Gutiérrez notes, “Job shares that theoretical reference, but his experience and his faith in God end up doing battle with that theology. The awareness of his integrity cannot entertain it. Job begins to glimpse a path, a method, for talking about God.”[4]

Yet Job, though he struggles to express it at first, after a certain moment appears prepared and is able to articulate his anguish and devastation: “Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (7:11). How many people at this very moment are silently experiencing utter exhaustion, fear, anguish or loneliness? How many are secretly weeping, drowning in an inexpressible whirlpool of helplessness, sadness and desolation? How many of them do we know? We can’t even imagine how many more there may be? How many, like Job, are tragically crying out for an end to their anguish and that, for once, they may have peace?

“Now I would be lying down and quiet; I would be asleep; then I would be at rest” (3:13), Job wishes. “I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (3:26), he ends up acknowledging.

Step two: allow yourself to get angry

“If you happen to think that Job’s reaction is marked by mere resignation, the process that Job follows will show that this is not so. The full encounter with his God comes through lament, perplexity and confrontation.”[5]

From the very first speech of Eliphaz (chapters 4-5), Job begins to feel aggrieved that the answers of his three friends are not helpful to him at all, because they do not listen to him: “My companions are treacherous like a torrent-bed, like riverbeds that pass away” (6:15). And at the end of the first cycle of dialogues (chapters 12-14), his indignation toward them is obvious, triggered by what he regards as the false wisdom they dispense.

Although at first Elihu’s entry seems promising, something similar happens with him as well. Relations between Elihu and Job become strained, as we are told at the beginning of chapter 32: “Then Elihu son of Barachel the Buzite, of the family of Ram, became angry. He was angry at Job because he justified himself rather than God” (32:2).

In this sense, writes Gutiérrez, “Elihu makes it personal and addresses Job in a defiant tone, calling him several times by name. In doing so, he shows a certain arrogance; he is very sure of his own ideas. He does not take into account either Job’s situation or his suffering; he does not even grasp at all his hard experience or his anguished questions; Elihu’s concern goes another way and obeys other motivations: to defend what he considers the correct doctrine.”[6]

Job blames his friends. He not only curses the day he was born, but the whole cosmos. Moreover, unlike his words in chapter 3, he begins to criticize God bitterly, to challenge, question and blame God for what he thinks God is putting him through: “I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul” (10:1).

Nothing in the speeches of the three companions has caused Job to change his point of view. For him, God is the author of his suffering: “Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?” (12:9). If Job suffers, it is not because God is absent, but because God is treating him with exasperating injustice: “Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked?” (10:3).

Therefore, for Job God is not the righteous judge, the comforter of the afflicted. Rather, God is an aggressor, who “strips understanding from the leaders of the earth, and makes them wander in a pathless waste” (12:24). In essence, God uses force and destructive power against a human being: “Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me” (10:2).

Oppressed by this situation, Job does not hesitate to express all his anger, his indignation. Indeed, he somehow seems to expect God to become present and explain to him the meaning of all that suffering. However, Job’s blasphemy here is not an obstacle to the search for the Lord’s face; rather, it is the thread that maintains Job’s relationship with the divine and that later on will enable him to turn to God in a new and transformed way.

Thus, when grief overwhelms, it is not forbidden to lash out at God. In fact, wrath, which always presupposes the prior recognition of a relationship, can be transformed into the catalyst that facilitates a genuine encounter with the Lord. The fact is that “in the Bible lament does not exclude hope. More than that, they go together.”[7] In fact, “The Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning” (42:12).

Step three: make space for silence

Job’s life comes into crisis when his suffering has turned into a presence that invades and swamps him. Therefore, the approach of Eliphaz, though well-meaning, is of no help to Job.

The first friend enjoins him to reflect on his identity beyond the crisis in which he finds himself, urges him to look to a past of strength and prosperity (cf. Chapter 4), which supposedly can make sense of the present situation (cf. Chapter 5); and makes a hopeful appeal to a future in which Job will no longer suffer as he does now (cf. Chapter 6).

