I don't get Job, do you?

I'm sorry. I wish it weren't true, but I just don't know what to make of Job--the man or the book. He's well beyond me, and so is his story. 

So I'm to believe that Satan shows up one morning at the House of the Lord. He's not alone. He's come with the angels for what seems an ordinary or customary visit. Except for Satan. This morning, there he is, oddly enough. Does this happen often?--weekly, monthly? It just strange to me that Satan hangs around with the angels, and that he'd choose one morning, for no understandable reason, to show up at the Creator's place.

And it's not Satan who brings up this great man, Job. It's God himself. "Have you considered my man Job?" God asks, hanging the man out there like a sweet and soft target for the Evil One.

"I don't think he's the prize you make him out to be," the Devil says. "After all, you've blessed him with all the accoutrements of 'the good life.' Take the goods away, and he'll drop you like a bad habit."

It seems, anyway, that God gets taken in by old Scratch, because no sooner does the Devil tell Him that looks can deceive with respect to the saints, that God tells him it's okay with him if the Devil wants to take a shot at smashing Job's substantial moral compass without taking his life.

He's as much a part of fashioning "my servant Job" as a game the two of them are going to play as is Satan himself. The Creator is not without complicity in the whole wretched mess.

Then, holocaust: property nixed, herds destroyed, kids dead, Job wracked by some awful skin diseases--it's not pretty. That Job would kick about his fate makes all kinds of sense. Let it be known, he is a victim. He didn't deserve the punishing blows he suffered. Nothing he did brought on the calamities that beset him. Seems like a game to me, a competition licensed by God himself and perpetuated by His own mortal enemy, who, like a good neighbor, just that day had stopped over for coffee, maybe a glass of wine. 

Three guys with oddball names come by to sit with him in his misery, and then begins what amounts to the burden of the book, continuing conversation and debate about the whys and wherefores, endless bickering and battering that's not only trying but downright impossible to understand, forty long-winded chapters that go back and forth, back and forth with arguments of far, far more hot air than distinguishable substance. 

Forgive us, but my wife and I just sort of quit. We were reading Job every night, sometimes two and three chapters because Frederick Buechner says to in Beyond Words, which we've been reading. Buechner says to read the whole book. On we went. But we quit. We got twenty chapters in and threw in the towel. Couldn't take it.

The ghost town at Highland--out here between us and the Big Sioux--never had any more than ten buildings, all gone now, although I'm told the blacksmith shop still stands as a dilapidated garage on a farm a couple miles north. Otherwise, only graves remain at Highland. 

Two of the scant buildings of whatever number was once there were churches. That's right, two. Where two or three are gathered, there will probably be as many churches.

At least thirty chapters of the book of Job is bickering that appears to go absolutely nowhere. Job's wife has her own cameo role. "Curse God and die," she says to her pathetic husband. Job is not a cheery book. There ain't much rejoicing.

"The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." That's a moral that can be mined from the story, but it's not the line you're going to offer to someone who's just lost someone precious.

But it is, finally, the moral of the story, or so it means to me. Don't even attempt to understand your troubles, just rest in the assurance that God has his own very good reasons you're in the tank. 

For the last four weeks, our pastor has been preaching on the book of Job, and as close as I can tell what he'd say we're left with when we reach the end of the story is an experience of God that's just about total mystery. Sounds right to me.

There's always more to be said, and there is here too.

But to me, at least, no matter how you look at all the theological sparring, Job the book is a very, very strange document that may have more to teach us about the Bible than about the nature of Job's suffering--or ours.