A reflection on Job 12:1, 13:3-17, 21-27, and John 8:33-47

There is something deeply refreshing about Job.

Not because Job has figured anything out. Quite the opposite.

Job is tired of easy answers. His friends have tried to explain his suffering to him, offering the familiar wisdom that if life is going badly, there must be a reason—and perhaps, if we’re honest, a fault. Job refuses. He knows that he has not been given an explanation that makes sense of his experience.

And so he says, in effect: Enough explanations. I want to speak to God myself.

“I want to argue my case with God.”

It is a remarkable thing to hear from someone who is suffering. Job does not retreat from God because he is angry with God. Instead, he brings his anger to God. He brings his confusion, his frustration, his questions, even his accusation.

One of the points in my community’s Rule from the Way of the Nativity is: Give to Jesus all that is in your heart: its gold; its frankincense; its myrrh; and its sorrows. In other words, hold nothing back. There is something profoundly faithful about that.

We sometimes imagine faith as the ability to accept things we cannot understand. We speak of trusting God, and rightly so. But perhaps trust can also mean believing that God is big enough to receive the truth of what we actually feel.

Job seems to believe that.

He does not want a God who can only be approached with the right words. He wants to encounter the real God in the midst of his very real suffering.

And that makes an interesting connection with today’s Gospel reading.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells those who have begun to believe in him, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” But the people listening to him are confident that they are already free. They know who they are. They are descendants of Abraham. They belong to the right tradition. They know the story.

Jesus challenges that certainty.

The irony is that knowing about God can sometimes become a way of avoiding an encounter with God.

Job’s friends know many things about God, but their certainty prevents them from really hearing Job. The people confronting Jesus know who they believe themselves to be, but their certainty prevents them from hearing what Jesus is actually saying.

This is where I see these two readings meeting: in the invitation to let go of certainty long enough to encounter truth.

That can be frightening.

There are truths we would rather not face. About ourselves. About other people. About our relationships. About the world. Even about our understanding of God.

Sometimes our religious certainty protects us from the vulnerability of actually meeting God.

Job offers another possibility. He is willing to say: I don’t understand. I don’t like what is happening. I don’t accept the easy explanation. But I am still going to bring all of this before God.

That, too, is faith—a mature faith.

Because faith is not always having the right answer. Sometimes faith is having enough trust in God to stop pretending that we have the right answer.

And maybe that is part of the freedom Jesus speaks about.

Truth does not always make us comfortable. At first, it may do precisely the opposite. It may unsettle the stories we have constructed about ourselves and about God. It may expose the places where certainty has become a kind of bondage.

But there can be freedom on the other side of that honesty.

Job teaches us that we can tell the truth to God.

Jesus reminds us that the truth can set us free.

The invitation today is simply to bring God whatever is true—not whatever we think should be true, not whatever sounds sufficiently faithful, but whatever is actually alive within us.

Anger.

Confusion.

Hope.

Doubt.

Longing.

Gratitude.

Even silence.

God, it seems, can handle the truth.

The question is whether we can.