Carol Newsom points out that “The therapeutic program of the friends, especially as articulated by Eliphaz in Chapter 5, attempts to heal the disorder by engaging the victim in spiritual exercises that reorient him to the fundamentally trustworthy nature of existence.”[8]

So his shortcoming – the same as Bildad’s and Zophar’s – is in not allowing the healing process the time it needs. Moreover, none of the three friends seem to understand Job’s tremendous present suffering; rather they increase it, because their words are not centered on what he is suffering, but on responding to what they regard as his blasphemies.

For example, Zophar says twice, “I hear censure that insults me, and a spirit beyond my understanding answers me” (20:3); “Should a multitude of words go unanswered, and should one full of talk be vindicated? Should your babble put others to silence, and when you mock, shall no one shame you?” (11:2-3).

But in the end, despite the anguish he feels, Job does not isolate himself, nor does God reproach him for his anguish, although at various times God corrects him. In fact, the genuine desire to establish a new relationship with the Lord remains alive. Therefore, in chapters 38-41, it is Job himself who gives up and falls silent, when he realizes that it is his suffering, neither his supposed sin, nor his error that has caused him to miss something important. It has prevented him from opening himself to what he desires, the words of God, who speaks to a human being in a special way in his or her pain.

That is why, in our pastoral ministry, in order for God to speak, we must first of all help people to become silent amidst the many noises – inside and outside – by which they feel overwhelmed. Elihu had already hinted at this in his first speech, though with different intentions: “But now, hear my speech, O Job, and listen to all my words” (33:1).

In our pastoral approach to those who suffer, silence is necessary to discover who God is and who, in fact, each of us is; what our motives and fears are; what drives us and what paralyzes our motivation; what gives us meaning and how anxiety assails us; what we aspire to and what makes us suffer.

Step four: allow yourself to be decentralized

The Book of Job at this point notes that God can reach the believer even in difficulty and desolation. But how can we help a person prepare to receive God’s revelation? Ignatius of Loyola, in the “Meditation on Sins,” in No. 58 of his Spiritual Exercises (SE), proposes an approach that is in harmony with Job’s text.

It is noticeable that both invite us, at first, to turn our eyes on ourselves to look at who we are. Job does this in chapters 29-31: he places himself at the center of his world and makes sure that everyone else, the neighbors and the the poor, must place themselves around him, listening to “the testimony with which he has tried to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of his companions and the community at large, a community that has already drawn tentative conclusions about him from its own interpretation of his terrible fate.”[9]

But neither Ignatius of Loyola’s approach nor the divine discourse in the Book of Job (chapters 38-42), provoked by Job in chapter 33, cause him to shut himself in, nor even confine himself to the experiences he goes through, or his current situation.

In fact, in those chapters “Job has grasped the meaning of the divine discourse. Instead of continuing to impose his own personal and narrow conception of justice on God, he now looks at the world and his own life from God’s perspective. He has understood that divine justice cannot be measured by the narrow criteria of human justice.”[10]

Until then, “being so withdrawn into himself, so focused on his own life, Job had understood neither how creation works nor who or what is the quintessential creature: the human being. In chapters 38-42, thanks to the initiative of God, who takes him by the hand so that he embarks on a decisive journey, Job finds his place in the world (he is creature and not creator), renouncing the illusory claims to know all of creation (only the creator has this prerogative), and this helps him reconcile with his suffering as well.”[11]

In other words, the believer discovers his or her own deep identity when considering who God is, that is, when decentering from the self and raising one’s eyes to the cosmos and to the Lord. This is the way to recover the relationship with God. And this is, therefore, the divine comfort that the Book of Job outlines, namely, that God manifests God’s self as the Lord of a creation in which evil is also present, a God full of wisdom, omnipotence, justice and, above all, goodness.

This implies that “the God whom Job had so earnestly sought is not the God who persecutes and controls him, who shoots arrows at him, who judges him arbitrarily and cruelly, who tosses him around with overwhelming power, but the creator God, the good God.”[12]

In other words, “the Lord responds to Job, albeit indirectly: God removes him from his self-centeredness, from the depths of his tortured self, and provides him with a broader, cosmic and creationist perspective in which he can weigh his personal case more objectively.”[13]

Ultimately, the voice of God, within the diverse voices present in the Book of Job, leads to a decentering both from traditional wisdom and from self. Job is so focused on himself and his claim that he goes so far as to condemn God. Therefore, the Lord confronts him with his limited image and urges him to expand his thinking so that it does not diminish the mystery of God.

