NOTES for Job 42:5-6

Spiritual pathos of the Book of Job, simultaneously the seeking of God and the fight against God, is understandable only in the context of this period, when this book was written: periods already well established and completely respectable Jewish religiosity. The periods, when the religious decency plays if not a decisive, then an important role in the life of the Synagogue, when to critical questions, there are more or less satisfactory ready answers, and the one that such answers do not arrange for a reason or another, has to look for his own, sometimes at a very high price. The hero of the Book of Job was at first a completely respectable, respectful, and pious religious man. From the religious point of view, he was the most genuine righteous man.

And even when he came under a shaft of misery and misfortune, he withstood them with a resistance peculiar to a person profoundly and sincerely religious. And he bore all the trials, except one: the absurd and meaningless trial of the being. But we do not of course have to accuse Job here: religion does not give the strength to survive such a trial, when it comes to absurd trial, it cannot be any more the support.

Job understands it, but his friends cannot understand it: it seems to them that Job is simply spiritually weakened, that the trials were too much for him, and they try as they can, to support him, to strengthen in him his religiosity, which cannot already in anything help Job. But it seems to Job that is limited not his religiosity, but God Himself, that the problem is not in his [Job] inability to see, but in God, Who has no time neither for the world, nor for the man, nor for righteousness, nor for good and evil. And accuses furiously God for what as it seems to him, God is guilty.

And at the same time asking Him to appear, to answer, to solve all the misunderstandings, keeping all the same at the bottom of the soul a completely irrational hope that God is not like that, that He will turn out all the same other and will answer. And when God really answers Job, this one understands that formerly he did not know the real God. And take back all the reproaches: because God really turned out to be not such, as Job imagined himself, when the world seemed to him cruel and a nasty trick from God. Of course, the whole religiosity of Job after this meeting collapsed. But on the other hand began a new life. The life with God.

Job's repentance often appears forced to readers. God revealed Himself, His power, and in the face of such an obvious demonstration, Job had nowhere to go, as they say. Meanwhile, the matter is clearly not only the manifestation of power. God really did speak with Job in human terms, as Job had wanted. Another matter is that the conversation turned out to be unexpected for him. God did not try to dissuade Job from his righteousness, did not present to him the sins for which He might reproach him. And He did not answer the question about the sufferings of innocent people, of the righteous.

He simply appeared before Job. He showed him what power that ignores the human being is like, using as examples the animals He created. And He let Job understand that He is God, who knows what He is doing and who remembers the human being. Of course, God gives Job no details and still less any guarantees. Except one: He remembers the human being and knows what to do with the evil in which the world lies. And even if to a person living in this world everything appears hopeless and without light, God has His own plan, which includes, among other things, the deliverance of the world from evil. Of course, if these words had been spoken to Job by his friends, he would not have believed them.

After all, they had said something similar to him. But what mattered was precisely the meeting, the meeting with God face to face, which Job so wanted and awaited. This meeting, among other things, opened to Job spiritual perspectives he had not known or seen before. It turned out that all his former life, and even his righteousness, had been only a human matter; it did not go beyond the limits of that traditional religiosity of which Job himself was a completely sincere and convinced bearer.

God opened another perspective to Job and showed him another life, a life where there is no religion, but there is the living God. And where righteousness is not a careful, almost bookkeeping-accurate reckoning of merits and sins, but the experience of meeting this living and completely real God. And therefore also a meeting with a new and equally real life, the life of God's great world, which one day will be revealed in all the fullness of the Kingdom of God. Job can now bear witness to this new reality opened to him. He can commune with God from it and through it. And therefore God entrusts him with prayer for his friends, who as yet know nothing of this, or almost nothing. That is why they speak, bear witness about God, not as rightly as Job, who has become a living witness of the living God.

Having seen and heard everything said and shown to him by God, Job repents of what he had said to God before meeting Him (vv. 1-6). And this second repentance was not like the first (Job 40:3-5). The first repentance was caused by the realization that Job had been wrong before God, that he had been mistaken in thinking that God had no concern for an individual human being in general or for him, Job, personally. Now Job's repentance is deeper; he himself says that he repents "in dust and ashes" (v. 6), an expression used when a person wanted to say that he deeply regretted everything he had done before. Such repentance evidently had to mean also a renunciation of what Job had previously considered righteousness, of the demands he had made on God while wanting to contend with Him in court (vv. 3-4). Job himself explains his renunciation simply. He says to God: before, I had only heard of You, but now I see You (v. 5).

It would appear that exactly what Job had waited for so long and desired so intensely had happened; now, at last, he can say everything to God. But evidently during the meeting something happened that completely changed both Job himself and his view of his own righteousness. As is clear, only now did he truly become a real righteous man, and he himself understood this; his former righteousness now appeared to him like a child's toy that he had seriously displayed to God, demanding in exchange some special rights and some special position in a world where a war is going on between God and the forces of darkness. Job's former righteousness had not yet gone beyond religious limits; it was human righteousness, unquestionably valuable to God, but it did not give a person the possibility of living a full spiritual life. Now Job understood what God's righteousness is, which can be obtained only by giving oneself completely over to God's will and ceasing to rely on any merits of one's own, even those connected with achievements in religious life. But complete surrender to God's will was, of course, utterly impossible without that face-to-face meeting with God which Job so desired, although he expected from this meeting something entirely different from what happened. He wanted to contend with God in court, but having seen everything God could reveal to a human being, he abandoned his intention and surrendered to God, admitting defeat. Yet this was a defeat not so much before God's power as before His love and wisdom. That is why God entrusts Job's friends to his prayers (vv. 7-9): Job has already traveled the path on which they have not yet even set foot. Of course, religiosity has its own significance and meaning; it has its own relative truth. God tells Job that his friends have not spoken of Him "as rightly as Job" (v. 7). But there is something greater in relations with God than religion: revelation and the Kingdom, experienced by Job during his meeting with God as an unquestionable reality.