Job and the Dark Night of the Soul

The book of Job is the record of one man’s dark night of the soul. In the story Job loses everything that gave his life meaning. His family are wiped out, his home, money and possessions are lost, he experiences severe and painful illnesses and is left alone, except for three friends who are more hindrance than help as they offer only platitudes that essentially pin the blame for his condition on Job himself.

Job knows that the diagnosis offered by his friends is wrong. He knows there is nothing he has done to deserve his suffering. He knows that it is not punishment for something he has done and this gives us one of the reasons why this is such a significant book to find within the pages of the scriptures. The book of Job tells us that much suffering in this world is undeserved. There are times in life when we do reap what we sow and bear the consequences of our choices, as Job’s friends assume must be the case for him. But this is not one of those times and the story is told, in part, to warn us against making the assumptions made by Job’s friends. Not all suffering is brought on by our actions, sometimes life simply deals us a bum hand - and that’s the way it is!

Job is understandably angry about this situation. In the section of the poem we heard read today (Job 23. 1-9, 16-end), he is so angry that he argues the toss with God, saying "I still rebel and complain against God; I cannot keep from groaning." God accepts Job’s arguing with him and affirms him in so doing. In the final chapter of the book, God says that he is angry with Job’s friends because they did not speak the truth about him, the way his servant Job did. So, the friends who said "it’s all your fault and God is right to punish you" were condemned and Job, who argued his case with God is affirmed.

The book of Job is important, therefore, because it tells us that it is ok to argue with God and to complain to him when life seems unfair. That is important because it is not how we have been brought up to think about relationship with God. Most of us instinctively think that submission to the will of God rather than arguing the toss with God is what makes for a good Christian. Job tells us that that is not so. And, in fact, if we read scripture carefully we will finish that stories are told of all the heroes of the faith - from Abraham through Moses, Jeremiah and Habbakuk to Jesus and Paul - arguing with God. Why? Because it means we are in real relationship with God. Our virtuous mask comes off and we say what we really mean. We are honest with God in a way that we cannot be when we are trying to be righteous. That is real relationship and that is what God wants more than anything.

This is something which has been acknowledged and understood throughout Church history. The phrase which I used of Job at the beginning of this sermon - the dark night of the soul - was coined by St John of the Cross while imprisoned in a tiny prison cell for his attempts to reform the Church. He was a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who wrote many of his poems on a scroll smuggled to him by one of his guards. After escaping his captors, he wrote the Dark Night of the Soul, a poem about the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in spiritual maturity and union with God.

Similarly, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of "That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God."

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

At the end of the Book of Job, Job says, "I talked about things I did not understand, about marvels too great for me to know." Through his dark night of the soul, he comes to understand that God is not who or what he had thought him to be. God is more than he had imagined or conceived. Human beings can know God but cannot know God fully because is always more than we can imagine or conceive. Every image or idea we have of God is inadequate because God is always more than any human definition. We can say, for example, that God is Father but to say that cannot fully define God as God can also be understood as Mother and as child and as Spirit (without gender). All these different things are true of God at one and the same time. So God is both known to us and yet unknowable. In the dark night of the soul, all that we had thought we knew of God is taken away from us and we experience something of the mystery of God.

Summing all this up, what can we say? We need to be careful about the advice we offer to those who are suffering. In particular, not to assume that they have in some way brought their suffering on themselves. God said to Job’s friends, "you did not speak the truth about me, the way my servant Job did." Then, to understand that we do not have to suffer in silence. To argue or complain to God actually brings us into a deeper relationship with him and is a valid part of prayer. Job says, "I still rebel and complain against God; I cannot keep from groaning." Finally, we need to be prepared to have our understandings of God brought into question as he challenges us to engage with the mystery of who he is, the One who is always more than we can ever conceive or image. And so, like Job, we say "I talked about things I did not understand, about marvels too great for me to know."

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Julie Miller - By Way Of Sorrow.