A Man Named Job

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A Man Named Job/17 The first and last hour of the poem of our life are always a gift given to us

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 05/07/2015

logo GiobbeIn Job I am the one who sings, it is the man who exists and, if you will, it is the man himself who can seek the light that he is looking for with the help of this book - a book that is absolutely his. Because, after Job, there was nothing new said by any man about the problem of our lives.

David Maria Turoldo, Da una casa di fango – Job (From a Mud House – Job)

There once was a righteous man named Job. He had many properties, daughters and sons, he was blessed by God and men. One day a terrible calamity hit him and his family, and the man accepted his misfortune with patience: "Naked I came into the world, naked I shall leave." When they found out about his bad fate, knowing his righteousness, his friends and relatives joined him in his mourning, to comfort him and help him. But in the end it was God himself to intervene in his favour, by giving him back double what he had lost, because Job proved faithful and upright in the test.

[fulltext] =>

The primitive legend of Job was like this or something similar, known in the ancient Near East and in the land of Israel. The author of the Book of Job, however, broke away from this story. He kept the materials and used them for writing the Prologue (chapters 1-2) and the Epilogue: "And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job... And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. (...) And he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen, and 1,000 female donkeys. He had also seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first daughter Jemimah (Dove), and the name of the second Keziah (Cassia), and the name of the third Keren-happuch (Silver). And in all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job's daughters." (42,10-15)

But when the author began to compose his poem, that ancient legend became something very different. The wonderful songs of Job were born, the dialogues with his friends and maybe the words of Elihu and those of God. At the end, he found himself with a work retaining very little of the original and yet fascinating legend. Job is shown as anything but patient: he protested and shouted against God and life. Instead of being comforters, his friends became torturers and lawyers of a trivial God. And the same God - when he finally enters the scene - is a disappointment: he does not come to comfort Job or to answer his questions. That ancient legend became the container of a theological and anthropological revolution and an authentic literary masterpiece.

So when we come to the end of the book, to the Epilogue, we are amazed to read: "After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: 'My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.'" (42,7). Here God becomes the judge between Job and his "friends", in a process that Job wins but that he had never asked for nor desired (he had sued Elohim, not his friends). And so Job, first reprimanded and silenced by the Almighty God, now suddenly becomes "his servant," the only one who said "what is right". No mention of the illness of Job, his rebellion, or the bet with Satan.

Obviously we are dealing with materials from different traditions, but we should attempt an interpretation even this last time. Of course, even here we could easily solve the problem by saying that the Epilogue was added by a later, final editor, perhaps the same that added the Prologue. There are, in fact, many people who suggest this solution. But not all. Some think that it was the author of the great poem of Job who wanted to leave the materials of the ancient legend behind, like the builders of the first Christian churches who used the stones and columns, sometimes even the perimeters of the former Roman and Greek temples. And so, set inside his cathedral, the ancient author has created and left some magnificent columns and beautiful capitals to us. But these ancient materials, along with their beauty, bequeathed some architectural and stylistic constraint, too.

If you write using other stories received as a gift (and every writer does, stories and poems have always fed them: every word written is a word received first) as your point of departure, you should know that if you want that gift to bear fruit, you should also have respect for it. You cannot only use it for your own construction without obedience to the "spirit" that the story gave you engraved in the gift itself. There is also a continuous and essential exercise of truthfulness and gratuitousness to which all those are called who do not aim at profit only but to serve the daimon that's in them, and that inhabits the earth in them. All stories, even the greatest ones, are born on columns erected by others.

"And after this Job lived 140 years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, four generations. And Job died, an old man, and full of days" (42,16-17). This is the last verse of the Book of Job. All stories have a profound, almost invincible need for a happy ending. The demand for justice, the desire to see the good triumph and the humble being exalted at the end are too deeply rooted in us and in the world for us to be able to settle for dramas and stories that end with the "why" of the penultimate chapter.

But we know that the Jobs of history do not die as the patriarchs, "old and full of days". The living Jobs die too soon, sometimes they do not even become adults; their goods and children are not returned to them (because no child can be replaced by the gift of another one), their health is lost forever, their wounds are not healed, the powerful are always right, God does not answer, their misfortune not never stops, their cry does not calm down. But, more fundamentally, the children and the assets that life gives us are not there forever, good health ends sooner or later, and if we have the gift of seeing the angel of death face to face, we almost always leave this world with a "why". It may be pronounced with an "amen" and perhaps even a "thank you" which make it tame, but it does not disappear.

So as we read this Epilogue arriving as a gift of an ancient pearl to us, we should not forget the song of Job and, thanks to it, the song-cry of the many Jobs who do not know and neither would be helped by that last chapter - which brings us back into the retributive theology of the "friends" of Job. And so we do not finish the book by reading Chapter 42. We return to the prayer to the earth “O earth, cover not my blood, and let my cry find no resting place” (16,18), to Job's quarrel with God “Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven (...) that he would argue the case of a man with God, as a son of man does with his neighbour.” (16,19-21), to his desperate protests ("I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me.” (30,23). These are the words with which we all can and should pray with, even those of us who pray only to ask that the sky should not be empty. The Job who is the friend of men, in solidarity with all creation and with every victim, is the one who stops a step before the Epilogue. This is the path of every true human solidarity, the one that departs from misfortune and ends with disaster, and the one that is surprised, just like the misfortunate, if and when paradise arrives on earth or in heaven. Paradise is always a chapter that's donated, the one that no book can write for us, not even the great books of the Bible, because if it were already written we would not even leave the book and enter the mystery of our life, which is called life exactly because the past chapters can only be the penultimate ones.

But perhaps there is another hidden message in this Epilogue donated to us. We are not the authors of our finale. We are not the creators of the auroras and the beautiful sunsets of our lives, because if they were our creation they would not surprise us, they would not be as wonderful as the first love or the last glance of our spouse is. As in the most beautiful stories, where the real conclusion is not written and the ones that every reader has the right and duty to write (the eternal novels are those unfinished). We, too, come to the world within a horizon that welcomes us and shapes the landscape in which we're going to live. We write the poem of our life, but the prologue and the epilogue are given to us, and the masterpiece is created when we are able to inscribe our song in the oldest and largest symphony of all. We can and must write the many hours of our day, but the first and last ones are a gift given to us - and perhaps that is because they are the truest.

It was difficult to start reading Job, and now it's even harder to leave him. He wants to stay, the scenery one can contemplate from the top where he has taken us, holding hands in the journey, is so beautiful. Thank you, ancient nameless author. Thank you for your entire book. But above all thank you for Job. The commentaries of Genesis were a great adventure of the heart and the spirit. Exodus offered us the discovery of the power of the voice of YHWH on earth and that of the prophets, who are not false prophets - if they free the slaves and the poor. But Job was the most unexpected discovery, the greatest gift that I have received ever since I started writing. I want to thank those who followed me - all the way or even just for a while. There were many comments I received that joined in my own reflection, many words have become my words. You can only talk about these great texts together, by singing them in a choir.

There once was a man named Job. The God that Job sought, hoped for and loved, however, did not arrive. The innocent continue to die, children suffer, the pain of the poor is still the greatest that the earth has ever known. Job taught us that if there is a God of life then he must be the God of the not-yet. And that because of this he can come at any time, even when we least expect it, leaving us breathless. Come!
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Our dialogue will resume on 26th July, after a break for two Sundays, necessary after crossing the 'continent of Job', thanks to director Marco Tarquinio who continues to believe in this unusual "page three" of the Sunday edition of Avvenire. (Luigino Bruni)

And thanks to Luigino Bruni, economist and writer, who continues to believe, as we do, that our hard and wonderful times can be understood, loved and saved by the deep encounter through the words he has spoken and continues to tell and tell himself and to us driven by love. (Marco Tarquinio)

 

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Come in tutti i racconti più belli, la vera conclusione è quella non scritta e che ciascun lettore ha il diritto e il dovere di scrivere. Grazie all’antico autore senza nome. Grazie per tutto il libro. Ma soprattutto grazie per Giobbe. 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A Man Named Job/17 The first and last hour of the poem of our life are always a gift given to us

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 05/07/2015

logo GiobbeIn Job I am the one who sings, it is the man who exists and, if you will, it is the man himself who can seek the light that he is looking for with the help of this book - a book that is absolutely his. Because, after Job, there was nothing new said by any man about the problem of our lives.

David Maria Turoldo, Da una casa di fango – Job (From a Mud House – Job)

There once was a righteous man named Job. He had many properties, daughters and sons, he was blessed by God and men. One day a terrible calamity hit him and his family, and the man accepted his misfortune with patience: "Naked I came into the world, naked I shall leave." When they found out about his bad fate, knowing his righteousness, his friends and relatives joined him in his mourning, to comfort him and help him. But in the end it was God himself to intervene in his favour, by giving him back double what he had lost, because Job proved faithful and upright in the test.

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The Song With No End

A Man Named Job/17 The first and last hour of the poem of our life are always a gift given to us by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 05/07/2015 In Job I am the one who sings, it is the man who exists and, if you will, it is the man himself who can seek the light that he is looking for with the...
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A Man Named Job/16 - As long as we are able to ask questions we are free, even with God

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 28/06/2015

logo GiobbeI returned to Job, because I cannot live without him, because I feel that my time, like all times, is that of Job; and that can only be left unnoticed because of a lack of consciousness or because of illusion.

David Maria Turoldo, Da una casa di fango – Job (From a Mud House – Job)

It is not uncommon that the poor are so deprived of their dignity that they are not even asked why they are poor. We tend to convince them that the fault lies not in our lack of answers but in their questions that are wrong, cheeky, arrogant and sinful. The ideology of the ruling class convinces victims that seeking reasons for their misery and for the wealth of others is illegal, immoral, perhaps even irreligious.

[fulltext] =>

When the poor, or those who give them a voice stop to ask themselves, others or God the true and radical questions that arise from their objective and concrete conditions, when they are silent or formulate their questions in a more gentle and harmless way, their slavery starts to become irreversible. We can always hope to free ourselves or someone from a trap of material, moral, relational or spiritual poverty, as long as we continue to ask ourselves and others: 'Why?'.

After Elohim beautifully described animals and sea monsters from inside the storm, silencing it with the spectacle of his omniscience and omnipotence, "...Job answered the Lord and said: ‘I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know’." (Job 42,1-3)

How to interpret these words? God did not tell him anything about the reason for the unjust suffering of the innocent and the wrong well-being of the villains - these were the real questions that Job expected to get answers for during his incredible process against God. He was looking for a new justice and Elohim answered him with an abstract speech that was too similar to those of his ‘friends’ who had humiliated and hurt him in the first part of his book. How is it, then, at the end of his endless waiting, that Job feels his hunger and thirst for justice satisfied by the non-answers of Elohim, and that he even admits to having made the wrong questions ("I have uttered what I did not understand")? No, this Job cannot be the one we knew: fighting like a lion in his plaint against God. How and where can we find coherence between the earlier and the latter Job?

Every now and then something sublime happens in the life of writers, when the character of their book becomes bigger than the author who is their creator. They slip out of the author's hand, begin to live their own life, to grow until they get to pronounce words and to discover the truth that the author himself did not think or know. The author becomes a student of his character. What occurs here may well be called ecstasy, and it is there in every genuine work of literature - and if a writer has never experienced it then he has simply stopped in the antechamber of literature - but the really great authors are moved by their writerly transcendence into their characters to produce masterpieces. It is however necessary for the author to have the spiritual strength to die many times in order to be reborn every time in a different way, and to keep his work up without succumbing to the temptation to own and control his 'creatures', preventing them from growing in their freedom and diversity. These are the literary experiences (or artistic ones, in general) that make true literature and art not only fiction but the discovery of the more real things. If it were not so, novels and short stories would only be projections of their authors, writings about what was already there anyway. Instead, it is thanks to this transcendent capacity of the writers - that is charis, gift after all - that Edmond Dantes, Fra' Cristoforo, Zosima, Pietro Spina, Katyusha Maslova are more real than the people we meet in our street, and they love us just like and even more than our friends, our mothers or our children. Writers make the world more beautiful by populating it with real creatures that are truer and larger than they themselves.

I think that something probably happened to the distant and unnamed author of the Book of Job. And that's how the masterpiece was born, which is perhaps the greatest in all the Bible. When the ancient writer of this book - or maybe, we cannot know, a community of wise men - began to write this poem, they could not know that Job would come to actually ask those radical and revolutionary questions to God and to life. Job has grown immensely along his drama, and the moral grandeur of his cry has far outstripped the theology and the wisdom of his author. So this writer after following Job to the highest peaks, after having made him speak even when he himself did not understand what he said and asked nor would he have ever dared to think and write - perhaps he has actually had the experience of not having a God (theology) available that could really interact with Job. Elohim did not grow during his part of the poem - also because the growth of God on this earth can only take place parallel with the growth of man. So when he found himself having to finally give the word to God, he heard the huge gap between Job who has grown throughout the book and God who was still unchanged inside. For this reason it is plausible and fascinating to think - along with some commentators - that the first draft of the book ended with Chapter 31 ("The words of Job are ended" 40b), without Elihu and with no response by Elohim.

But we can try to attribute these latter difficult and uncomfortable chapters to the same author by daring to make another interpretation, the key to which is contained in the Prologue of the book (chs 1-2), in the bet between Satan and Elohim on the nature of Job's righteousness. The book opened with Satan challenging God to test Job to see if he was righteous out of interest or for his sheer gratuitous love of God, to see whether having to face the destruction of all his possessions and his own body would stop him blessing God and start cursing him.

Job begins his test, he resists until the end clinging to a single hope: to be able to see God appear in the dock. At the end of his song and his test, God enters. However he does not sit in the courtroom; he does not answer the questions of Job and silences him with his omnipotence.

It is perhaps at this time that Job comes to the culmination of his trial. In the name of his God-of-the-not-yet awaited who had not appeared yet, Job could condemn and curse the God who had arrived. And so Satan would win the challenge. However, even though Job does not find the God he has waited and hoped for, he continues to bless Elohim: "Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you make it known to me. I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you! Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (42,4-6)

Job passes the last temptation and God wins his bet against Satan. He does not curse the God who did not respond to his questions and did not show himself capable of taking the most difficult and most real why-s of man and the innocent poor seriously. Job can finally see God, but actually he sees him again, as he sees the God whom he had already known in his youth; he does not see that new and different face he had yearned for. The Goel, the guarantor whom he had desperately prayed did not arrive; God did not show another, still unknown face of his.

But now Job does not rebel anymore: he surrenders. As long as he was still waiting, when he could and had to ask everything in the hope that a different God would come, he could have protested and complained about God without cursing him. And he did it, too. Now that the waiting was over and God spoke: if Job had continued his protest it would have necessarily become blasphemy. Only a God who has not yet revealed himself could accommodate the desecrating cries of Job, not the God that has finally arrived. If Job had repeated the complaints and accusations that he had turned to the God-who-is-awaited to the God-who-has-arrived, these would have only been malediction.

Job spoke and shouted to a face of God other than Elohim, and not having managed he found himself faced with a single dramatic choice: curse or unconditional surrender. And he chose to give in.

There are some decisive moments in life when the crossroads of ‘curse-or-yield’ occurs in all its drama. For many, death comes in the form of this dramatic crossroads. When after a long struggle, having finished all one's own energy, that of the family and that of medicine, the day finally comes when we understand that we still have a final choice between two possibilities: the one suggested by the wife of Job ("Curse God and die": 2.9) or docile surrender. And even in this last choice it is very likely that the angel of God who comes is not what we expected, that the life that is ending has not answered the big questions that we have been making from the first day of our childhood. And it is also in that time that we will have to decide whether to die meek or angry, blessing or cursing.

But the crossroads between surrender and cursing arises regularly also in the important relationships in our lives, when facing the disappointment in our child or a friend of ours who give us answers that are less than expected and not what they should have given us, instead of cursing them and losing them we choose to give in and bless all as it appears, accepting the disappointment to save the trust-faith in that relationship. And maybe from this time our ‘personality’ can begin to surprise us.

