The most important thing about Job’s silence is that he does not remain alone in it. He is joined by three friends—Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—who hear of Job’s affliction and come from far off to comfort him.
“And they lifted up their eyes from a distance but could hardly recognize him. And they lifted up their voices and wept, and each one tore his robe and they threw dust over their heads into the air. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights without speaking a word to him, for they saw how great was his pain. (Job 2:12–13)
Those seven days of silence are surely one of the most influential acts of pastoral care ever performed. The Jewish practice of “sitting shiva” (literally “sitting seven,” when friends come to sit with mourners at home over the period of a week) memorializes the friends’ wise compassion in this long moment of shared grief. More than twenty-five hundred years after the book of Job was written, this one act of Job’s companions is imitated on a daily basis by comforters all over the world. Silence kept with others has a special quality. It is like a fine veil, preserving separateness, yet strangely heightening mutual awareness. Silence requires us to be present to the unexpressed needs of others, needs of which they may themselves not yet know. It is a powerful means of fostering mutual encouragement among us, whom God has entrusted to one another in this wilderness of pain and doubt.
Ellen Davis (Duke Divinity School)
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Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar
Did a lot wrong
They misrepresented God's justice by claiming
bad things only happen to bad people,
Eliphaz literally invented false charges
Saying Job abused the poor, starved the hungry, and robbed widows
All to support his own crappy theology
Bildad said that Job’s children died because they sinned
Zophar insisted that as bad as things were,
Job should have been punished more harshly
With friends like these, who needs enemies
They tried to make sense of it all
They tried to make reality fit their theology
That good produces blessing
And evil produces curse
And God is harsh and demanding
They created their own reality
A rather cruel, minimizing, marginalizing
reality
Rather than open their hearts, minds, and souls
To the idea
That life is messy
And that God is love
And that it is all very confusing
And all we can really do is trust God
Embrace the fact that God is love
And take it one day at a time
But before they got scared
Facing uncertainty
Having to move to radical trust
In love and grace
And got all caught up in merit theology
They did something beautiful
They went to where Job was, and it wasn’t pretty
They went and sat on a mound of garbage
And they just were with him
Present
On the garbage heap
In the dust
With the flies
With the pain and the uncertainty
With God
Sometimes we struggle with God
We get confused and frightened
We don’t understand
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Why does a person like Donald Trump flourish?
We watch as wonderful people suffer injustice at the hands of ICE
We watch children go hungry as SNAP is taken away
We see the elderly lose access to healthcare
And the temptation is there
To try to have it make sense.
But it doesn’t make sense!
We don’t have to make it make sense.
All we have to do is trust that God is love
And then
As agents of God’s mercy and grace
Find the hurting, wherever they are
And sit with them
In Trump’s concentration camps
In the doorways of old buildings
Wherever they are
We should be with them
But going to where they are is not enough. We break the silence
We reach out
We pick them up
We proclaim that they are beloved children of God
We advocate for them
We do whatever we can to care and heal
To fight for justice
And God will become present
Perhaps through us
God’s voice will be heard, and God’s love will be manifest
It will still be messy
But God will be with us in the mess
One day at a time