Neither Job nor any of us, let alone our personal motivations, is the center of creation. Therefore, the suffering human being, opening himself or herself to this encounter with the divine, which is a relationship of care and love, can utter an exclamation of gratitude for the comfort received from the creator.

Indeed, “in the same way that the recognition of the tragic structure of existence signals the limits of human self-sufficiency, by contrast it signals the preciousness of being, but this time by way of gift.”[14]

Fifth step: cooperate in the task of healing

Ultimately, the spiritual journey that makes possible the transformation of Job’s relationship with God leads him to intercede for his friends with the Lord: “My servant Job shall pray for you” (42:8). Job does not keep the comfort he received for himself, but now, thanks to the decentering to which God leads him, he is able to pass it on and work for reconciliation.

Enrique Sanz writes: “This, too, is the great truth of Job, of the same and the new Job, who intercedes for his enemies (Bildad, Zophar, Eliphaz) and prays for his persecutors (cf. Matt 5:44; Luke 6:28); of the one who is socially reintegrated and generates life, despite being sick; of the one who acts gratuitously, like God, establishing daughters and sons as heirs (something unheard of in Israel, where daughters do not inherit while sons are still alive); of the one who also receives gratuitously what he had not asked for (children, wealth, long life). It is Job 42:7-17, the epilogue of the Book of Job, that tells all this briefly.”[15]

Indeed, although God offers more questions than answers, God’s intervention dismantles the defenses and barriers in Job. Víctor Morla states, “A divine palisade of blessings and prosperity protected Job. Because the palisade was very high, it was very difficult for our hero to contemplate another kind of reality that also abounded on the other side: poverty, misfortune, death…, evil, in short. But by a satanic (and divine!) backhand, that palisade of security and self-satisfaction collapses dramatically, and Job is mercilessly dragged into the cruelest physical and psychological storm.”[16]

In this great step taken by Job, “it was not a matter of denying personal suffering, but of opening oneself to the affliction of others, committing oneself to eliminating it.”[17] From a pastoral perspective, we recognize here a call to care for and comfort those in need of encounter and relationship.

It is an appeal, ultimately, to justice: “The poet’s insight continues to apply to us: the gratuitousness of God’s love is the framework in which the need to practice justice is inscribed […]. The need to work justice as a way of recognizing God and speaking of God.”[18]

Beyond the cry: transforming the relationship with God

Although Job reaches the limit of blasphemy, his relationship with God has never completely disappeared. Therefore, the pastoral task to which this book can propel us is not so much in the direction of refounding the suffering individual’s relationship with God, but to transform and recalibrate it so that it can grow, making room for the new lived experience.

As Gutiérrez observes, “the Book of Job does not seek to find a rational and definitive explanation for the problem of suffering,”[19] but rather “leaves readers to make a spiritual transformation, in the sense that they try to see life from God’s perspective and not their own.”[20]

Sanz expresses himself in similar terms when he says that Job asserts “that evil and pain do not have an explanation, but instead have an end; that evil and pain do not have a logic, but have a way to overcome them, a path to live them with much dignity.”[21]

In fact, what transforms Job is not an explanation but an encounter, an encounter with God. In other words, “the relationship and personal encounter that God gave [Job] completely changed him, made him leave behind the past and opened him to a new future. Through this he was able to recognize God and know God’s truth, the consistency of God’s word.”[22]

The Book of Job is not about ideas, but about action. It is action that enables Job to come out of his suffering. This is a message with profound pastoral implications, because it announces that human beings can do something in situations of pain, can cope with suffering. More than that, we can help others to do the same.

The suffering person can turn to God, even when screaming in anger and transform his or her relationship with God by recognizing the self as a creature before the Lord. This is what Job comes to say in the second round of dialogues with his friends: “I shall see him, myself, my eyes shall behold him, and not another” (19:27).

In the midst of suffering, it remains possible to reconfigure one’s relationship with God, who remains present in the midst of pain, even if the meaning remains hidden. In other words, Job can perceive the wholeness of his life at the very moment when he feels shattered, for “God’s words foster another reading […] in which one embraces the goodness of life in all its fragility.”[23] Or, according to another formulation, feeling shattered is Job’s paradoxical way of being complete.