Jacob got the blessing from the angel of Elohim along with his hip injury, in the great struggle at the bed of the River Yabbok (Genesis 32). Job, in the ford of his river of suffering, is wounded by Elohim yet he is the one to bless him. The God of Jacob wounds and blesses, that of Job wounds and is blessed. And thanks to Job - and the author of his book - the earth and sky meet again in a new reciprocity, where even Elohim can be revealed as someone in need of our blessing.

 

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L’uomo giusto non maledice il Dio che non ha risposto alle sue domande. Ci sono nella vita dei momenti decisivi quando il bivio “maledizione-resa” si presenta in tutta la sua drammaticità. Anche nei rapporti decisivi dobbiamo imparare a benedire e non maledire chi si presenta all’appuntamento diverso dalla nostra attesa [access] => 1 [hits] => 2613 [xreference] => [featured] => 0 [language] => en-GB [on_img_default] => [readmore] => 9951 [ordering] => 23 [category_title] => EN - A Man Named Job [category_route] => commenti-biblici/serie-bibliche/un-uomo-di-nome-giobbe [category_access] => 1 [category_alias] => a-man-named-job [published] => 1 [parents_published] => 1 [lft] => 115 [author] => Luigino Bruni [author_email] => ferrucci.anto@gmail.com [parent_title] => IT - Serie bibliche [parent_id] => 773 [parent_route] => commenti-biblici/serie-bibliche [parent_alias] => serie-bibliche [rating] => 0 [rating_count] => 0 [alternative_readmore] => [layout] => [params] => Joomla\Registry\Registry Object ( [data:protected] => stdClass Object ( [article_layout] => _:default [show_title] => 1 [link_titles] => 1 [show_intro] => 1 [info_block_position] => 0 [info_block_show_title] => 1 [show_category] => 1 [link_category] => 1 [show_parent_category] => 1 [link_parent_category] => 1 [show_associations] => 0 [flags] => 1 [show_author] => 0 [link_author] => 0 [show_create_date] => 1 [show_modify_date] => 0 [show_publish_date] => 1 [show_item_navigation] => 1 [show_vote] => 0 [show_readmore] => 0 [show_readmore_title] => 0 [readmore_limit] => 100 [show_tags] => 1 [show_icons] => 1 [show_print_icon] => 1 [show_email_icon] => 1 [show_hits] => 0 [record_hits] => 1 [show_noauth] => 0 [urls_position] => 1 [captcha] => [show_publishing_options] => 1 [show_article_options] => 1 [save_history] => 1 [history_limit] => 10 [show_urls_images_frontend] => 0 [show_urls_images_backend] => 1 [targeta] => 0 [targetb] => 0 [targetc] => 0 [float_intro] => left [float_fulltext] => left [category_layout] => _:blog [show_category_heading_title_text] => 0 [show_category_title] => 0 [show_description] => 0 [show_description_image] => 0 [maxLevel] => 0 [show_empty_categories] => 0 [show_no_articles] => 1 [show_subcat_desc] => 0 [show_cat_num_articles] => 0 [show_cat_tags] => 1 [show_base_description] => 1 [maxLevelcat] => -1 [show_empty_categories_cat] => 0 [show_subcat_desc_cat] => 0 [show_cat_num_articles_cat] => 0 [num_leading_articles] => 0 [num_intro_articles] => 14 [num_columns] => 2 [num_links] => 0 [multi_column_order] => 1 [show_subcategory_content] => -1 [show_pagination_limit] => 1 [filter_field] => hide [show_headings] => 1 [list_show_date] => 0 [date_format] => [list_show_hits] => 1 [list_show_author] => 1 [list_show_votes] => 0 [list_show_ratings] => 0 [orderby_pri] => none [orderby_sec] => rdate [order_date] => published [show_pagination] => 2 [show_pagination_results] => 1 [show_featured] => show [show_feed_link] => 1 [feed_summary] => 0 [feed_show_readmore] => 0 [sef_advanced] => 1 [sef_ids] => 1 [custom_fields_enable] => 1 [show_page_heading] => 0 [layout_type] => blog [menu_text] => 1 [menu_show] => 1 [secure] => 0 [helixultimatemenulayout] => {"width":600,"menualign":"right","megamenu":0,"showtitle":1,"faicon":"","customclass":"","dropdown":"right","badge":"","badge_position":"","badge_bg_color":"","badge_text_color":"","layout":[]} [helixultimate_enable_page_title] => 1 [helixultimate_page_title_alt] => Un uomo di nome Giobbe [helixultimate_page_subtitle] => Commenti Biblici [helixultimate_page_title_heading] => h2 [page_title] => A Man Named Job [page_description] => [page_rights] => [robots] => [access-view] => 1 ) [initialized:protected] => 1 [separator] => . ) [displayDate] => 2015-06-28 05:00:00 [tags] => Joomla\CMS\Helper\TagsHelper Object ( [tagsChanged:protected] => [replaceTags:protected] => [typeAlias] => [itemTags] => Array ( ) ) [slug] => 16412:there-is-no-curse-in-the-meeting [parent_slug] => 773:serie-bibliche [catslug] => 715:a-man-named-job [event] => stdClass Object ( [afterDisplayTitle] => [beforeDisplayContent] => [afterDisplayContent] => ) [text] =>

A Man Named Job/16 - As long as we are able to ask questions we are free, even with God

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 28/06/2015

logo GiobbeI returned to Job, because I cannot live without him, because I feel that my time, like all times, is that of Job; and that can only be left unnoticed because of a lack of consciousness or because of illusion.

David Maria Turoldo, Da una casa di fango – Job (From a Mud House – Job)

It is not uncommon that the poor are so deprived of their dignity that they are not even asked why they are poor. We tend to convince them that the fault lies not in our lack of answers but in their questions that are wrong, cheeky, arrogant and sinful. The ideology of the ruling class convinces victims that seeking reasons for their misery and for the wealth of others is illegal, immoral, perhaps even irreligious.

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There Is No Curse in the Meeting

A Man Named Job/16 - As long as we are able to ask questions we are free, even with God by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 28/06/2015 I returned to Job, because I cannot live without him, because I feel that my time, like all times, is that of Job; and that can only be left unnoticed because ...
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A Man Named Job/15 - The soul is alive as long as we seek Him who has not answered to us yet

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 21/06/2015

logo GiobbeAt the end of his fight that he knows to be lost from the start - how can man hope to win over God? - Job discovers an ingenuous method to persevere in his resistance: he will pretend to give in before even engaging in the battle. ... So we understand that, despite appearances, or because of them, Job continues to interrogate the sky.

(Elie Wiesel, Biblical characters through the Midrash).

When, having waited and hoped for it for a long time, the decisive encounter arrives, it usually lets us down. That imagined and hoped-for meeting was too great to be satisfied by a real encounter. We had dreamed of it and 'seen' it a thousand times in our soul. We had already pronounced the first words in our thoughts and chosen the dress for the other, glimpsed him/her, felt his/her smells and heard the sounds he/she makes.

[fulltext] =>

But there are no real words, clothes, smells, colours or sounds that would equal to those imagined and printed in our longing hearts. Even faith, all faiths feed on scraps between these dreamful meetings and the encounters that actually occur, and surprise or even disappointment, is the first experience of every authentic spiritual life, the first sign that the God were waiting for was neither an idol nor just a dream. Because if those who actually come are too similar to those we have dreamed of, it is certain that we won't be changed through that encounter. The soul is alive and does not go out as long as we keep longing for that different God who did not attend the appointment.

And so, after a wearying wait, we are about to see the appearance of the most important witness in the courtroom, the one that Job relied on relentlessly. The Book of Job is great also because it was able to hold back and keep itself and us in God's silence for thirty-seven chapters. By not entering the scene, Elohim allowed us to push our questions to the very end, and Job to finish his poem. Too many times our songs do not become God's masterpieces because God's lawyers make them come to the scene too soon. The truest presence of Elohim in the drama of Job was his absence, his most beautiful words were the ones unsaid when his friends asked him to speak and to make his powerful voice heard. A silent but real sky is more capable of saving us than a sky filled with words that are not enough human to be true.

God starts speaking from the midst of a storm but does not answer the questions of Job, he does not descend to the level we expect. Why? No theology can give an abstract answer to the most radical questions rising from the innocent who are suffering in the world. People are capable of asking more questions to God than the answers he can give us because a God who has ready and perfect answers for all our great and desperate why-s is only an ideology or, in the worst but very common case, an idol that we have built in our own image and likeness. The God of the Bible learns from our big and desperate questions and he is surprised when we put them to him for the first time. If it weren't so, creation, history, ourselves and time would all be but fiction, and we'd all be inside a TV set with God as the only, bored spectator. Only the idols do not learn anything from people, because they died without ever having been alive. The gap between our questions and the answers of God are a space for the true experience of faith, and when theologies seek to reduce or delete these differences they do nothing but alienate their man and their God from the Bible.

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (38,1-7)

Elohim does not accept the dialogue between equals that Job asked of him, and he does not respond to his questions. He scolds him and reminds him of the infinite abyss separating the Creator from the creature - a gulf that Job knew, but that did not prevent him to sue God. He does not call Job by name but as 'faultfinder' and 'he who argues with God' (40,2). The Book of Job and perhaps no holy book knows a God who is able to fight on par with Job. Only an extreme type of God could stay close to the extreme humanity of Job. The God of the book, in fact, can only make Job quiet, to bring him back in the coordinates of a creature, but in doing so he also leads himself back inside the theological barriers from which Job had tried to untangle him throughout his many lines. Job had asked for a greater God than the one he had known; but, at the end of his poem, he finds the same Elohim of his youth, as if the drama of Job had not taught anything to heaven. Perhaps we could not ask any more of the book. But we can and must ask Elohim for more, we must ask him to be different from how he is presented by this great biblical book, which is perhaps the greatest of all. Along with Job, we must continue to pose questions that are bigger than the answers we get, not being content with a God who is too much like the one we knew and that theology told about to us: the one who is the creator, omnipotent, wise and wonderful. All this we had already known before we got to know Job. Now, having listened to and cried with him facing the pain of the innocent in history, the God-before-Job is not enough for us. It is not what Elohim says in itself that is disappointing (if you extrapolate it from this book we find a lot of poetry and beauty in it): it is what God says at the end of Job's cry that leaves us unsatisfied. Is it possible that only we have changed, and that Elohim has stayed the same as he was in the bet with Satan that we saw in the prologue of the book (chaps. 1-2)? But then does the innocent suffering of the world not reveal something new about the universe even to God? And if it is so, then what good is it for us to remain faithful and honest to the end in endless solitude?

Therefore we have a spiritual and ethical duty to ask for more, to continue to implore God to tell us something he has not yet said to us. Because if we do not do so, we lose contact with the poor and with the victims, with those who continue to cry out and with those who are too helpless at the spectacle of evil to be consoled by the omnipotence of God. The poor and the victims do not ever keep silent in the name of God, even when they curse against the sky. When you look at the world together with the victims, when you attend the existential, social, economic and moral suburbs of the world, the greatness and power of God seem too distant, and, above all, it does not push us to do everything possible to reduce suffering in the world with our freedom. No narration of the incredible things of the universe, no magnificent description of the terrible Behemoth ("He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron." 40,17-18), or the Leviathan ("His back is made of rows of shields, shut up closely as with a seal. One is so near to another that no air can come between them..." 41,15-16) can comfort and love those who scream as they are sinking into the sea, or those who die alone in the beds of elegant hospitals. Only the God awaited by Job could meet them and collect their screams. But that God is not to be found in the Book of Job: “Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?” (38,8-11).

To the ear and heart of Job, sitting lonely on the dunghill, at the ford of his desperation, these words that are perfect in themselves would only have produced the same effects as the wise words of his 'friends': they only increased his loneliness and abandonment. In fact, even this God wants the conversion of Job and asks him to surrender - which he will get: "And the Lord said to Job:

‘Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.’ Then Job answered the Lord and said: ‘Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but I will proceed no further’” (40,3-5). Job, as so many innocent victims, is made quiet, he is silenced. This Elohim, the defence attorney of his own unfathomable omnipotence, is not the God that the poor and the innocent like Job seek and deserve.
The responses of this God cannot match the questions of Job. His words are not up to the moral height of the words of Job. But - and this is where the extraordinary mystery of the Bible lies - Job's words, too, are God's words, because they are embedded inside the same and only scripture. Therefore we can listen to the voice of God by making Job speak who denounces and attacks him. By defining the whole Book of Job (and other books) 'sacred', biblical tradition has created a wonderful and eternal alliance between the words of YHWH-Elohim and those of man. The word of God in the Book of Job and in all the scriptures is to be found also in the pages where Job speaks and shouts; where men speak, in their extreme, unanswered questions. We can pray to God with the words of Job without God. This mestizo God who wanted to mix his words with our own is the only one capable of speaking from the burning bushes of the earth, and still calling us from there by name.

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Le risposte di Dio nel Libro di Giobbe non riescono però a eguagliare le domande di Giobbe. E le sue parole non sono all’altezza morale delle parole dell’innocente. Ma è proprio qui che si rivela l’alleanza tra le parole del Signore e dell’uomo. 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A Man Named Job/15 - The soul is alive as long as we seek Him who has not answered to us yet

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 21/06/2015

logo GiobbeAt the end of his fight that he knows to be lost from the start - how can man hope to win over God? - Job discovers an ingenuous method to persevere in his resistance: he will pretend to give in before even engaging in the battle. ... So we understand that, despite appearances, or because of them, Job continues to interrogate the sky.

(Elie Wiesel, Biblical characters through the Midrash).

When, having waited and hoped for it for a long time, the decisive encounter arrives, it usually lets us down. That imagined and hoped-for meeting was too great to be satisfied by a real encounter. We had dreamed of it and 'seen' it a thousand times in our soul. We had already pronounced the first words in our thoughts and chosen the dress for the other, glimpsed him/her, felt his/her smells and heard the sounds he/she makes.

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A God Who Can Learn

A Man Named Job/15 - The soul is alive as long as we seek Him who has not answered to us yet by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 21/06/2015 At the end of his fight that he knows to be lost from the start - how can man hope to win over God? - Job discovers an ingenuous method to persevere in hi...
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A Man Named Job/14 - In the sky of faith even the clouds help us sense God

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 14/06/2015

logo GiobbeThe sacred order, separating by the atoning sacrifice the infection of blame that always accompanies man from its catastrophic consequences, makes the idea of ​​sin as something not only and necessarily bad, not a disease of life, but as a moral indictment possible. Guilt becomes a desperate artifice, a cage to be able to coexist with the merciful Almighty and his compassion for pain.

Sergio Quinzio, Un commento alla Bibbia (A Commentary on the Bible).

The happiness and pain of a civilization depends very much on its idea of ​​God. This applies to those who believe but also for those who do not, because every generation has its own atheism deeply attached to his dominant ideology. Believing in a God who is like the best part of the human is a great act of love for those who do not believe in God. Good and honest faith is a public good, because being atheists or non-believers in a god made trivial by our ideologies makes everyone less human.

[fulltext] =>

In the development of his poem in the Book of Job, Elihu deepens the discussion on the saving value of suffering. And even though it is following a theological line that does not convince neither Job, nor us, it suggests some new questions: "If there be for him an angel, a mediator, one of the thousand, to declare to man what is right for him, and he is merciful to him, and says, ‘Deliver him from going down into the pit; I have found a ransom; let his flesh become fresh with youth; let him return to the days of his youthful vigour'"(33,23-25).

