Job's Wife
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
DESPAIR SO DEEP
Back in the days when I read mystery novels with some regularity, I tried very hard to find that single detail that would show me the way through to the unexpected truth that I was certain would out at the end. The unexplained sigh or the object out of place. I knew that the obvious ones probably weren’t what mattered. They were, after all, obvious. Any one reading it could come up with that one. It would only be someone superior, like me, who would notice that the matches turned up in Mildred’s hands, or that the murder weapon was in fact that barely noticed needle just peeking out from under the comfy armchair where the victim was found.
It is perhaps needless to say that I rarely sorted out the details by the end of the book, but I suspect that those years of Agatha Christie have shaped me into a detail watcher, wondering about what isn’t said as much as what is said.
It’s not only the mystery novels that got me there. It’s also the work of another woman author – Mary Daly, a radical feminist – who really got me thinking about those who are left out or just barely mentioned. That which is trivial, she suggested in her book Gyn/Ecology, is often of great importance. The word comes from the Latin trivium meaning three roads. The places where three roads met were understood to be a common, public place, and eventually the word took on the nuance of it being a pejorative term for that which is commonplace, ‘appropriate to the streetcorner, vulgar’ according to one source. Daly suggested that the places where three roads joined were sacred to the goddesses of the time, and were places where women often went, it was the marketplace, where the water was gathered, where women carried out the business of their days. What is dismissed as trivial is often what is most important, and we do well to keep our eyes open for such things, Daly suggested.
That’s part of my interest in the bit part played by Job’s wife. She has one line in the whole of the story, and doesn’t enter into again, not even at the end when Job’s riches are restored and increased. Surprisingly, there is no mention of how it was that his wife bore seven more children for him.
She’s hardly in the picture, but the story couldn’t have happened without her there. But perhaps I am ahead of myself.
Job is that book in the Bible that is for the most part perplexing. God and Satan are chatting, and Satan identifies Job as honourable and righteous. ‘But only because you protect him,’ Satan challenges. So God sends the terrible tragedies to Job’s life: his wealth destroyed bit by bit, his children murdered. They get to talking again, and Satan says, ‘Yeah, you took away all he had, but a man will do more to save his own life,’ and so God visits ulcers upon him from head to foot. He takes a pot shard and goes to the ashpit – or perhaps the dungheap – and sits there scraping himself. Everything is lost, and his body is now a complete mess. It is only pain and not even the promise of death.
Job’s wife has her close up, her one shot in the whole of the book.
Now just imagine this woman. She has lived with a man who was blameless all his life, who honoured God above everything, who said prayers for his children in case they might not have said them in the right way. He did nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. Whatever else we might say, it is fair to acknowledge that saints of this sort are seldom easy to live with.
She was likely wed to him young. Seven children she bore him. If we believe that God had blessed him and kept him from grief, then we can suppose that there weren’t the usual losses, the early deaths that the people of that time knew only too well. We can guess that she has been there with him, running his household, tending children and servants and, yes, benefiting from the wealth and prestige that being married to such a man would bring.
And suddenly – and not because of who she was or wasn’t, not because of her own blamelessness, not because of her blame but because her husband was set aside by God and because of that he became a target for some sort of misguided game – suddenly her whole life is destroyed in a few short moments. Seven children gone in a flash. All that she had known, her home, her servants, all destroyed. Her husband is in sackcloth and has shaved his head, disappearing into his own grief.
Here is what she says: ‘Do you now still mean to persist in your blamelessness? Curse God and die.’ Job carries on as a righteous man ‘That is how foolish women talk,’ he says back to her. ‘If we take happiness from God’s hand, must we not take sorrow, too?’
It is, I believe, one of the most devastating conversations in all of literature. I imagine her there with him, covered with ashes herself, her heart beyond broken, having suffered unimaginable loss. The world no longer makes sense. If there was anything that might look like justice, it has been shattered into so many pieces that it could never be put right again. If there was anything that had any salvific power at all, it is gone now.
All the talk that is to follow – and there is a lot of it – means less than nothing. This is, you see, what Job is well known for: all his friends gather around and they all try to make sense of what has happened. Talk, talk, talk, talk.
