EARTHKEEPING
NEWS
A NEWSLETTER
OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY
Volume Fourteen, Number Five
September / October 2005
THE BOOK OF JOB
After 2 years of studying the Bible as a nature-friendly book, we finally, in the Woodstock New York Earthkeeping Circle, are approaching the book of Job, which may very well embody the central and most pertinent theological message about the human-natural world-divine relationship. The central dramatic character, Job, suffers great pain — loss of family and wealth — and his friends argue that he must have sinned before God.
Job denies that he has done anything wrong to deserve this punishment and he challenges God. God's answer is: "Stand in awe before my wonderful and dreadful Creation." (And, in our ungodly language, we can imagine the Lord adding: "And shut up, you miserable little critter!") Whatever the words he hears, Job, shocked and humbled, returns to an attitude of devotion before the Cosmos.
The meaning of the book of Job is this: If we open up ourselves to the awesome Creation, our complaints about our existence will lose their force. The experience of God in nature has the power to ameliorate our painful frustration with how life is treating us. Job is converted from a covenantal relationship with God — an agreement between God and us to love each other — to a cosmological way of apprehending God.
The author of the poetry of Job is saying that we experience God directly in nature, and that this encounter distances our anxieties and our questions about why we suffer. In the face of the vastness and beauty of Creation, our sufferings matter little. We turn to other parts of the Bible for the consolation and comfort of Spirit that comes to us through our environment and from within. We start with Job, however, for the existential slap in the face — the divine Wake Up Call.
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind…
"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 heavenly beings shouted for joy?"
Job 38:1-7
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