Job is an interesting book because it portrays a God that apparently challenges the fundamental assumptions of believers whether they are Muslim, Christian or Jew: That God is perfect and being perfect is perfectly good and being perfectly good is deeply interested and invested in our good. Or what I call the Tri-Perfecta: Perfect God, Perfect Good, Perfect for Us.
And the reason Job is such a great lens (look mom, no hands:
I’m using academic clichés in a coherent English sentence) through which to look
at these fundamentals is that at first glance, nothing God does in Job seems
particularly caring of Job or his people, good, or for that matter
perfect. Rather it seems that Job is
tormented and his people slaughtered as a result of an off-hand conversation
that God has with Satan. A conversation
that could demonstrate:
- That God’s not perfect – that he set into train a series of events that He didn’t intend or anticipate. It almost seems that in response to Satan’s trash talking, God is goaded into a bet that he later regrets.
- That God’s not good – or more accurately God’s perfection does not conform to the standard that we have established for Him. We say that killing humans and inflicting needless pain on them are sins and are not good. But God’s standard could very simply be different: God could could be blessing us with persecution, torture, brutality and death because he knows deep down we like it (and Jew know who you are). Or God could be, you know, just not Good which means the rest of Job could simply be an incompetent Nixonian coverup of His screw up: “Okay Dean: you erase the tapes of the bet and the lives of the caddies that heard it. And Haldeman, first of all, get a better haircut you look like a damn Nazi and Mitchell, I want you to…..no don’t do anything because I know that you can’t keep anything from that drunk harpy of a wife of yours. Colson: for My sakes man, if you kill someone, do it quietly this time. And Ron, for once can’t you keep the frickin’ Babylonian press off of our keisters?”
- That God couldn’t care less about us – he’s perfect and perfectly good but we’re no more important to Him than ants are to us. We have no moral agency, we’re just clever talking bugs who have wrongly interpreted the fact that once in a great while (about 2,000 years ago to be precise) God finds us amusing as evidence of a deep and abiding concern for us. It’s a natural mistake: my bloody ant farm is always petitioning me for more fresh cricket and sacrificing virgins to me as if I didn’t know that virtually all ants are virgins. Dumb bugs.
But if any of these things are true then Job undermines the
whole point of the Bible which is of course ‘us 'n God' and how much God loves ‘us’ and the extremely complicated relationship that results from imperfect beings trying to interact with the tri-perfecta God (What else do you think we’d write about? We are above all a supremely solipsistic
species). So Job requires believers to cling to God’s tri-perfection in the
face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Which reminds me of the old kid and pony joke: A psychologist conducts an experiment that involves locking a child alone for a brief period of
time in a room filled with horse manure.
Most of the children - repelled by the ordure - retreat to a corner
and softly sob until someone lets them out.
But one kid reacted to the poo pile with joy, jumping on it and digging
furiously. When later asked why, he replied:
‘with all this horseshit, there must be a pony around here
somewhere’. Which is how
believers respond to the overwhelming evidence all around them that God’s not
Tri-perfecta: they’re busily digging through the shit of life for what they
believe will be a pony. Above all,
they want their damn pony.
I don’t believe I’ll ever find my pony because I don’t think one with my name on it ever existed. For me Job represents my reality – not reality to be disbelieved and flailed against with clods of
horseshit but reality full stop. Not so
much the intramural back-chatter between God and Satan but the supreme
indifference that higher order creatures show for the lower orders or at least for me. In that regard, Job is simply a confirmation of the life I've experienced: sometimes it hurts, sometimes not,
but ultimately no matter how hard I struggle, no matter how much I study or Sunday school or tithe or pray or be nice or not say naughty things or
actually care I am confronted with the truth that I am alone in a
universe ruled by a God that couldn’t give a fuck about me if he notices
me at all. And if Job teaches us anything, it’s that it’s much better
not to be noticed. So Tri-perfecta or non-perfecta, after 52 years of desperately lonely flailing I
have concluded that whatever God turns out to be he certainly isn’t going to
save me. I find that I am utterly alone
under his indifferent gaze.
Hey! I just flipped off God! Although I think I'm the one who's going to get fucked. Poor pitiful me.
Hey! I just flipped off God! Although I think I'm the one who's going to get fucked. Poor pitiful me.
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