Biblical monotheism is far from simple and straightforward. Along with the great words on the uniqueness of the God of the Sinai, an antidote for the eternal temptation of idolatry, if we dig into the scriptures we find a living and fruitful layer that delivers to us a God with a plurality of faces. Job, too, in the most dramatic moments of his trial, invoked a God other than the one that the faith of his time communicated and that he had known in his youth. Job continuously and tenaciously searches for a God beyond God, a 'Goel', the guarantor who can guarantee and defend his innocence and recognize his righteousness against the God who was killing him unjustly.

Here Elihu also shows us, among the thousand angels of God, a 'rescuer angel' that, moved to mercy by the pain of man can intervene with its merciful hand freeing him from the abyss where he was plunged by the other hand of God. This variety of hands and faces of the only Elohim (whichis the plural of Elohah in Hebrew, and El in the ancient language) is beautiful and rich. Christian tradition has in a sense saved it by defining a Triune God, recognizing that YHWH is unique but not a sole being, though in Christian doctrine the dark face of YHWH that was still present in the Gospels (where a God-father abandoned a God-son on the cross) disappeared all too soon. A single, full deity who is only light cannot understand the questions of Job nor the despair of the other victims of the earth. If faiths today want to prepare a home for the men and women of our times who think the sky is empty above them, they must recover the shadow inside the light of God, by inhabiting and crossing it with the many Jobs that populate the world (there are countless Jobs around our religions). Job will not hear God speak from the thunder today be if we eliminate the clouds from the skies of faiths.

Elihu keeps mentioning God's justice, and he defends it against Job. He too feels the urgent need to perform the job of the defence lawyer of God, a profession of which there has always been a very generous offer in all religions, in the face of a modest of non-existing demand: "Of a truth, God will not do wickedly, and the Almighty will not pervert justice" (34,12). However, Job had denied the justice of Elohim, and he did not start from theological theorems but from his own particular status as a victim. In his cause to God, he first of all tried to defend his innocence, showing that it does not deserve all the pain that others interpreted as divine punishment.

Job could have won his case in the divine tribunal by denying that God was the reason of his illness, and so saving it from having to answer the injustice of the world. But he did not, and he continued to believe in a God who is responsible for evil and innocent suffering. At this point, helped by Elihu, we must ask ourselves: why would Job not free God from the evil of the world? In Job's culture joys, sorrows and misfortunes were the direct expressions of the divine in the world. In his and his friends' world whatever happens is intentionally wanted by God, and if unjust things happen (misfortune of the honest and happiness of the evil), it is God who wants or at least allows for it. Retributive theology - in almost all ancient religions - was the simplest type of mechanism, but it was also very powerful and reassuring to explain the presence of God in history: positive events in our lives are the prize for our righteousness, and negative ones are the punishment for our sins (or for those of our fathers). "And Elihu answered and said: '...What advantage have I? How am I better off than if I had sinned?’” (35,1-3). In principle, Job could have found a first way to save his own and God's righteousness, too: he should have simply denied retributive theology altogether. But, in his universe, the high price of this denial would have been the recognition of an injustice on earth against which even God would have had to admit his impotence. In that culture, this would have been an impossible price to pay.

The ethical operation performed by Job had a revolutionary effect and it consisted in proving the innocence of the victim of evil, a revolution the deeper meaning of which we modern readers have lost (our beliefs and our non-faiths are too different and distant). At this point of his book, however, we must also recognize something that could surprise us: not even Job freed himself completely from retributive theology, because in his culture that liberation would have simply meant atheism, or making religion irrelevant. Job, in fact, by accusing God of injustice against him and against the victims, continues to save the cultural framework of the retributive or economic vision of religion and life. And in this context of retributive faith, not even he (which is what attempted to really undermine this religious theory) can detect a twofold innocence: that of the misfortunate righteous and that of God. Therefore Job preferred to sue God rather than lose faith in the God whom he was suing.

Only the discovery of a fragile God could have saved his innocence together with his faith in an innocent God. Only a God who also becomes a victim of the evil in the world could assert his justice and that of the righteous poor. Perhaps it is in this waiting for a different Elohim running through the entire book and persisting even after the response of God, that we can find Job's demand for a still unknown God who is able to accept his own impotence in the face of the evil in the world. Along with his innocence he would have to admit a weak God, too, an Almighty who is helpless in the face of evil and pain.

But Elihu indicates a second way to Job: the indifference of God: “Look at the heavens, and see; and behold the clouds, which are higher than you. If you have sinned, what do you accomplish against him? And if your transgressions are multiplied, what do you do to him? If you are righteous, what do you give to him? Or what does he receive from your hand?” (35,5-7). The God of the Bible, however, is not indifferent to human actions: he is moved, he repents, he rejoices and he gets angry. So Elihu cannot be right, because YHWH-Elohim has been known as a God interested in what happens under his sky. And Job knew this, he knows it now and will always know it. If we had to deny any contact between our actions and God's 'heart' in order to save him from the evil in the world that he created, we would lose the entire biblical message. Job did not give up in his fight so as to save a God who has a heart of flesh. To save himself, he was not satisfied with a useless God or one that is only useful for theological disquisitions that almost always end up by condemning the poor. If the actions of man are useless to God it is God himself who becomes useless for man - do not forget that Elihu's reasoning is in the centre of the project of modernity. Job, we have seen it many times, waits for and calls for a God that looks like the better part of humanity and exceeds it, too. We can suffer for the injustice and wickedness of others, and we rejoice in the love and the beauty around us, even when we suffer no harm or have any advantage personally. This human compassion is the first place where we can discover God's compassion. Anthropology is the first test of any theology that does not want to be idolatry-ideology. If God does not want to be an non-movable motor or an idol, he has to suffer for the evil we have done, he should rejoice in our justice, must die with us on our crosses. If we are capable of doing it - how many fathers and mothers are nailed onto the crosses of their children?! - then God should be capable of doing it, too.

Retributive logic has not disappeared from the earth. We find it strong and in a central position in the 'religion' of our global capitalism. Its new name is meritocracy, but its effects and function are the same as those of the ancient economic theologies: find an abstract (never concrete) mechanism that is able to both ensure the logical order of the system and reassure the conscience of his 'theologians'. So, in front of the rejected ones and the victims of the market, the 'moral' circuit closes recognizing the lack of merit in the losers, the 'non-smart', who find themselves more and more rejected and blamed for their misfortune.

At the end of Elihu's monologue the Book of Job provides no answer to either Job or his friends. Job continues to remain silent and to call for another God. A God whom neither Elihu, nor Job, nor the author of the drama know yet - and we neither. But will this new God come? And why is he so late to come, while the poor continue to die innocent?

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Se Dio non vuole essere un motore immobile né un idolo, “deve” soffrire per il male da noi compiuto, “deve” rallegrarsi per la nostra giustizia, “deve” morire con noi sulle nostre croci. Se noi lo facciamo, anche Dio “deve” saperlo fare. 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A Man Named Job/14 - In the sky of faith even the clouds help us sense God

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 14/06/2015

logo GiobbeThe sacred order, separating by the atoning sacrifice the infection of blame that always accompanies man from its catastrophic consequences, makes the idea of ​​sin as something not only and necessarily bad, not a disease of life, but as a moral indictment possible. Guilt becomes a desperate artifice, a cage to be able to coexist with the merciful Almighty and his compassion for pain.

Sergio Quinzio, Un commento alla Bibbia (A Commentary on the Bible).

The happiness and pain of a civilization depends very much on its idea of ​​God. This applies to those who believe but also for those who do not, because every generation has its own atheism deeply attached to his dominant ideology. Believing in a God who is like the best part of the human is a great act of love for those who do not believe in God. Good and honest faith is a public good, because being atheists or non-believers in a god made trivial by our ideologies makes everyone less human.

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The Other Hand of the Almighty

A Man Named Job/14 - In the sky of faith even the clouds help us sense God by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 14/06/2015 The sacred order, separating by the atoning sacrifice the infection of blame that always accompanies man from its catastrophic consequences, makes the idea of ​​sin as some...
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    [title] => The real sense of suffering
    [alias] => the-real-sense-of-suffering
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A Man Named Job/13 - Dialogue, even the most unexpected type, helps understand life and God

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 07/06/2015

logo GiobbeIob says that the good ones do not live and that God makes them die unjustly. Iob's friends say that the bad guys do not live and that God makes them die justly. The truth is that everyone dies.

Guido Ceronetti  Il libro di Giobbe (The Book of Job)

Job has ended his speeches. His 'friends' have humiliated and disappointed him, but they also allowed us to find more and more profound reasons for his innocence. In moments of deep discernment on the justice of our life and that of the world, dialogue is an essential tool. We may only manage to understand the deepest questions of our existence and penetrate the darkest depths of our soul in company, by performing a dialogue.

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Even when the interlocutors are not our friends, they do not understand us and hurt us, the truth about us emerges in dialogue with other humans, with God and with nature. Instances of solitude are only good when they represent a break between two dialogues. To know who we really are, to reach the furthest and truest corners of our heart above all we need to speak and to listen. In the nights of life it is better not to be well but in company than to be alone.

Job got to the end of his trial with raised head. Like a 'prince' he is waiting for God but he does not know if he will arrive, and if it will be the God of his old 'friends' or a new God. And we, unknowing just like him, share in his wait. The Bible is alive and true as long as it is capable of surprising us. If we can wonder here and now again at the sea opening in front of us while we are chased by the pharaoh's army; if we desperately witness the death of a man on the cross and then we are out of breath when we hear him, alive, pronouncing our name.

The first surprise comes at the end of the Job's words (acting as his own lawyer) is the arrival of a new character: Elihu. It is not clear if it is a character that is expected in the initial script of the play and kept intentionally hidden until this point, a spectator that suddenly bursts onto the scene, or even the theatre director who wants to make his different voice heard. What is certain is that no reader approaching this book for the first time really expects Elihu at this point. He wasn't there in the prologue, and the dramatic tension of the text prepared us to meet only one last character: Elohim. But this book is also great for its twists, the continuing leaps that force us to keep the desire for the words of Elohim alive: we all want these to be great, at least as great as those of Job.

Perhaps an early draft of the book ended with chapter 31, when Job answered all the charges of his interlocutors and silenced them. The silence of all those involved could have been the earliest conclusion of the book. Job had finished the test, and Satan had won his bet. Perhaps there was no need of Elihu, nor the words of Elohim, because - come to think of it - God has already said everything in the prologue of the book. But the great books, certainly the Bible's books, are still alive because, as it happened in ancient cities, the first temples are transformed into churches, the new houses are built using the stones of the old one, new architectural styles are born around the first buildings. The little poem of Elihu is a new square in Job's town, the most recent of the first large forums and temples, artistically less original, and too large not to disturb the harmony of the ancient landscape. A place that we have to cross anyway. Walking through it we will discover some interesting corners, and coming on top of some of its steps we will see new perspectives on the ancient and eternal beauty of this town.

So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes. Then Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the family of Ram, burned with anger. He burned with anger at Job because he justified himself rather than God. He burned with anger also at Job's three friends because they had found no answer, although they had declared Job to be in the wrong.” (32,1-3).

A first interesting thing about Elihu is his name that is very similar to that of the prophet Elijah: “He is my God”. Elihu is the only character in the book with a clear Jewish connotation. Elihu also only has a genealogy: he is from the region of Buz. We know it from Genesis (22,22-24) that two grandsons of Abraham are called Us and Buz, and Us is the region of Job. There are two facts that place Elihu right next to Job and the culture of Israel. Elihu tells us that he wants to put himself on a par of Job, in a dialogue on equal terms between two earthlings: “Behold, I am toward God as you are; I too was pinched off from a piece of clay” (33,6).

The first 31 chapters of the Book of Job are very radical and extreme for any reader in any era. If we are honest, we cannot go into crisis, because this song of the innocent righteous forces us to reconsider our theologies, religions and ideologies deeply. It obliges us to put ourselves on the side of the victims and their questions that take off our mask of idolatry, watching the world from the bottom up, to question God starting from the poor and not vice versa (as is our habit deriving from the same religions). During our reading, when the questions of Job begin to hurt us, the temptation to amend it, to tone down his radical message may be born really easily so as to be more comfortable inside the story. One day, when the text was still in a permeable phase and prior to final editing, a generation of intellectuals perhaps had the courage and the audacity to meddle in that old song of a misfortunate innocent man, and inserted of a long digression in the original text (chs. 32-37) to make it less scandalous a defeat of traditional theology and less clear a victory of Job - and perhaps to improve God's discourses themselves: “Beware lest you say, ‘We have found wisdom; God may vanquish him, not a man.’” (32,13). The authors of Elihu do not accept defeat on the level of dialogic arguments: they want to attempt a last statement and show that there are other all-human reasons to disprive Job's 'blasphemy'.

Yet their result is modest. They find very few new arguments, although some of the verses here are worthy of the best pages of Job (eg. from 33,15-18; 27-29). Elihu's most original thesis - well-known in the traditional wisdom of Israel but almost completely absent in the arguments of Job's three friends - is about the salvific role of suffering that God sends to improve and convert his creatures: “Man is also rebuked with pain on his bed and with continual strife in his bones” (33,19). Here we find an idea that runs through the whole Judeo-Christian universe and is fascinating because it also contains a truth. It is a thesis, however, that poses too many problems in itself and it certainly does not work for Job.

We cannot deny that in the biblical tradition there is a theological line according to which God sends various forms of suffering to mankind for their conversion (it is enough to think of the 'plagues of Egypt'). But when a salvific reading of suffering and pain prevails in religions, there is always the temptation not to do anything to alleviate human suffering and that of the poor. They can also insinuate the idea and practice that it is good to let people in their suffering because if it was alleviated or eliminated the sufferer may lose the chance to save themselves. Job, however, is waiting for another God that is not the cause of human suffering - and we join him in this. He is looking for a face of Elohim who is a travelling companion of those who suffer, who has mercy on him and cares for him.

Suffering is part of the human condition, it is our daily bread; and if Elohim is the God of life, we can certainly also find him at the bottom of our or other people's suffering. Sometimes the night of pain allows us to see the most distant stars, and to feel that the void created by the suffering is "inhabited". The encounter with suffering can make us access the deeper dimensions of our life, when in the nudity of existence we can meet a truer "me" that has been unknown so far. At other times the pain makes people become worse, it takes the light of day away and we can no longer even see the sun at noon. Too many poor people are crushed by suffering that does not make them more human. The first chapters of Genesis tell us that the suffering of Adam was not in God's original plan and that its source is external to Elohim. The Bible knows that the gods that feed on the suffering of man are called idols.

But Elihu cannot use his argument to explain the suffering of Job. Job is righteous and innocent, he was not or is not in any condition of mortal sin from which he should exit by way of suffering. So despite having to recognize the anthropological and spiritual value that suffering can sometimes produce, no humanistic and therefore true reading of the Bible can make God the cause of the suffering of people, let alone the innocent. Which God's actions could be associated with the suffering of children, the destruction of the poor, the cry of the many Jobs in history? And if anyone were to come up with such an idea, they would be constructing inhuman religions and gods that are too small to be up to the best part of us that continues to suffer when faced with human suffering. What religious sense would a world have where the better humans have to be fighting the suffering that God would cause? None. Those who are crucified without resurrection do not save either people or God, and anyone who tries to constrict religions to Good Friday is preventing the flourishing of man and God. Solidarity and fraternity are born and reborn by our capacity to suffer for the suffering of others, our compassion for the pain of every woman and every man. It is this caring God that Job is seeking: a God who is the first to suffer from the pain of the world, the first to take action to reduce it by redeeming the poor and the victims.

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Cerca di convincerci che la spiegazione dei mali di Giobbe sia il ruolo salvifico della sofferenza. Ma nessuna lettura vera della Bibbia può far di Dio la causa della sofferenza degli uomini, tanto meno degli innocenti. 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A Man Named Job/13 - Dialogue, even the most unexpected type, helps understand life and God

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 07/06/2015

logo GiobbeIob says that the good ones do not live and that God makes them die unjustly. Iob's friends say that the bad guys do not live and that God makes them die justly. The truth is that everyone dies.

