Last week's section contained what Jerome called the harshest words of the book.
It is all one; therefore I say,‘He destroys both the blameless and the wicked.’When disaster brings sudden death,he mocks at the calamity of the innocent.The earth is given into the hand of the wicked;he covers the faces of its judges—if it is not he, who then is it?
This passage speaks of the sovereignty of God. In English the repeated use of "he" identifies God as the first cause. With God being the first cause and Job seeing that death comes to both the blameless and the wicked, Job struggles with the justice of it all.
This week in class, we shared in his struggle as we grabbed hold of this slippery passage. But in my efforts I think I went beyond the text and did it a disservice. The swift death of an innocent, while truly a gift compared to a protracted time of suffering, does not ease the truth of the prior statement. In this life both the blameless and the wicked come to the same end and it appears injust.
In class, we also attempted to use the alternate meaning of massâ, that of a trial, to understand the mockery of God as the laughter that would occur as we attempted to prove our innocence. This too adds to the passage by going past this life in which the injustice occurs.
Both of these thoughts attempt to reduce the harshness of Job's statements. But stepping back and holding the text more loosely. Job is not speaking prophetically; He does not know the mind of God; He cannot hear the mocking voice. Rather he is simply expressing the depth of his complaint. From what Job can see of this "justice", it could as well come from a judge that laughed at the sentencing.
Complaining is not a sin. Arguably the deepest complaint ever uttered came from the lips of Christ:
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
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