“Read in dialogical relation, the sublimity of the divine discourses and the beauty of the prose epilogue point to the human insertion of tragedy into the powerful imperatives of desire: to live and to love.”[24] Job too arrives at this integrity or perfection because he is honest with regard to what happens to him. In fact, “as the discussion proceeds, Job becomes aware that the dividing line between him and his interlocutors lies in the terrain of personal experience and the reflection that follows. Job does not see clearly, but he has the honesty and courage to go on seeking. His friends prefer to repeat concepts they have learned at a certain time, instead of approaching the lives of people, asking questions and thus opening themselves to a better understanding of God and God’s word.”[25]

This is not to say that suffering does not hurt, that helplessness does not hurt, or that fear loses its ability to upset. Not at all. Rather, it implies that God can emerge from the depths of human beings’ suffering as a focus of longing, opportunity and gift.

Indeed, those who are capable of feeling in need already find within themselves the disposition to place their trust in God’s consoling hands. “By employing the resources of his inherited moral language in a novel way, Job has effectively rehabilitated himself.”[26]

However, this encounter does not erase the suffering that so many continue to endure, so that the relationship they re-establish with God will now be new and different. Therefore, it can be hoped that, in our pastoral ministry, we can help ensure that suffering and pain are also open paths, like joy and health, and not just threats, that lead to a complex, paradoxical and polyphonic encounter with God.

Therein lies the wisdom (cf. Job 28:12, 20). “The lesson is clear: only in emptiness and storm, with no reality interfering in Job’s encounter with the Lord, is our hero able to let light filter through the mortal tangle that tortured him. This is why Job moves from accusation to praise. For existence is gratuitousness; it is not to be lived from the mercantile perspective of the doctrine of retribution. The human person must be religious without seeking rewards. Here begins the path of religious wisdom.”[27]

[1].      The experience of health workers during the Covid-19 pandemic is a recent example of human and spiritual suffering. An approach to this phenomenon, including through reading the Book of Job, can be found in A. Cano, “¿Quién hará que se me escuche? El grito de los sanitarios a Dios”, in Sal Terrae 109 (2021) 349-359.

[2].      E. Sanz, “Viajar y Reconocer: Dios, Job y los Discípulos de Emaús”, in Sal Terrae 97 (2009) 900.

[3].      G. Gutiérrez, Hablar de Dios desde el sufrimiento del inocente, Salamanca, Sígueme, 1986, 41.

[4].      Ibid., 62.

[5].      Ibid., 111.

[6].      Ibid., 98.

[7].      Ibid., 177.

[8].      C. A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, New York, Oxford University Press, 2009, 127.

[9].      Ibid., 185.

[10].    D. Harrington, Why Do We Suffer? A Scriptural Approach to the Human Condition, Franklin, Sheed & Ward, 2000, 47.

[11].    E. Sanz, “Viajar y Reconocer”, op. cit., 902.

[12].    E. Sanz, “Hablar, Escuchar y Contemplar: Job and Ignacio de Loyola”, in J. García – S. Madrigal (eds), Mil Gracias Derramando. Experiencia del Espíritu ayer y hoy, Madrid, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2011, 114.

[13].    V. Morla, Job 1-28, Bilbao, Desclée de Brouwer, 2007, 25.

[14].    C. A. Newsom, The Book of Job…, op. cit., 256.

[15].    E. Sanz, “Sufrimiento y Heridas en el Antiguo Testamento”, in Sal Terrae 99 (2011) 220f. Italics are in the original.

[16].    V. Morla, Job 1-28, op. cit., 64f.

[17].    G. Gutiérrez, Hablar de Dios, op. cit., 161.

[18].    Ibid., 162f.

[19].    Ibid., 169.

[20].    D. Harrington, Why Do We Suffer?…, op. cit., 48.

[21].    E. Sanz, “Intercedió por sus Amigos. La Justicia en el Libro de Job”, in Sal Terrae 102 (2014) 11.

[22].    Ibid.

[23].    C. A. Newsom, The Book of Job…, op. cit., 257.

[24].    Ibid., 258.

[25].    G. Gutiérrez, Hablar de Dios…, op. cit., 70.

[26].    C. A. Newsom, The Book of Job…, op. cit., 197.

[27].    V. Morla, Job 1-28, op. cit., 27.