Guido Ceronetti  Il libro di Giobbe (The Book of Job)

Job has ended his speeches. His 'friends' have humiliated and disappointed him, but they also allowed us to find more and more profound reasons for his innocence. In moments of deep discernment on the justice of our life and that of the world, dialogue is an essential tool. We may only manage to understand the deepest questions of our existence and penetrate the darkest depths of our soul in company, by performing a dialogue.

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The real sense of suffering

A Man Named Job/13 - Dialogue, even the most unexpected type, helps understand life and God by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 07/06/2015 Iob says that the good ones do not live and that God makes them die unjustly. Iob's friends say that the bad guys do not live and that God makes them die j...
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A Man Named Job/12 - Nostalgia about the future where God's sky and man's horizon meet

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 31/05/2015

logo GiobbeAs they are repeated, the cries of the victims increase their strength. In his final speech Job continues to repeat his questions and his cries, once again he defends his innocence, and launches another scream into the sky: the poor is not poor because he is guilty. A man may be poor, unfortunate and innocent. And if he is innocent, someone has to help him up. God should be the first one to do so, if he wants to be different from the idols. The real crime that often stains religions, too, is to kill poor people by convincing them that they are guilty and that they deserved their wretched conditions; and so we are justified in our indifference that we try to associate even with God.

[fulltext] =>

Turning to Nairobi (where I'm writing this), the cry of Job here is deafening; and our non-response masked by ideologies resonates everywhere. If you hope to remain righteous, the only way you can walk in the unruly "peripheries of capitalism" is to do it in Job's company. You should recognize him in the streets, take a closer look at his wounds, and at least try to be quiet to really hear his cry.

Job's friends have stopped talking. He is left on his dunghill, wounded in body and sunk in the darkness of his heart that only Elohim may lighten up by pronouncing words that are different from those declared by his interlocutors, the adulators of God and the enemies of the victims and the unfortunate . Elohim, however, does not come. His absence is becoming the most cumbersome presence in the centre of the drama.

Job invoked him, he sued him, summoned him to court as a judge to protect him from God himself, he even delivered a first oath of innocence; but Elohim does not enter the courtroom, he is not talking or responding to him. And in this waiting for a different God that is slow to come, nostalgia hits Job on the dunghill: "Oh, that I were as in the months of old...as in the days when...the friendship of God was upon my tent, when the Almighty was yet with me, when my children were all around me” (29,2-5). It is a nostalgia that sharpens his pain. It is joyful to remembers the spring during winter when it is believed or hoped that the spring of yesterday is going to come back tomorrow. But when winter does not blossom in a new spring, when the night does not generate a new dawn because it is the last night, the memory of the times of light and buds only increases the suffering in the cold of that last winter. Memories of youth are painful in old age if we do not have at least one child with us in whom we may feel our future youth revive, all different, being all and only gratuitousness. The only nostalgia that has a saving power is the nostalgia of the future.

But in that last memory of the blessed days there are many other things, too. First of all, Job finds a further, final proof of his innocence and righteousness: “I was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy”. And in the same poetic tone he keeps offering to us, he adds: “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (29, 15-16; 31,1). And as a thesis to add to that of his innocence, we find his accusation to God again, which is ever clearer, louder and more and more outrageous and wonderful: “God has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes. I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me.” (30,19-20). The biblical God is a God who is close to the poor and responds to the innocent who calls on him; he is close to the victims, he runs to the aid of those who cry out. The God whom Job is experiencing is not like that: Job cries out and God does not come.

If the Bible wanted to show us a God who is not responding to Job, then it should be possible to find truth in a God that does not respond when he should. If we take a good look at the world we discover that God still does not answer Job who is crying out. This mute God is the one that the poor of the earth know. Then, perhaps, if we truly hope to find the spirit of God in the world, and not to be caught by some idol in and outside of the religions, we should find him inside the unanswered cries, we should look for him where he isn't.

The last words of Job then contain an immense 'oath of innocence' ('if I have committed this crime, let this evil hit me'...). Job has already pronounced it earlier (27,1-7), but now he does it in a more solemn, final, extreme way. It is a last oath that contains a precious pearl, one of the greatest and most revolutionary messages of the entire book and of all books. In his last words we max discover what innocence consists in really for Job: “If my heart has been enticed toward a woman, and I have lain in wait at my neighbour’s door, then let my wife grind for another and let others bow down on her ... If I have withheld anything that the poor desired, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail, or have eaten my morsel alone, and the fatherless has not eaten of it ... then let my shoulder blade fall from my shoulder, and let my arm be broken from its socket. ... If I have made gold my trust or called fine gold my confidence ... if I have looked at the sun when it shone, or the moon moving in splendour, and my heart has been secretly enticed, and my mouth has kissed my hand ...” (31,9-27). Maltreating the poor and not helping them, adultery and the many forms of idolatry (wealth and the stars): these are the most serious crimes for Job and for all.

But at a certain point Job adds something that leaves us perplexed, amazed and dirsturbed at first. It seems that Job actually admits to his guilt at the end of his argument “I have not concealed my transgressions as others do by hiding my iniquity in my heart” (31,33). He gives it up right in the last act of his defence, a few steps from the finish, and following the advice of his friends he admits to being guilty, he denies his innocence that was the only good he had saved in this total meltdown. Is this the meaning of these words? No. Job here is telling us something different and very important: his last words, as a testament.

Recognizing his guilt Job concludes his speech by expanding the territory of human innocence to cover sin, too. The righteous man is not the one who does not sin and does not commit crimes, because sin is part of the human condition. Job has always denied the economic theology of his friends who associated his unfortunate condition to his sin. Now we understand fully that Job's justice and innocence do not consist in the absence of sins of moral lapses. Even Job sinned. You can commit sins and crimes and still remain righteous if you do not depart from the truth about yourself and the truth about life. The only great sin against the God of Job is telling lies, the sin of those who know they are wrong and still 'hide their iniquity in their heart' because admitting and recognizing it publicly would demonstrate their intention of conversion, and so they would remain righteous. There are people who are unjust and not innocent who receive public praise and civil honours and the prisons are full of righteous people like Job. God, if he is not an idol, is not free not to forgive the sins of the righteous. So with his last words Job is telling us something decisive for every experience of faith: even the sinner can remain innocent. And if even the sinner stays in the territory of innocence, then you can always raise after every fall: innocent people can return. Job knows, because he believes and hopes only in this God.

It is with this sincere, genuine and honest innocence that Job ends the telling of his story. He has done his job, he finished his mission. He fought a good fight. He has kept the faith in man, in Elohim, in his own dignity and honour, in the innocence of man, of every man. And he did it for us, he continues to do it for us to include sinners who continue to be righteous in the realm of the innocent. 

Now he can only wait for God to also play his part, waiting for his appearance in the courtroom of the earth. It is there that he is waiting for him: “Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me! ...like a prince I would approach him” (35,35-37). Job has stood his test with the dignity of a free and true man. He feels like a king, "a prince", and can expect God with his head lifted up.

Job is in the time of Advent, he is still waiting for God; but now he knows that if he comes he will be different from the God of his youth. That first Elohim was blown away by the strong wind that wiped out all that he had. But he never ceased waiting, he continues to have a nostalgia for God, a nostalgia for the future.

In the trials of life, even those that are great and tremendous, the important thing, the only really important thing is to get to the end of the night, not to stop waiting for another God, and to reach this decisive meeting with our head high. Not all waits for God take place with head-high, because to hold your head high and be able to look in the eyes when Elohim he comes you also have to go through trials like Job, and not to be content with a lesser God and a worse man in order to be saved.

Job gets to the end of his defence like a prince and having continued to expand the horizon of the good human until it coincides, on the horizon line, with the good sky of his God.

 

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Se la Bibbia ci ha voluto mostrare un Dio che non risponde a Giobbe, è possibile trovare una verità nel Dio che non risponde quando dovrebbe farlo. 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A Man Named Job/12 - Nostalgia about the future where God's sky and man's horizon meet

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 31/05/2015

logo GiobbeAs they are repeated, the cries of the victims increase their strength. In his final speech Job continues to repeat his questions and his cries, once again he defends his innocence, and launches another scream into the sky: the poor is not poor because he is guilty. A man may be poor, unfortunate and innocent. And if he is innocent, someone has to help him up. God should be the first one to do so, if he wants to be different from the idols. The real crime that often stains religions, too, is to kill poor people by convincing them that they are guilty and that they deserved their wretched conditions; and so we are justified in our indifference that we try to associate even with God.

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The Innocent Waits

A Man Named Job/12 - Nostalgia about the future where God's sky and man's horizon meet by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 31/05/2015 As they are repeated, the cries of the victims increase their strength. In his final speech Job continues to repeat his questions and his cries, once again he d...
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A Man Named Job/11 Let's find the sky in ourselves, faithful to the truth that is in us

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 24/05/2015

logo GiobbeJob continues to interrogate the sky. Thanks to him we know that man has been given the capability to transform divine injustice into human justice. Once upon a time, in a distant land, there was a legendary man, just and generous, that, in his loneliness and despair, found the courage to face God. And to force him to look at his Creation.

(Elie Wiesel, Biblical Characters Through the Midrash).

The history of religions and peoples is the unfolding of a real struggle between those who imprison God within ideologies and those who try to free him. The prophets belong to the category of the liberators of God who perform the essential function of criticism of all the powers in every age and overcome the invincible, tempting charm of using religions and ideologies to strengthen their dominant positions.

[fulltext] =>

Job is one of these 'prophets', who - more than anyone else - forces us to go to the heart of the mechanism of power by criticizing and attacking directly the idea of ​​God built by the ideologies of his time. Therefore he does not limit himself to the criticism of the powerful, the priests and kings, but just as and most of the great prophets of the Bible, he wants to dismantle the idea of ​​God that is artificially supported by the whole edifice of power. His stubborn request to put the ideological God of his 'friends' to process is the precondition for liberating the possibility of another God.

When Job is eclipsed or silenced in a religious community, the answers in the name of God proliferate and questions to God disappear. And when we stop posing new and difficult questions to God, we prevent him from talking to our history and to grow inside it, we harness him in abstract categories that no longer understand the words and the cries of the victims. The prophets are essential because they call people to die and rise again to free themselves from idolatry, and because they force God to die and rise again to live up to the real human.

At the end of their discourse to Job, the three friends have not achieved anything. Job is increasingly convinced of his innocence, and so more and more determined to meet God in a fair trial where he hopes to be cleared by a different God that he cannot see yet but he can hear him. The theo-ideology of his interlocutors only reinforced the conviction of his own righteousness instead of reconciling him to their reasoning about God. Those dialogues, however, have had the great merit that through them we got to know Job and his radical religious and anthropological revolution. And so, that great pain and infinite misfortune that at first seemed to us as a high hedge of suffering that covered out the horizon of man and God have also gradually opened to a boundless space beyond and to new horizons of man and God.

As a link between the first and second part of the book, at this point we find a Hymn to Wisdom, perhaps an already existing poem inserted in the book by the author to break the narrative rhythm and let us take a breath. It is an interlude that's difficult to decipher but it is full of poetry, yet another gift of this great book. “Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place for gold that they refine"; man "searches out to the farthest limit the ore in gloom and deep darkness”, he creates shafts underground and to reach precious metals that "hang in the air”. The man of technology uses his intelligence to dominate the world: “He cuts out channels in the rocks, and his eye sees every precious thing. He dams up the streams so that they do not trickle, and the thing that is hidden he brings out to light." (28, 1-11) The ambivalence of technology is pointed out to us, however. Like any man of the antiquity, the author of the book of Job is amazed and humbled by the capacity that man has developed in dominating matter, things, the world. But inside technology he also sees the hidden but real risk of abuse: “As for the earth, out of it comes bread, but underneath it is turned up as by fire. ... Man puts his hand to the flinty rock and overturns mountains by the roots.” (28;5,9). Technology has its own intrinsic law that drives man to dig ever deeper tunnels, to topple the mountains in search of precious materials, thus starving the peasants who lived on the land, yesterday and today. Therefore, if we want to understand the biblical message about the relationship between man and nature, we must read the command of 'subduing the earth' contained in Genesis (1:28) along with this hymn in the Book of Job, where the value of the spirit of technology is recognized but it is also distinguished from the spirit of wisdom: “But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?” (28,12) Wisdom is not extracted inside mines, nor can it be bought in the market place in exchange for precious metals: “Gold and glass cannot equal it, nor can it be exchanged for jewels of fine gold. …The topaz of Ethiopia cannot equal it, nor can it be valued in pure gold.” (28,17-19).

To point out the innovative message of these words we must keep the culture of the time in mind that was all steeped in 'economic' theology. For the ancient Middle Eastern world it was certain that gold, silver, topaz and pearls did not buy wisdom; however, these were unmistakable signs of God's blessing, that same God from whom wisdom comes. And it was common to think that you will not become rich without wisdom. The spirit of the wealth and that of wisdom were considered the mirrors of one another. The fool does not become rich, and those born rich become poor if they lack wisdom. Just as the engineer and the scientist are not 'intelligent' if they lack wisdom.

This hymn, however, separates wealth (and technology) from wisdom, and in so doing it takes Job's side: in fact, he has reiterated to us that there is no relationship between wealth and justice, because there are rich and wretched among the righteous on this earth, and the same is true for the non-righteous. The gold and silver of a person does not say anything about his righteousness: Job was righteous as a rich man and continues to be so when he becomes poor and unfortunate, too. The goods pass and are changeable, justice and wisdom are forever, and so they are a much smarter investment. We could then read this interlude as a confirmation and approval of the 'theology' of Job and a critique of the economic and retributive theologies of his friends. This hymn to wisdom reminds us of the ancient and important truth that wisdom is a gift and gratuitousness: charis, not a commodity to be purchased with either gold or through soothsayers or magicians. Here, too, YHWH-Elohim is distinguished from the idols that only give their 'wisdom' to their flatterers if they pay the price in terms of sacrifice and submission. The God of the Bible is not an idol because he does not sell wisdom, but gives it freely - every retributive religion is, in essence, an idolatrous and commercial religion. Words that could have been uttered by Job, too.

But - and here it is the mystery and the interest of this chapter - the author tells us something else that complicates the discourse, and forces us to dig deeper. He tells us that wisdom is unknowable and unreachable by man: “God (only) understands the way to it, and he knows its place.” (28,23).

And here there is a definite distance created from Job. Not all of the book of Job is at level with Job. We have to select and save Job's words from the many other words of his book, including those of Elohim that soon we will also hear.

Job denies the law that connects justice to wealth, but believes that there is, there must be a logic of wisdom. The God whom he calls and waits for is not an accountant who assigns assets to men according to their merits, because that would make him a trivial god just like all the idols. But he does not accept the idea that there is no link between justice and wisdom: the righteous one is wise, even if he is poor and unfortunate. And the proof of this is the history and the life of all those for whom wisdom does not coincide with the intelligence of technology, but where there exists a relationship between righteousness and wisdom, and it is a real one. We know people who are wise and ignorant, wise and poor, wise and not very intelligent. The homo faber and the homo oeconomicus may be foolish, and often they are, too. The righteous man is not foolish, because God - if he is not an idol - must give wisdom to those who follow justice, even when its following (as in Job's case) means denying the justice of Elohim.

A false, unjust and evil person is never wise: this law is as real as that which moves the sun and other stars. An unjust man can hope for all other goods, but not in that of wisdom. Job knows this law because he sees it in the world, but mainly because he carries it inscribed in his conscience. And we also know it and recognize it outside and inside us (that's why there is hope that we can always convert, even with the last breath of life). So the mine of wisdom exists: it is inside us, and to discover it, the only thing necessary is to remain faithful to the truth that is in us. This is the main message of Job.