All the while, the women prepare the bodies for burial. They sit shiva with her, and she begins the work of putting her life back together. Having no servants to do anything any longer, she begins to walk to fetch water again. She washes what scraps of clothes remain, makes food for them to eat, gathers up sweet berries, grinds up roots to make something to stick in the stomach, scavenges wheat, cuts the green tops off of the wild garlic. It would take her all day, and while she does it she bears on her back the lost lives of her children. She drags her own lost life as if it was a thousand pound weight tied to her foot. But foot in front of foot, she carries on. She feeds her husband, herself. Makes some sort of shelter to survive the wind and rain. She does it because it must be done and because her husband is busy with his friends and his grief and his faithfulness to a God who has so deeply betrayed him.
Perhaps she is nearby as his friends try their arguments about why God has rained this down upon him, but likely she doesn’t pay any of it much mind. The words would drift like so much ash past her as she stirred the stew. And when God speaks from out of the tempest, when there is a bellowing voice coming from inside the whirlwind, I would think that she might be out on one of those long walks, carrying water, or perhaps digging by some roadside where she saw what looked to be potatoes gone astray from someone’s field. Had she been nearby, I imagine she would have gone and given God a piece of her mind. God claims to be beyond questioning, as the one who laid the foundations of the universe, who caused all of this to become and to be, who took on the magisterial mantle, all the while dismissing Job and his sufferings and his righteousness. A woman who has survived what she has survived, would have no fear of death in the face of such a bully. She must have been gone.
But there was really nothing to be done, and nothing to be gained.
WHAT REMAINS
Now lest you think that we have entered into a pit of existential despair without any hope of ever escaping, the truth is – and it is ever and always the truth – the despair is not all that there is, not even in the midst of this horrific story of loss and pain and struggle.
In Archibald MacLeish’s telling of this story in the play JB, he gives Job’s wife a name – Sarah. In that exploration of the story, Sarah doesn’t stay by Job’s side while all is being destroyed, but leaves. At the end of the play, (which comes before all is restored), Sarah reappears holding a twig of forsythia in her hand. When asked where she went, she replies,
Among the ashes.
All there is now of the town is ashes.
Mountains of ashes. Shattered glass.
Glittering cliffs of glass all shattered
Steeper than a cat could climb
If there were cats still . . .
And the pigeons —
They wheel and settle and whirl off
Wheeling and almost settling . . .
And the silence —
There is no sound there now — no wind sound —
Nothing that could sound the wind —
Could make it sing — no door — no doorway . . .
Only this . . .
Among the ashes!
I found it growing in the ashes,
Gold as though it did not know.
Job reminds her that she said he should curse God and die. She says:
Yes,
you wanted justice, didn’t you?
There isn’t any. There’s the world...
Cry for justice and the stars
will stare until your eyes sting. Weep,
Enormous winds will thrash the water.
Cry in sleep for your lost children,
Snow will fall. . .
snow will fall. . . .
Job asks, ‘Why did you leave me alone?’ Her answer says it all:
I loved you.
I couldn’t help you any more.
You wanted justice and there was none —
Only love.
Job says: He does not love. He Is.
Sarah responds: But we do. That’s the wonder.
The play ends with Job saying that it is too dark to see. Indeed this scene is set in the night when all around there is devastation. Sarah pulls his head into her two hands and kisses him and says:
Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling.
It’s all the light now.
Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in the churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see by and by . . .
Sarah and Job are setting the chairs back into their places on the stage, uprighting what has fallen over.
We’ll see where we are.
The wit won’t burn and the wet soul smoulders.
Blow on the coal of the heart and we’ll know. . .
We’ll know. . .
And this is what we have in the midst of the loss and fear and despair of our own lives. If we’re lucky, we don’t ever know this kind of capricious terror when all of our lives fall down to ashes and pain, but none of us escape it wholly. Loss lurks, on every street corner, trouble is there with it, too, and no matter how smart or faithful or beautiful or wise, none of us will escape it. Not because of what we’ve done, but because it is. That’s the message of Job. But Job’s wife tells us that other story, too, that the common yet extraordinary miracles of love and kindness, of forgiveness and humility can endure, and if we allow them in, if we see the blossom there too among the ashes, we, too, can find something like salvation.
Blow on the coal of your heart
And we’ll see by and by. . .
Amen.