This hymn to wisdom then contains a half-truth. It reminds us that wisdom is a gift, but it does not tell us that we receive this gift right upon coming into the world, and it dwells in us. It is there where we can dig to reach him, and once reached we find that it is the best part of us. That's where we can meet, discover, listen to and follow wisdom. That's where we can recognize the voice of Elohim, a voice that we could not recognize if it weren't already within us, perhaps covered or wounded. If Adam was kneaded in the image of Elohim, divine wisdom is also human wisdom. The sky within us is no different from the sky above us, and the inner sky darkens, the one above us goes out or fills with idols.
The song of Job is a great hymn to the truth of the living human, which is truer than all of his nights. If God is true then man is also true, and his clear conscience is not a self-deception. If God is wisdom then man is also wisdom. If we separate these two wisdom-truths - we have done so many times, and we still do - religions become useless, humanisms are lost, and Job ends his song.

 

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Il canto di Giobbe è un inno alla verità dell'essere umano vivente. Se Dio è vero anche l'uomo è vero, e la sua coscienza retta non è auto-inganno. Ogni volta che separiamo queste due sapienze-verità, religioni e umanesimi si smarriscono. 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A Man Named Job/11 Let's find the sky in ourselves, faithful to the truth that is in us

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 24/05/2015

logo GiobbeJob continues to interrogate the sky. Thanks to him we know that man has been given the capability to transform divine injustice into human justice. Once upon a time, in a distant land, there was a legendary man, just and generous, that, in his loneliness and despair, found the courage to face God. And to force him to look at his Creation.

(Elie Wiesel, Biblical Characters Through the Midrash).

The history of religions and peoples is the unfolding of a real struggle between those who imprison God within ideologies and those who try to free him. The prophets belong to the category of the liberators of God who perform the essential function of criticism of all the powers in every age and overcome the invincible, tempting charm of using religions and ideologies to strengthen their dominant positions.

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The mine of wisdom

A Man Named Job/11 Let's find the sky in ourselves, faithful to the truth that is in us by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 24/05/2015 Job continues to interrogate the sky. Thanks to him we know that man has been given the capability to transform divine injustice into human justice. Once upon ...
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A Man Named Job/10 - Those who accept the wrong type of logic and words will not be saved

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 17/05/2015

logo Giobbe...on Judgment Day, God will have to account to mankind for all the suffering he has allowed.

Ermanno Olmi, Centochiodi (One Hundred Nails)

One day a sparrow ended up in a big, bright house and flew in there free and happy. At one point, someone closed the window from which he had entered, and all the other windows of the house. Beyond its transparent glass the bird could see the sky: it kept trying to reach it but only beat its head on the closed windows. The little bird tried several times, until it saw, on the opposite side, a door into a corridor that was dark, very dark. Desperate, it realized that if there was a way out for its return to the sky that could only be through the darkness, beyond the dark door. And so it dashed down towards the black stairs. It was hit by many corners, got hurt, broke the tip of a wing, but did not stop to continue sinking, did not let itself be won by the fear of darkness and pain. Finally, at the bottom of the great darkness, it glimpsed a light: it was the same light he had come from. [fulltext] =>

We have reached the end of the dialogues between Job and the "friends". Imprisoned in their ethical and ideological theologies, they fail to see Job the real man and continue to blame and condemn his ghost, drawn perfectly in order to confirm their theories. Job was not satisfied with the perfect answers to easy and trivial questions; he wanted someone to take his difficult and desperate questions seriously, even if without answering them. But above all he cannot accept an idea of God who humiliates and belittles human beings to assert his own greatness, denying their truth and innocence, as Bildad insists: “Behold, even the moon is not bright, and the stars are not pure in his eyes; how much less man, who is a maggot, and the son of man, who is a worm!” (25,5-6). And Job answered to him: “How you have helped him who has no power! How you have saved the arm that has no strength! How you have counselled him who has no wisdom, and plentifully declared sound knowledge! With whose help have you uttered words, and whose breath has come out from you?" (26,1-4). It is as if Job asked Bildad: whom did you speak to actually, when you said you were speaking to me? Caught by their ideology, Bildad and his friends had gradually lost Job along the way; and the dialogues had become monologues: while talking to him, they no longer had crossed eyes of the victim, and they were only talking about Job and not to Job. There is a powerful demand by Job at the end of the "dialogue", because he charges his friends of the grave deed of felony, which is perhaps the most serious such instant in biblical humanism: they had betrayed the word. Like sorcerers, idolaters, and soothsayers had manipulated the words by emptying them of their truth.

For every person who speaks, especially when they speak and write publicly, there must come a moment when they should ask themselves: 'whom am I actually talking to? for whom am I actually writing? and what place does truth take in my words?' To feel the urgency of the honesty of words is a milestone in the lives of those who speak and write, and therefore almost in everybody's life; because it is always tempting to use and exploit words and strip them of the humble and difficult truth, silencing the only true “spirit” and worship the false and deadly spirits of the idols. It is a decisive step, though it is one that may never come. The honest reading of Job is a great help to bring out the possibility of this stage. But if this decisive moment does not arrive, or when it is placed in front of the crossroads we choose to give voice to the wrong spirit, the word loses its creative and effective power and becomes formal exercise, a technique to use to our own advantage. The word we use but do not respect is always abused word, because it loses its most profound and true nature: gratuitousness, that is at stake in the bet between

Elohim and Satan, with whom the book opens and whom it shapes entirely.
It is in this “economy” of the word and the words that we understand, in all its scandalous power, the oath of Job, one of the masterpieces of the book: And Job again took up his discourse, and said: “As God lives, who has taken away my right, and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter, as long as my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils, my lips will not speak falsehood, and my tongue will not utter deceit. Far be it from me to say that you are right; till I die I will not put away my integrity from me. (...) my heart does not reproach me for any of my days. Let my enemy be as the wicked, and let him who rises up against me be as the unrighteous.” (27,1-7). Job can now make this oath because he has kept the truth of his words so far. Only those who are faithful to words can ask everything.

This type of oath was a solemn confession of innocence that was pronounced only on some very serious occasions. When the accused made this oath of innocence, the trial was suspended and the defendant was remitted directly to the judgment of God (Deuteronomy 17,17-19), knowing that they had to face death penalty if God was refuting their innocence. The wonderful and desperate madness of Job is the paradox that continues to push to its own extreme consequences. He pronounces his extreme oath in the name of God, but calls him “As God lives, who has taken away my right, and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter”. He asks to be freed from all the lawyers, freed from all human judges, to finally get justice from the God who is denying it to him, because in his great cause Elohim is not the impartial judge of last resort, but his opponent: “Let my enemy be as the wicked, and let him who rises up against me be as the unrighteous” (27,7). From this paradox, we cannot find a way out, and if we were to get out of it we would lose the most revolutionary and liberating dimension of the Book of Job. If Job is the image and the voice of the innocent victims of history, and if God is the good and right one of the Covenant, the paradox of Job has no solution, and any theology that is friendly to man and to the truth must find their place inside the paradox of Job, without groping shortcuts (of which, unfortunately, the earth is full).

In the development of his drama Job is telling us something very important: the first gratuitousness is that of the word. To suspend or relieve his suffering he could have manipulated and disrespected the truth of his word, and following the advice of his friends ask for a false mercy. Had he done so, Satan would have won his bet.

The gratuitousness of life, the heart, the soul is always the gratuitousness of the word. If you lose contact with the truth of the word and words you lose touch with the truth of life, and so everything becomes instrumental, utilitarian, "economic", just as the theologies of Job's friends that are false because they are lacking gratuitousness. And so, when we try to call things, others or even ourselves by name, what comes back to us is only a silent echo.

Here a horizon of great significance opens up to us. We understand, for example, why many people lost their lives when, under torture (just like and more than Job) they refused to say certain words (to renounce their faith, betray a friend) that would have saved them but betrayed something greater and sacred: their truth within the truth kept by the words used. YHWH-Elohim is a voice, only a voice that cannot be seen, and all his strength is in his word. Therefore, the truth of faith and life depends entirely on the truth of the words of God and the truth of human words. The Covenant is a meeting of human and divine words, and if it wants to be real and not only idolatrous magical ritual, it has a radical need of gratuitousness in both parties of the contract.

Our age has to make a huge, sometimes invincible effort to understand the Bible and other great words in the world because we have lost contact with the truth and gratuitousness of our human words. In a world of chit-chat even the words of the Bible are associated to the endless "zero" of our betrayed words. And we no longer understand the poets, who become the new Jobs on this earth of empty words used without gratuitousness and are tortured by "friends" and an "economic" ideology dominating our time: “He claps its hands at him and hisses at him from its place” (27,23). Where a disregard for the truth of the words reigns, false poets thrive that hijack words for profit, and make them die.

Job could pronounce this solemn oath on the basis of two faiths. Faithfulness-faith in the living God who one day will have to reveal something of himself that does not appear yet, and faithfulness-faith to the true voice that speaks inside, his ruah, in that spirit-breath that tells him that he is innocent. It is within his sincere and true conscience that he senses the possibility of the revelation of a God whom he does not see yet: it means that Job is waiting for the Messiah, and so are we. The promised land can begin inside his heart that "has no shame" about himself. There is no night in which we really die as long as we manage not to be ashamed of our heart.

If we are able to keep believing in the possibility of a "living God" after the concentration camps, after the death of our children and that of little children, it is because there have been and there are people on this earth who, like Job, have continued to look for different faces of God anchored in the truth of their own consciousness, because they felt inhabited by the "God of the not yet". However, only the extreme loyalty to the gratuitousness of our words can make us capable of seeing a sky that is higher and truer.

 

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Giobbe nello sviluppo del suo dramma ci sta dicendo allora qualcosa di grande importanza: la prima gratuità è quella della parola. 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A Man Named Job/10 - Those who accept the wrong type of logic and words will not be saved

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 17/05/2015

logo Giobbe...on Judgment Day, God will have to account to mankind for all the suffering he has allowed.

Ermanno Olmi, Centochiodi (One Hundred Nails)

One day a sparrow ended up in a big, bright house and flew in there free and happy. At one point, someone closed the window from which he had entered, and all the other windows of the house. Beyond its transparent glass the bird could see the sky: it kept trying to reach it but only beat its head on the closed windows. The little bird tried several times, until it saw, on the opposite side, a door into a corridor that was dark, very dark. Desperate, it realized that if there was a way out for its return to the sky that could only be through the darkness, beyond the dark door. And so it dashed down towards the black stairs. It was hit by many corners, got hurt, broke the tip of a wing, but did not stop to continue sinking, did not let itself be won by the fear of darkness and pain. Finally, at the bottom of the great darkness, it glimpsed a light: it was the same light he had come from. [jcfields] => Array ( ) [type] => intro [oddeven] => item-even )

Faithful to the God of the "Not Yet"

A Man Named Job/10 - Those who accept the wrong type of logic and words will not be saved by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 17/05/2015 “...on Judgment Day, God will have to account to mankind for all the suffering he has allowed.” Ermanno Olmi, Centochiodi (One Hundred Nails) One day a sparr...
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A Man Named Job/9 - Through the eyes of the poor, beyond the night of man and God

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 10/05/2015

logo Giobbe"I'm a wounded man. And I'd like to leave, pity, / And finally reach a place / Where a man who is alone / With himself will be heard. / (...) Show us a hint of justice. / What is Your law? / Dash my wretched passions / Release me from anxiety. /I am tired of my voiceless screams."

Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pity (La pietà - English translation: Diego Bastianutti)

Each generation produces its own gap between the new and difficult questions of the victims and the insufficient answers of Job's friends. Sometimes this gap becomes a loophole that we observe trying to see a broader human horizon and a higher sky. Many other times, the space of this gap is denied and cancelled, erasing the painful but fruitful questions of the poor. To hope to meet "Job and his brothers" we should simply learn to live in this inevitable vacuum, by listening quietly. There may flourish a new type of solidarity with our time and perhaps, finally, fraternity.

[fulltext] =>

Seeing the obstinacy with which Job declares himself innocent and denies the "retributive" theology of his friends, in his second attack on Job, Eliphaz the Temanite abandons the abstract reasoning (if you suffer you must be sinful and evil), and comes to accuse him of some specific, concrete, historical serious crimes, attributing the worst deeds to him: "...you have exacted pledges of your brothers for nothing and stripped the naked of their clothing. You have given no water to the weary to drink, and you have withheld bread from the hungry. (You were like) "The man with power ... You have sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless were crushed." (22, 6-9). But Eliphaz is not yet satisfied, and he accuses Job of having committed these crimes "for nothing" (22,6), for no reason, 'just because'. This gratuitousness is the opposite of the true one of Job, this is what Satan had made the object of his bet with God (“Does Job fear God for no reason?” (1,9). Reality is completely overturned: Job who is righteous “for nothing”, quite freely, is now accused of being a powerful evil capable of malice, which is an accusation worse than that of Satan - who, in fact, only challenged the gratuitousness of Job, not his righteousness.

And so, continuing his inquisition, Eliphaz comes to evoke even the perverse condition of humanity before the flood (22,14-20). Job as Lamech. Job as Cain.

Eliphaz knows that Job has ever committed these heinous crimes. We know (from the Prologue of the book) that Job was a righteous and honest man, the most righteous man on earth (“there is none like him on the earth”: (2,3). Like Noah, the saviour of mankind from the flood. Eliphaz and his other friends knew all this, too. Yet they overturn reality completely. Why?

Here we are facing a perfect description of what an ideology is. When a person, a community, an organization or a school of thought is captured by ideology (which, lest we forget, is always idolatry: they worship fetishes manufactured by their own "hands"), it means not only to deny evidence, but, almost always, to invent facts, stories and words. In the beginning, the inventor of this virtual reality is still able to distinguish what's invented from what's real; but soon comes the time when the same inventors are starting to believe in the reality they have created. The strongest point of ideology is this capacity to invent a different reality and then believe in their own inventions. This is what makes it irrefutable and invincible at the level of discourse and dialogue - Job shows it to us. Stories, heroes and victims are built artificially and one day they leave the realm of fiction and become real for those who produced them. Thus the person made ill by ideology actually lives in another world, sees other things and lives in a parallel reality. History presents a series of ideological monsters to us who end up devouring real people and almost always their own authors, too. Ideological thought is always presented as a progressive departure from the ambivalent reality of everyone's real life to enter another different, simpler one, with perfect answers to all questions.

Job, however, is the anti-ideologist, because all his efforts are directed at remaining anchored to his own truth and land, to avoid that he, too, should fall into an ideology which his friends consistently and tenaciously propose to him as a way out from the black hole that he has fallen in.

What is tremendous and wonderful in the dialogues of Job is his stubbornness in not accepting even the mercy of God that is systematically reintroduced by his friends (“If you return to the Almighty you will be built up”: 22,23), because he feels that he would not meet God, but only an ideology, an idol. Even mercy needs to have truth. He who forgives a non-existing fault or a forged crime meant to elicit a request for forgiveness in the other person is not merciful. To accept this mercy would only mean entering the same ideology of those who propose it. The offers of mercy to forgive invented sins are common and subtle forms of domination of the powerful over the poor and the victims, of which history offers us a wide, sad range. Job did not seek or want this type of mercy, and he acted also on behalf of those before and after him; he had to do so. How many poor people, how many women have had to apologize for crimes they never committed, to beg pardon for sins they have never made, to shoulder faults instead of others who had to remain covered and "innocent". Job continues to cry out for them to keep their erased memory alive and to echo their choked cries. The cries of the innocent are not to be muted by false offers of mercy: the greatest act of mercy that we are asked to perform is to let them go on screaming, waiting for someone, or God, to listen to them and receive their cries. Perhaps there is no act of non-mercy that could be worse than that of those who do not let the poor scream, convincing them of their guilt. If it is true that there is no justice without mercy, then Job tells us that mercy without justice cannot be true, either. Every gift that's manipulated becomes a poison, and it poisons relations.

Job did not want the bargain of admitting his guilt, he only wants to get his full absolution, and the condemnation of God for his unjust behaviour towards himself and towards the many innocent in the world. Therefore, chapter after chapter he continues to ask for only one thing: to be able to meet God, on a par, and get an explanation of the injustices of the earth: "Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!" (23,3).

Job - and here is the shocking greatness of this book - is looking for a face of God that is willing to admit his faults, and accept the possibility of having to lose at court against the justice of man. But can there be such a God? Is there an Elohim who is willing to accept getting into an argument with mankind, and then take the verdict of being guilty? "I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments" (23,4).

But Job cannot find the throne of God, he cannot see Elohim on this earth, nor can he surmise him arriving on the horizon: "Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him; on the left hand when he is working, I do not behold him; he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him" (23,8-9). His is a night of the perfect God. He keeps looking for him, beyond the chatter of his friends. And so his honest night prepares a dawn for man. Skies that are too bright and clear inevitably end up darkening the humble, rocky and barren lands of the poor.

And at this point there comes a twist. Job uses the same images of sin and wickedness that Eliphaz had attributed to him (bread and water denied, widows, orphans, pledges, clothes ...), but he uses these to give us an image of the victims of the crimes of the powerful that is very real and very true: “Behold, like wild donkeys in the desert the poor go out to their toil, seeking game; the wasteland yields food for their children. They gather their fodder in the field, and they glean the vineyard of the wicked man. They lie all night naked, without clothing, and have no covering in the cold. ... hungry, they carry the sheaves; among the olive rows of the wicked they make oil; they tread the winepresses, but suffer thirst" (24,5-11).

The poor work as wild donkeys: they carry sheaves of wheat on their shoulders for their masters and they themselves are starving, they press olives and grapes and they themselves are burning with thirst. The poor are forced to pawn their clothes to their creditors, and instead of getting it back for the night to cover themselves with, they are left naked in the streets (Exodus, 22,26). There are too many people who become atheists in the face of inadequate answers to their questions on injustice and evil in the world.

Eliphaz, with his theo-ideology, had invented a powerful and cruel Job who wanted to oppress the imaginary poor and commit crimes against them. Job, who is truly poor and innocent, looks at the same world of Eliphaz, but sees it differently. He places himself in solidarity with the victims, and says: “From out of the city the dying groan, and the soul of the wounded cries for help; yet God charges no one with wrong” (24,12). When we look at it from the dunghill of Job, the world cannot seem like the sight of some large, systematic and universal injustice. The poor continue to sleep at night without clothing to cover themselves, under the closed shutters of the windows of high fashion.

Job is starving to death, and right next to him his friends are philosophising about food. The temptation is becoming ever stronger to build new and increasingly sophisticated ideologies in order to silence the poor, not see them, persuade and convince them that they are only guilty and deserve their sad fate. Job continues his struggle, generation after generation. And he is eternally waiting for true answers in solidarity, not false mercy. By people, by us, and by God.

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A Man Named Job/9 - Through the eyes of the poor, beyond the night of man and God

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 10/05/2015

logo Giobbe"I'm a wounded man. And I'd like to leave, pity, / And finally reach a place / Where a man who is alone / With himself will be heard. / (...) Show us a hint of justice. / What is Your law? / Dash my wretched passions / Release me from anxiety. /I am tired of my voiceless screams."

Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pity (La pietà - English translation: Diego Bastianutti)

Each generation produces its own gap between the new and difficult questions of the victims and the insufficient answers of Job's friends. Sometimes this gap becomes a loophole that we observe trying to see a broader human horizon and a higher sky. Many other times, the space of this gap is denied and cancelled, erasing the painful but fruitful questions of the poor. To hope to meet "Job and his brothers" we should simply learn to live in this inevitable vacuum, by listening quietly. There may flourish a new type of solidarity with our time and perhaps, finally, fraternity.

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The Poison of False Mercy

A Man Named Job/9 - Through the eyes of the poor, beyond the night of man and God by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 10/05/2015 "I'm a wounded man. And I'd like to leave, pity, / And finally reach a place / Where a man who is alone / With himself will be heard. / (...) Show us a hint of justi...
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A Man Named Job/8 The truth in life is found in the ever renewing questions of the poor

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 03/05/2015

logo Giobbe"... And I am not waiting for anybody: / Between four walls / Astonished of space / More than a desert / I am not waiting for anybody: / But he must come; / He will come, / if I resist, / To blossom not seen, / He will come all of a sudden, / When I least realize: / He will come almost pardon / Of what he makes die, / He will come to make me certain / Of his and my treasure, / He will come as a relief / Of my and his pains, / His whisper / Will come, perhaps it is already coming."

Clemente Rebora, Canti Anonimi (Anonymous Poems, English translation by Roberto Filippetti)

In people, communities, civilizations and faiths, there is a cycle that alternates between faith and ideology, religion and idolatry. At the beginning of the journey we are seduced by a voice that calls us: we believe, and we set out. But after travelling a certain stretch of the road, which is sometimes very long, we find ourselves almost always inside an ideology, if not idolatry. It is a most likely, perhaps inevitable outcome, because ideology and idolatry are natural products of faiths and religions. The honest and naked reading of the Book of Job – it comes as no surprise that it is in the middle of a Bible whose chief enemy is idolatry - is a powerful treatment of these serious diseases of religions, because it forces us to quit the answers that we have matured and acquired by hard work for the good part of our life in order to return, humble and true, to the first questions of youth.

[fulltext] =>

We're getting to the centre of the Book of Job, in the midst of his nightly river ford (chapters 21 to 42). As we read on, we become increasingly aware that we do not possess the cultural categories that would be essential for truly understanding the radical and amazing author of this great book. We risk trivializing the dialogues between Job and his "friends", because the gap between the greatness of the words of Job and those of its partners in the conversation appears too wide to us. And so it escapes us that the positions of the "friends" were an expression of the highest theology of their time, as the author of the book and its first readers-listeners knew very well. Unlike it happens to most of us nowadays, in fact, the listeners of Job's poem would first identify with the theologies of the friends and not with the victim. The man on the pile of manure was the heretic. Therefore, the great revolutionary purpose of the book was to lead listeners to abandon their theology and their religion, or at least to try to put it in a deep crisis, and start walking towards a new idea of ​​God and justice.

For us, today's readers, who know the whole Bible and maybe read it from the perspective of the Gospels, Paul, of humanism and modernity, it is almost impossible not to miss the dramatic tension of the story. To get into the heart of this book - and it is now time to do it - we should at least attempt a difficult and decisive operation: not to identify too quickly with Job without first having felt the failure of our answers to the questions that the many Jobs inhabiting the peripheries of our history send to us today. We can only grasp Job after realizing that our responses are radically inadequate and continue to "harass" the victims of our time. We cannot understand the questions of Job without realising the poverty of our responses. Job's friends are us. Here and now. And Job is always away and forgotten, sitting on the piles of manure that we continue to produce.

Once we reach the middle of the book, the thesis of the three parties of Job in conversation becomes increasingly essential and synthetic. Zophar says to him: "Knowest thou not this of old, since man was placed upon earth, that the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment?" (Job 20,4-5). He is reminded of the only possible explanation of his unfortunate condition: through retributive logic. If you have fallen from grace you must be guilty, you must be evil. Job never gave in to this explanation, because it is contrary to his truth of a righteous and unfortunate man.

At the heart of its dialogue with God and men, Job heads on this "economic" theology of his time. To deconstruct it he turns to history for help, to the "travellers" of the earth who truly know life and men. But his first plea is for careful listening: "Hear diligently my speech, and let this be your consolations". (Job 21,2). He knows he is close to the peak of his trial with God and religion, and therefore he asks his interlocutors to "lay their hands upon their mouth" (21,5), to prepare for the wonder and the scandal that his extreme words will provoke in them - it cannot be excluded either that the editor of these middle chapters has amended and censored certain parts of the book, where the questions of Job would have been most extreme and outrageous.

But Zophar, Eliphaz and Bildad were not able to listen and could not keep quiet but continued to speak and to accuse him. Listening is true and deep love, agape, it requires good will, trust, friendship - the ingredients missing from the three "friends". Job knows this; nevertheless he requests that they should listen because his real audience is us. We are invited to keep quiet, listen and put our hand over our mouth. The first sign that faith has already become ideology is no longer being able to remain silent before the pain of the world.

And so, after calling to the earth and after you wanting to entrust his cry to the pietas of the infinite future generations by carving it in the rock, to disprove his "friends" Job calls historical evidence into question, the life of real people and not that imagined by those who think of God without knowing and listening to man: "Have you not asked those who travel the roads, and do you not accept their testimony?" (21,29) It is on the earth shared by all that Job finds evidence to show that the theological arguments of his time are false: "Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power?... Their houses are safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them. Their bull breeds without fail; their cow calves and does not miscarry...They spend their days in prosperity, and in peace they go down to Sheol" (the kingdom of the dead; 21,7-13). The basis for the non-truth of the theorems of his friends is real life. A more true-to-life religion and theology must be known, seen and learnt. Yesterday, today, always.

It is all too easy to be on the side of Job and prove, using his evidence and our own, that the world does not respond to over-simplified retributive logic. Too many are the wicked ones who accumulate great unfair wealth and then leave it to their children, and even more numerous are those impoverished by misfortune. But are we sure that Job is right? It is true that there is no link between our ethical behaviour and our happiness and that of our children? This is not the level on which Job wants to conduct his dialogue with us. He knows that if we really ask the travellers and observers of the world they will tell us about both happy and unhappy wicked people and both happy and unhappy righteous people, too. Job is not interested in supporting the opposite view to that of his "friends", because he knows that it is just as fragile. His argument is different and much more interesting: punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous on this earth cannot be God's "job". It would be a too trivial kind of god, it would only be an idol, because it is made in our own image and likeness.

The world is not left to chance, Providence must be at work, Job does not deny this; but he invites us to look for records that are different from those of the theology of his time (and ours). Job is in search of another God, and he also seeks to defend the truth of history. Job then reminds us that those who believe in God love him do not have to tell theologies that do not hold up to the evidence of history. Yet we have many, too many, stories of God that just associate him to our banality, that are necessarily proved wrong by the truth of the questions of Job and the stories of travellers. Job asks only more silence, more hands on the mouth, to be amazed by the truth that happens in history that cannot be against God's truth. His is a call for a religion that is able to give an account of the real joys and sorrows of real people. The rest is just vanity and false consolation: "How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood" (21,34).

Knowing how to be silent and retain those definite answers of ours in our throat in order to hear the cries of the Jobs of our own time has been important in all ages, but it was and is essential in the great moments of transition, when the official responses of religions, cultures and philosophies are not enough to respond to the most difficult questions of the just and innocent victims, when the conventional explanations of pain, death and faith are not satisfactory to Job any more. It is especially in these moments that one needs to listen carefully to the man of Uz, and be converted. Because if we don't, religions remain trapped inside ideologies, idols take the place of faith.

Today, too, Job does not understand our responses, they do not console him, they torment him. And he invites us to stay quiet at least and to listen to him. There are too many cries rising to the sky panting a different God that are muted by our over-simplified responses showing little solidarity that are distant from the people, and are held by those who cannot listen to the travellers of our time. The Bible was able to listen to the outrageous and uncomfortable cry of Job, engraved it forever on its rock, and so gave him the highest dignity. Will we now be able to do the same about the shouts and questions that send our theologies into crisis? Shall we write new poems through listening to the voice of the victims of our times? Or shall we continue to wear the masks of Job's friends in the drama of life?

The new springs of religions and civilizations begin when Job's friends, learn to be silent, leaving the old and inadequate certainties behind, and bringing themselves to listen to the cries of the victims, the distant ones and the poor, sitting on the same piles of manure.

 

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A Man Named Job/8 The truth in life is found in the ever renewing questions of the poor

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 03/05/2015

logo Giobbe"... And I am not waiting for anybody: / Between four walls / Astonished of space / More than a desert / I am not waiting for anybody: / But he must come; / He will come, / if I resist, / To blossom not seen, / He will come all of a sudden, / When I least realize: / He will come almost pardon / Of what he makes die, / He will come to make me certain / Of his and my treasure, / He will come as a relief / Of my and his pains, / His whisper / Will come, perhaps it is already coming."

Clemente Rebora, Canti Anonimi (Anonymous Poems, English translation by Roberto Filippetti)

In people, communities, civilizations and faiths, there is a cycle that alternates between faith and ideology, religion and idolatry. At the beginning of the journey we are seduced by a voice that calls us: we believe, and we set out. But after travelling a certain stretch of the road, which is sometimes very long, we find ourselves almost always inside an ideology, if not idolatry. It is a most likely, perhaps inevitable outcome, because ideology and idolatry are natural products of faiths and religions. The honest and naked reading of the Book of Job – it comes as no surprise that it is in the middle of a Bible whose chief enemy is idolatry - is a powerful treatment of these serious diseases of religions, because it forces us to quit the answers that we have matured and acquired by hard work for the good part of our life in order to return, humble and true, to the first questions of youth.

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Listening as Revolution

A Man Named Job/8 The truth in life is found in the ever renewing questions of the poor by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 03/05/2015 "... And I am not waiting for anybody: / Between four walls / Astonished of space / More than a desert / I am not waiting for anybody: / But he must come; / He...
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A Man Named Job/7 - The redeemer of the poor serves both the brother and the God of the living

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 26/04/2015

logo GiobbeMy last desire will be for you, who hold my whole life in your name: mother. I am at peace and I am innocent. Never be ashamed for the reason why I'm dying, rather, say that your child did not fear and that he died for freedom and now I forgive everyone, bye Mum, Dad, Stefano, Alberto, bye to all, everything is ready, I am at peace. Farewell Mum, Mum, Mum, Mum ...

(Letters from the death row of the resistance fighters, Domenico, 29 years old)."

Many faiths have been reborn from the supportive context of fraternity that were able to accompany the man shouting towards a sky that appears to be blank or hostile all through his experience of the dark. But around the desperate people sitting on piles of manure in the world, the gossip and persecution of non-supportive “friends” are no less frequent. They do not see that the truth is often hidden in the silence of faith and the “fights” with God, and they want to fill the empty sky of others by their empty words. And so the lament of Job continues to resound in our lands: “How long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words?” (Job 19,2).

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Even in his second dialogue-accusation Bildad the Shuhite reaffirms his theses with increased aggressiveness, making it sound perfect like all theorems without flesh and blood. You, Job, cannot change the world's order. The righteous one lives and is rewarded, the wicked one perishes and suffers: “shall the earth be forsaken for you, or the rock be removed out of its place?” (18,4). He describes the fate of the wicked and the sinner in detail, and it coincides perfectly with the situation Job is in. With just one, albeit radical difference: Job is a righteous man.

But the great, crazy and wonderful hypothesis of Job returns with increasing power and conviction: “know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me.” (19,6). Job too, like Bildad, believes in the divine order of the world, and to escape atheism, he takes God so seriously as to debit him for the misfortune he is going through. And he shouts out for help: “Behold, I cry out, ‘Violence!’ but I am not answered; I call for help, but there is no justice.” (19,7)

"Violence" (hamas) was a scream, a scream, with a specific legal value. When a person in extreme difficulty shouted ‘Justice!’, they created an obligation of help in the other - something like the ship sending out an SOS obliging those receiving it to intervene in its help. But God remains silent even about the extreme SOS of Job, because he himself is the author of violence. God – as for Job - has heard the cry and is not doing anything. Unlike in the case of many lamentations in and outside the Bible, the God of Job is not deaf, but his enemy: “He has kindled his wrath against me and counts me as his adversary.” (19,11). To whom should he cry out then? What remains is the hope in his friends: “Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me!” (19,21). Left alone in the world, Job has prayed the earth (16,18), and now he prays friends. His prayer is fully earthen, which becomes a last appeal to the solidarity of men under a hostile, closed sky. It is a prayer that resembles the one that the condemned man addresses his captors, reminding them of their common human condition. It is the appeal to fraternity as a last resort.
Many instances of human solidarity are born and reborn from horizontal prayers, from desperate cries for help received by companions, when the sky seems closed, or when the “lawyers” of God manage to convince us that their obvious and academic answers were really the ones by Elohim. Even when it seems the only one, the cry to the other person is almost always the second one, which is launched by the poor when the first cry upwards remains unanswered. These instances of fraternity that come from knowing how to receive the screams of pain cannot be the enemy of God, even when the people involved cannot pronounce his name and do not recognize his voice. The enemy of prayer is not the other, supportive person, but the narcissism of the one who speaks only with himself, with the idols or with the goods. Even a prayer in search of a friend can be a sublime prayer and human solidarity that comes from God's silence can be more real and spiritual than prayers to the trivial god of the adulators of God and therefore the enemies of Job.

Job's cry for human compassion remains unanswered, too. Even his friends are silent. But his extreme quest for justice continues, opening up another sky for us: “Oh, that my words were now written! Oh, that they were printed in a book...” (19,23). Job's wish is that his words should be engraved “with an iron pen and lead” (19,24), into the rock so they do not die with him. He wants to leave his testament as his last message - there is an immense love for humanity in all his drama. The rock mentioned is the Bible. Here, too, we can find the mystery of the word: while Job uttered that cry – “Oh, that my words were now written!” - his words were really being written, so that we could receive them. At this point a key process throughout the book of Job is revealed to us: the friends capable of pietas to whom Job calls for solidarity are us, the readers, recipients of his song, who can receive his SOS today and respond to it. Every unheard cry that has been kept in the Bible - including the great cry of Golgotha - is addressed us. The Bible is not just a great collection of psalms, divine truths and prayers, and it is not only a story of God to men. Above of all of these, the Bible is a great story of man - to man, under an inhabited sky. The Bible is a humanism inviting us to try to respond to the women and men when the answers of YHWH are not there. All the Scripture is an SOS sent out to our humanity, a call to us to become truly human, to receive the cry for justice by the man named Job and all his brothers and sisters who continue to cry out throughout history, who have enriched his first song and are calling out for our pity. For biblical humanism God's answers are not enough, as he is often silent to make room for our responsibility. If Elohim had not been silent for most of the book, we would not have had the great questions of Job, and his cry yearning for justice would not have embraced and reached all the despair of the earth, as a means of saving it. God must know how to keep quiet if he wants responsible people who are capable of non-trivial questions.

But the Bible is not the only treasure chest guarding the last messages of the real human. Much literature has been and is still born as a testament - perhaps all great literature is born like that. Many last words and many cries towards heaven and people were written in search of brotherhood inside the stories of fratricide. Many of these words have been lost, but there are many others that we have been able to collect and cherish. The concentration camps, prisons, deaths in solitude were all piles of manure also capable of generating wonderful flowers. Thousands of poems, diaries, letters from the front, music, songs, art and even the stones have joined in and kept up the cry of the beggar Job. When a man on the death row entrusts his last message to paper so that it can reach someone, his hope is alive. So even a letter or a poem can make that last moment of hope last forever. They make hope eternal and do not let it die - death can be defeated even by our words.

At the height of these cry-prayers of Job, an unexpected and wonderful, a authentic song of hope flourishes: “For I know that my Redeemer [goel] liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth” (19,25). It is about a hope that comes like a rainbow while the storm is still raging. That is how real hope always comes: it is not the result of our virtue or merit, but all and only grace, charis, gift. And it always surprises us, leaving us breathless - and if it doesn't surprise us and is announced well ahead, then it is either small or vain hope.

Who is the redeemer, the goel that Job wants, yearns for and calls to from the bottom of his desperate hope? We do not know. But perhaps it is another God, a God who is more real than the one he feels to be more of an enemy. It is the hope inside the despair that resurrects faith, because it calls it to transcend itself, to become what it is not yet. And as he is hoping for goel, the redeemer of the innocent poor, he sees him already approaching on the horizon. In the dark nights of faith, of every faith, one always starts again from hope, by re-learning to hope, and re-learning it many times (the hope-gift comes shining like a rainbow, and like a rainbow it also fades).

We do not know what kind of goel Job hopes for. But we know that it is not enough for Job to be redeemed in Paradise, because he does not know it. The God of these biblical books is the God of the living, not the dead. No biblical humanism can be a authentic if it postpones the redemption of innocent victims to the eschaton, or the afterlife. The goel in whom Job is hoping must arrive and stand up on the dust of our human condition of living beings. The promised land is our land. Every promise of redemption of the victims that does not become a concrete commitment to free them here and now ends up being inhumanity and deceitful hope. Job wants to see his goel arrive in the dust of his dunghill, to see him with his own eyes: “whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold” (19,27).

The goel is not an idol if he is able to get down to the dust of the victims, if we can come across him in our street, if we can catch a glimpse of him in the men and women of our city who are able to listen to Job's cry and respond to it. Too many poor people have never seen the goel arrive to their piles of manure, and are still waiting. And Job continues to call to the earth, to people, to Elohim. For them. For us.

 

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A Man Named Job/7 - The redeemer of the poor serves both the brother and the God of the living

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 26/04/2015

logo GiobbeMy last desire will be for you, who hold my whole life in your name: mother. I am at peace and I am innocent. Never be ashamed for the reason why I'm dying, rather, say that your child did not fear and that he died for freedom and now I forgive everyone, bye Mum, Dad, Stefano, Alberto, bye to all, everything is ready, I am at peace. Farewell Mum, Mum, Mum, Mum ...

(Letters from the death row of the resistance fighters, Domenico, 29 years old)."

Many faiths have been reborn from the supportive context of fraternity that were able to accompany the man shouting towards a sky that appears to be blank or hostile all through his experience of the dark. But around the desperate people sitting on piles of manure in the world, the gossip and persecution of non-supportive “friends” are no less frequent. They do not see that the truth is often hidden in the silence of faith and the “fights” with God, and they want to fill the empty sky of others by their empty words. And so the lament of Job continues to resound in our lands: “How long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words?” (Job 19,2).

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The Word that Defeats Death

A Man Named Job/7 - The redeemer of the poor serves both the brother and the God of the living by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 26/04/2015 “My last desire will be for you, who hold my whole life in your name: mother. I am at peace and I am innocent. Never be ashamed for the reason why I'm d...
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A Man Named Job/6 To do justice means not to "cover" the suffering of the righteous

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 19/04/2015

logo Giobbe"Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Mother Earth (...)
Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death"

(St. Francis, The Canticle of the Creatures)

Guilt and the debt are the big issues of life for everyone. In German they are almost the same word: schuld and schuldig. We are born innocent, and we can stay so for all our life. Just like Job. The death of any child is innocent death, but also many deaths of old people are just as innocent. And God, unlike the idols, must be the first to "raise his hand" in our defence, to believe in our innocence despite all the accusations of our friends, religions and theologies. The prisons are still full of slaves accused of nonexistent debts, and the jailers who get rich by trading with their innocent victims for panting liberations.

[fulltext] =>

After the first round of dialogues between Job and his three "friends", we now enter a new act of the book, when each friend takes the floor again to repeat, with more emphasis, their respective criticisms, accusations, theories and sermons. And Job, in the centre of the scene, sitting on the pile of manure, continues to pose the biggest questions, awaiting different answers. His patience is not exercised towards God (with whom he is radically impatient) but towards his "friends". Having received the responses of Job, also Eliphaz, the friend who had taken the first word (ch. 4), becomes aggressive and attacks: “Should a wise man answer with windy knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind? Should he argue in unprofitable talk, or in words with which he can do no good?” (15,1-3). His accusation is explicit: “But you are doing away with the fear of God” (15,4).  And he adds, “What is man, that he can be pure? Or he who is born of a woman, that he can be righteous?” (15,14) Job responds: “I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all. Shall windy words have an end?” (16,1). And he reaffirms his indictment: "I was at ease, and he broke me apart; he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces” (16,12).

In this new variant of the dominant theme of the desperate song of Job - I am innocent, it is God who has to explain what he is doing to me and to all those unjustly suffering on earth - there are some precious pearls embedded.

Job, who is not content with and exasperated by the trivial answers obtained from friends so far, given God's silence, continues to call for an arbiter and neutral judge who can prove his innocence and then enact the just ruling: “Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and he who testifies for me is on high... that he would argue the case of a man with God, as a son of man does with his neighbour.” (16,19-21). And so, after a recourse to the language of procedural law, Job now passes on to the commercial register. He invokes the figure of the guarantor and asks God to give him a guarantee: “Lay down a pledge for me with you; who is there who will put up security for me?” (17,3) The guarantor was the one who guaranteed a debtor in front of his creditor with his own reputation or heritage, joining in his responsibilities in the event of default - an institution similar to our surety. Together with the debtor, the guarantor got also involved, providing guarantee for him by a lifting up of hands (manum levare: lift up one’s hands, is where "mallevare", the Italian word for guarantor comes from). This is why Job's prayer is very powerful and tremendous - the Book of Job offers many different and beautiful prayers, especially for those who have exhausted their own prayers and seek other, truer ones. Exhausted by pain, by the non-answers, the academic discourse of his friends, Job raises a new cry to God: be my guarantor, lift up your hand for me! But how is it possible that God, the creditor, may also be the guarantor for the debtor (Job)?

Here we find another beautiful passage. Albeit through misted eyes, he had gained a different view, and so Job tries to glimpse inside the God of everyone to see a more hidden God who is deeper and truer than the one he had known as a young man. There has to be a face of Elohim that is on the side of the unfairly oppressed poor, willing to raise his hand for them. Job is calling Elohim to become what he does not yet seem to be. If the God of the Bible is called just, good, slow to anger and merciful, then you should be able to turn to a face of God without denying the other. And look for a new face - “Your face, Lord, do I seek” (Psalm 27). Every prayer, if it is neither magic nor the result of fear of God or of living, is to call someone by name, asking them to become something that they are not yet - and the same is true for us. Job is accused of insolvency, and was put in the streets by non-existent debts charged to him. In the ancient world (and today, still) you were made a slave for unpaid debts, and not rarely you died in prison. From the bottom of his prison, Job turns to heaven: You know - at least a piece of you should know - that the accusation that led me here is not true, that my debts are just false accusations. I shall prove it, in fact you will tell the real reasons of my misfortune to everyone; but now, in the abandonment, I pray you: be my guarantor. Lift your hand up for me. At least you - the different face of the one God - give me confidence!

It is a strong demand with extreme confidence that is a claim made by many righteous people every day. The world, inside and outside prisons, is full of innocent people who keep repeating Job's prayer: if I am righteous - and I know I am, and I will not cease to believe I am innocent because I am - there must be, on earth or in heaven, someone who will believe me, someone who will give me credit! Too many times there is no guarantor for the righteous victims, they just cannot be found, or do not respond to the call. Job cries out and continues to do so - also for those who could not find a guarantor for themselves. In this miserable state as he finds himself at the bottom of the pit of extreme humiliation, Job hears inside that ancient voice again: “although there is no violence in my hands, and my prayer is pure” (16,17). If Job had given in to the demands of friends and pleaded guilty, he would not have given God the chance to become the last guarantor for the poor and the victims of all times. The faith of Job in a different and more humane God forced God, through all the books of the Bible and throughout history, to demonstrate this different and new face of his. Therefore Job is not only widening the horizon of the human who is good and a friend of God: he has also widened the horizon of God towards men. If it is true that man has learned to become more of a man through the relationship with the God of the Bible, it is also true - paradoxically - that the God of the Bible has "learned" to live up to his promises more through the relationship with men. The God of the philosophers has nothing to learn from history, and is almost always useless for the lives of the poor. The God of the Bible is a different God. Let's ask Job, or Mary who saw a child become a man, be crucified and resurrected.

But the pearls of these chapters are not finished there. While invoking that extreme type of guarantee, Job feels his death very close already: “My face is red with weeping, and on my eyelids is deep darkness” (16,16). A new prayer blooms from his soul, which is among the most beautiful ones in the whole of the Scriptures. A phrase, a ray of light enclosed in one verse: “The rabbi who taught me Hebrew could not read this verse for the thrill he felt over it” (Guido Ceronetti, The Book of Job). Some verses of the Bible can be understood only by not being able to pronounce them for the pain felt over them: “O earth, cover not my blood, and let my cry find no resting place” (16,18).

The moment Job feels his certain defeat and death, he lowers his eyes, looks on the ground and calls her by name. Crushed and smashed, he learns to pray the earth. This prayer - which is the opposite of the off-season mother goddess cults - is the song of the earthling, of the Adam who was dropped with his nose in the dust and can speak to the earth (adamah), to see and feel her differently, as a loyal friend. And he calls the pit his father and the worms his sisters who shall eat his body, inhabitants, like him, of the same earth. We need stigmata to be able to actually call the earth and death our sisters.

The earth heard Job's prayer. It did not cover the blood of many righteous people, and it continues to keep the memory of the cry of Job and his brothers. Every person, every community and every culture has its places that continue the cry of Job and the innocent. Memorial columns, monuments, the son's old room, a lot of poetry and art that conserve the cries of the soul - even if too much of spiritual blood is shed, covered and absorbed by the earth, for lack of poets and artists, or because it is too secret and big to be seen by someone. These places know them and recognize them, and we thank the earth and its inhabitants for not having covered them, for allowing the cry-song of Job not to go out inside the throat of the world. The earth has to be asked and begged not cover the blood of the righteous, because life would and should cover it. Human love asks the earth to forget, burying the great pain - but Job unearths it for a truer type of love.

The earth did not absorb the blood of Abel, when his brother "raised his hand" not to protect but to kill, and the smell of that righteous man reached up to God (Genesis, chapter 4). Job, another righteous man, asks the earth not to absorb his blood, because he wants its smell to reaches all the way down to us. His living cry asks us to become guarantors who are responsible and in solidarity with the many innocent victims. Will we lift up our hands to save them?

 

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A Man Named Job/6 To do justice means not to "cover" the suffering of the righteous

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 19/04/2015

logo Giobbe"Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Mother Earth (...)
Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death"

(St. Francis, The Canticle of the Creatures)

Guilt and the debt are the big issues of life for everyone. In German they are almost the same word: schuld and schuldig. We are born innocent, and we can stay so for all our life. Just like Job. The death of any child is innocent death, but also many deaths of old people are just as innocent. And God, unlike the idols, must be the first to "raise his hand" in our defence, to believe in our innocence despite all the accusations of our friends, religions and theologies. The prisons are still full of slaves accused of nonexistent debts, and the jailers who get rich by trading with their innocent victims for panting liberations.

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The Living Memory of the Earth

A Man Named Job/6 To do justice means not to "cover" the suffering of the righteous by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 19/04/2015 "Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Mother Earth (...) Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death" (St. Francis, The Canticle of the Creatu...
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A Man Named Job/5 - The false love of those who defend the Lord to praise themselves

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 12/04/2015

logo Giobbe"Let's go from here. Let's ask for all this sickness to pass. Whom shall we ask? The vineyard that is ̀all
a burst of new leaves,
the acacia branch with its thorns, the ivy and the grass
empress sisters that are
a lying mantle and a powerful throne"

(excerpt from the poem Ai miei maestri immensi - To My Immense Masters by Mariangela Gualtieri)

There are many economists, philosophers and intellectuals who build theories to legitimize misery in the world, about which we are told that it is a result of the laziness of the poor, and may be something coded in their genes. Job and his great pleas for explanations are marginalized, they are not listened to, but ridiculed, and the one who tries to defend the truth of the poor and their reasons is surrounded by thousands of the 'friends of Job' that condemn and mock him. The false friends of Job are not extinct, and they are always with us with their ideologies, to humiliate, despise and condemn the poor.

[fulltext] =>

The third friend Zophar's accusation is clear and merciless: Job is a fake innocent, a bragger who hides his sins under a curtain of words: Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said: “Should a multitude of words go unanswered, and a man full of talk be judged right?” (11,1-2). Job responds: “No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you. But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you.” (11,1-3). Job wants different and new answers from God, he does not need those of the wisdom consumer theologians: “What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you. But I would speak to the Almighty” (13,2-3). He wants to hear the version of events directly from God. He does not want to hear the professional defenders, he wants to hear the voice of the accused.

To celebrate the infinite and unfathomable wisdom of God, Zophar attacks, condemns and humiliates the man, Job. Job, however, remains on the side of the earth and is totally in solidarity with humanity (with Adam, the earthen one). He does not praise God against man, he is not an adulator. However yesterday and today, there has always been a legion of the adulators of God like Zophar and Job's other friends who defend God to praise themselves, without really loving either God or men.

To defend God, these three friends offend man and deny what's evidence (they knew Job and they knew that he was righteous). Their theology is that of the cold theorems, praising God to praise itself. It is an ideology, and thus idolatry. However, every non-ideological theology is first of all humanism, it speaks well of man to God before speaking well of God to man. Divine truth, goodness and beauty cannot be defended against human truth, beauty and goodness. And he who does it denies what's human, the earth and God.

The concrete and incarnate experience of the righteous Job who is unjustly struck by misfortune is the first fact of reality from which Zophar started his argument. But, like all false prophets and false wise men, he defends God who does not need it to save himself and his own theological “truth”. The dialogues between Job and his friends are therefore a critique of the type of religion that is the enemy of man (and God), of the ideologies, philosophies and religion reduced to ethics.

Job denounces all moralists who do not look at the world from the pile of manure and become aggressive like Zophar. It is impressive, if one looks at history and the present, to see the huge group of theologians, philosophers and moralists who have used and still use (their idea of) God to build a pyramid only to able to place themselves on top, next to or even above God (as his architects and builders). Job is then the true theologian, the one who asks God to “wake up” in order to be at level with the suffering of the world.

From the meditation of these chapters in the Book of Job we find out then that the man named Job is a symbol of many things, all of them decisive. First, it reveals some essential dimensions of the mystery of truth. The victims, the poor have a privileged path to wisdom, they can access a truer truth. When you reach the extreme human condition, where all the bridges fell behind you and looking ahead you do not glimpse the promised land any more, you can search only the truth for truth - and we often find it, too, or rather, we find ourselves immersed in it. It is this truth, perhaps only this truth that allows those who 'own' it (or, better, those in whom it dwells) not to use it to their own advantage, not to consume it; like when, having discovered a rare mountain flower, instead of picking it to scent and embellish our home, we leave it in the meadow for everyone to see and enjoy. It is this gratuitousness that makes the truth, all truth, humble, chaste, pure and precious. Agape.

Job is also an excellent icon of biblical faith: a continuous and incessant demand for truth, that if it wants to be authentic, if it wants to be love it must be shouted out with Job, while sitting on the piles of manure of the world, never ceasing to feel brothers and sisters of everyone and everything.

But Job is also a paradigm of those who have received a true vocation - whether it is religious, secular or artistic. When you walk following a good voice that is calling you (from outside and from inside), there inevitably comes the stage of Job: you find yourself sitting on your and the city's garbage, and an absolute need for truth is born about your own story, about God and life, that can no longer be contented with small truths and simple answers. Having given everything, you can and must ask for everything. And with Job we understand that the answers to our questions of truth are not for ourselves, but for all, and a friendship is born with men, women and nature which is not the fruit of the virtues, but only and completely gift.

Afterall, the cosmic song of Job is really wonderful. In his condition of the poor and disinterested lover of truth, Job experiences the unity and communion with the entire creation in his own wounded flesh. He includes animals, the earth, the plants and the straw in his song; he understands them, loves them and feels one with them: “But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.” (12,7-8) Seen from the dunghill everything becomes alive, everything speaks, everything prays. But in order to see this life and this prayer that is the deepest of the universe one needs to love the truth for itself. This is the way, the only way to get to see a cosmic brotherhood, and from the pain of the world there springs and flourishes a communion with the grass, the finch, the rock, the star, the wild ass, the old man who passes away in a hospital bed. You learn to see and contemplate the innocence and the truth of the animals and of all non-human life - only men are capable of being false, flatterers and idolaters, animals or plants are not. In the real world of Job there is a more fundamental truth of the cosmos: rocks, water, trees, roots and leaves compose a single song of the earth taking the shape of words in the bleeding but life-filled throat of Job. The fragility of the ephemeral human condition makes Job feel even more like a creature. The death of man is more desperate than that of the tree (which after being cut can still hope to start sprouting and renewing again: 14,7), it is actually the poor sister of the death of the river and the lake that dry because of the lack of water (14,11). All creation is vulnerable and ephemeral (the mountain may come down with a landslide, the rock may be eroded by water: 14,19-20); like everything, like us.

This cosmic vulnerability, however, this kind of universal pain for the unexplained suffering of animals, plants and the earth, gives Job a more solid basis for his argument with God: he becomes the real and extreme spokesman of the earth and asks God to give reason to a world he created where there is too much suffering for no reason.

We are facing an amazing reciprocity between Job and nature: the earth gives him further evidence and more strength for his trial with God, and Job gives voice to nature, demanding explanations from the Eternal Being also on behalf of the rocks, animals and trees. The demanding of justice and truth that rises every day by plants, animals and men is rather powerful if we listen to it.

The presence of Job or someone wearing his mask well in the drama of life is essential for every person, community, society or people who do not want to fall into the ideologies and then in the regimes that are always built on the basis of the type of reasoning the 'friends of Job' practiced, using high ideals and God himself to oppress the poor and justify such oppressions.

The real brothers of Job, however are those (very few) poets and artists who, because of their vocation and charisma, are not afraid to persevere in asking questions about the truth of life, without stopping in front of the almost invincible temptation to try and find consolations that are other than the consolation of truth. If we never meet Job or a poet like him in life who is in love with the naked truth (for example the poet Leopardi), we cannot get rid of the ideologies, and we get enslaved by some idol providing simple answers to our simple questions.

We are living in a deep poverty of big questions. We are quickly getting used to the dialogues of the talk shows, and so we have forgotten that we grew up by asking thousands of “why”-s from our parents, and that the way to become adults and old is if we can get back to the big 'why' of children. God will speak to us again when, with and like Job, we will know how to ask questions to him that are able to “wake him up”.

 

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A Man Named Job/5 - The false love of those who defend the Lord to praise themselves

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 12/04/2015

logo Giobbe"Let's go from here. Let's ask for all this sickness to pass. Whom shall we ask? The vineyard that is ̀all
a burst of new leaves,
the acacia branch with its thorns, the ivy and the grass
empress sisters that are
a lying mantle and a powerful throne"

(excerpt from the poem Ai miei maestri immensi - To My Immense Masters by Mariangela Gualtieri)

There are many economists, philosophers and intellectuals who build theories to legitimize misery in the world, about which we are told that it is a result of the laziness of the poor, and may be something coded in their genes. Job and his great pleas for explanations are marginalized, they are not listened to, but ridiculed, and the one who tries to defend the truth of the poor and their reasons is surrounded by thousands of the 'friends of Job' that condemn and mock him. The false friends of Job are not extinct, and they are always with us with their ideologies, to humiliate, despise and condemn the poor.

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Beware of the Adulators of God

A Man Named Job/5 - The false love of those who defend the Lord to praise themselves by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 12/04/2015 "Let's go from here. Let's ask for all this sickness to pass. Whom shall we ask? The vineyard that is ̀all a burst of new leaves, the acacia branch with its tho...
stdClass Object
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    [title] => God's Responsibility
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A Man Named Job/4 – He who is righteous can say it out: no son deserves to die

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 05/04/2015

logo Giobbe“You did not come down from the cross when they shouted to you, mocking and reviling you: "Come down from the cross and we will believe that it is you." You did not come down because, again, you did not want to enslave man by a miracle and thirsted for faith that is free... I swear, man is created weaker and baser than you thought him! ... Respecting him less, you would have demanded less of him, and that would be closer to love, for his burden would be lighter.”

(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "The Grand Inquisitor", The Brothers Karamazov).

Biblical humanism does not ensure happiness to the righteous. Moses, the greatest prophet of all, dies alone and outside of the promised land. There must be something more real and deeper in the search of happiness of the righteous. We ask a lot more from life, above all the meaning of our unhappiness and that of others. The book of Job is from the side of those who are stubbornly looking for a true sense for the disappointment in the big promises, the misfortune of the innocent, the death of the daughters and sons, the suffering of children.

[fulltext] =>

After the first dialogue with Eliphaz, now it is the second friend to speak: Then Bildad the Shuhite answered and said: “How long will you say these things, and the words of your mouth be a great wind? Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right? If your children have sinned against him, he has delivered them into the hand of their transgression." (8,1-4). In order not to question the justice of God, Bildad is forced to deny the righteousness of Job and his sons. For his ethics, which is abstract and without humanity, if the children (and Job) were punished it means they had to have sinned. His idea of divine justice and order bring him to condemn and thus betray the other/man. But there are many children who die without any sin, yesterday, today and always. In the French Alps, in Kenya, on the Golgotha. Anywhere. There is no sin that requires the death of a child to be atoned, unless it is the denying of any difference between Elohim and Baal, between YHWH and hungry idols.

The poem of Job is a test of the justness of God, not that of Job (which is revealed to us from the very first lines of the prologue). It is Elohim who must prove that he is really just, despite the pain of the innocent.

To respond to his 'friend', there are two roads opening up in front of Job. The first, which is always the easiest, is to admit that there is no justice in the world: God does not exist or is too far away to master fair judgement of men. The second way is to attempt the unthinkable for his time (and for believers of all times): to question the righteousness of God, asking him reasons for his acts. Job in responding to Bildad crosses through these two extreme possibilities: “I am blameless; I regard not myself; I loathe my life. 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;" (9,21-24). He doesn't care about his life (and this is pure gratuitousness), but justice in the world; and so Job dares the non-darable, coming to deny the possibility of the existence of any kind of divine justice.

Here Job continues to expand the horizon of the human realm contained in biblical humanism, taking all those in his ark who continue to wonder if there can be a good and just God in a world of inexplicable pain and evil. Job tells us that an unanswered question may be more religious than the answers that are too simple, and that even a 'why' can be prayer.

After Job there is no truer rosary on earth than that consisting of all the desperate questions of 'why' without answers, rising toward a sky that they still want to see as a place that is inhabited and friendly to them.

Job continues to seek a foundation for the earth that should be deeper than chaos and nothingness. But to search for and want a true God beyond the apparent 'banality of good', with the strength of its fragility Job asks God to answer for his actions, he wants a responsible God.

In fact there would be an easier way: taking the shortcut suggested to him by his friends, admitting his guilt. However, for a mysterious loyalty to himself and to life Job does not follow this third way. Job could have admitted to be a sinner (which righteous man is not consciousness of it?), he could have begged the forgiveness and mercy of God, thereby saving the justness/righteousness of God, and also hoping to gain his own personal redemption. But he did not, and he continued to ask for reasons, to keep the dialogue up, to wait for a different face of God. To believe in his own righteousness.

A great difficulty that a righteous person faces during the long and exhausting trials of life is not to lose faith in their own truth and justice. "It was not true that I did it for the good...", "I was acting superior..." "Deep down I am but a bluff..." But when our sins (that are always there) suggest us a reading of our lives that gradually becomes the most convincing one, we lose every engagement with the truth and we get lost, even if for a different and less true desperation we ask forgiveness and implore the mercy of God and others. This giving in is not humility, but only the last great temptation. We can hope to save ourselves from the trials similar to those of Job only if the history of our innocence and righteousness is more convincing to us than the history of our sins and our wickedness. It is fidelity-faith in that something that was very beautiful and “very good” (Gen 1,31), and what we are and we remain despite everything, which can save us in times of great and long trials. It is to this dignity of his (and ours) that Job, too, clings: “Remember that you have made me like clay” (10,9). A faith that also includes the children, the people we love, and the faith that one day may include every human being. Job continued to believe in his innocence so that we, who are less righteous than him, can now continue to believe in ours. 

Furthermore, Job cannot believe that his children had deserved death. No child deserves to die. On this earth there is much truth and beauty because mothers and fathers continue to believe, sometimes against all evidence, that their sons and daughters are not guilty. We have been saved so many times and are still only because at least one person kept believing that our beauty and goodness were greater than our mistakes. What a sad place this earth would be without the resurrecting looks of the mothers and fathers?

The extreme loyalty of Job himself pushes him into a most subversive act. He does not want to deny the righteousness of God, but he cannot deny his own truth either. So, from the grip in which he seems crushed, there emerges an unexpected third possibility, an unthought and unthinkable one. Job summons God himself to be judged. His dunghill turns into a courtroom. The accused one is Elohim, his lawyers are Job's friends, the inquisitor is Job: “I loathe my life I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me. Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favour the designs of the wicked?” (10,1-4).

But - one may ask - how is it possible to sue God, to denounce him, if the accused person is also the judge? “For he is not a man, as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together. There is no[d] arbiter between us, who might lay his hand on us both.” (9,33). In fact there is a judge-arbitrator present throughout the book of Job: the reader who, in the course of the play is called to participate, to express themselves to one or another of the contenders. A reader-arbitrator who is a contemporary of Job would have condemned him, considering his harangue an act of pride and indolence. The defence of Job has developed with history, with the prophets, the gospels, Paul, the martyrs, and then modernity, the lagers, terrorism, the euthanasia of children. Job is more contemporary to us than he was to the man of his own time, and he will be even more so in the centuries to come.

With the 'lawsuit of God' we are then inside a true religious revolution: God must also give an account of his actions if he wants to be the foundation of our justice. He must make himself understood, he must say other words in addition to the many he had already said. If he wants to reach the status of the biblical God of the Covenant and the Promise and free himself from the idolatrous cults, stupid as their fetishes. Therefore the Book of Job, nestled at the heart of the Bible, takes us on a high peak and it invites us to look at the entire Torah, the prophets, and then the New Testament, the women and men of all times from there. It stands as a test of the truth of the books that precede it and those that follow.

There was another time, when a trial took place with God as the accused in it. The roles, however, were reversed. Man was strong, almost omnipotent, the one who questioned and judged. God was fragile, condemned, crucified. It is between these two extreme trials that all justice, injustice and the hopes of the world are inscribed. Job did not and could not know this. But he was probably the first one to celebrate the empty tomb. Only those crucified can understand and desire resurrection. Happy Easter.

 

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A Man Named Job/4 – He who is righteous can say it out: no son deserves to die

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 05/04/2015

logo Giobbe“You did not come down from the cross when they shouted to you, mocking and reviling you: "Come down from the cross and we will believe that it is you." You did not come down because, again, you did not want to enslave man by a miracle and thirsted for faith that is free... I swear, man is created weaker and baser than you thought him! ... Respecting him less, you would have demanded less of him, and that would be closer to love, for his burden would be lighter.”

(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "The Grand Inquisitor", The Brothers Karamazov).

Biblical humanism does not ensure happiness to the righteous. Moses, the greatest prophet of all, dies alone and outside of the promised land. There must be something more real and deeper in the search of happiness of the righteous. We ask a lot more from life, above all the meaning of our unhappiness and that of others. The book of Job is from the side of those who are stubbornly looking for a true sense for the disappointment in the big promises, the misfortune of the innocent, the death of the daughters and sons, the suffering of children.

[jcfields] => Array ( ) [type] => intro [oddeven] => item-even )

God's Responsibility

A Man Named Job/4 – He who is righteous can say it out: no son deserves to die by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 05/04/2015 “You did not come down from the cross when they shouted to you, mocking and reviling you: "Come down from the cross and we will believe that it is you." You did not com...